Jay Gallard’s Reading List

When he isn’t scrounging the city for food, Galahad tries to educate himself about humanity’s past.

Here are some selections from his reading list. Granted, he’s been too busy to read any of these thoroughly. He skims them by the light of a flashlight or candle after everyone has gone to bed, makes notes of what he agrees with or what he finds disquieting, and skips over the rest.

His conclusion to date is as follows:

"I’ve been trying to read the classics our civilization was supposedly built on. I used to think that if I could understand our origins, I could help get us back on track again. But these books are as full of barbarism as our own damn lobby."

Perhaps if he had time to read more carefully or if he had a different sort of intellect he would do better. So far he hasn’t been able to find much that gives him hope for the future of humanity, but maybe someone else will.

• The Bible
  
• The Iliad (Homer)
  
• The Republic (Plato)
  
• Aeneid (Virgil)
  
• Dhammapada
  
• City of God (St Augustine)
  
• Utopia (Thomas More)
  
• The Prince (Machiavelli)
  
• New Atlantis (Francis Bacon)
  
• The Citizen (Thomas Hobbes)
  
• Paradise Lost (John Milton)
  
• Concerning Civil Government (John Locke)
  
• The Social Contract (Jean Jacques Rousseau)
  
• An Inquiry into Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
  
• Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon)
  
• Common Sense (Thomas Paine)
  
• U.S. Constitution
  
• Democracy in America (Alexis de Toqueville)
  
• Federalist Papers
  
• Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  
• The Theory of the Leisure Class (Thorstein Veblen)
  
• Democracy and Education (John Dewey)