Crack The Book: A Beginner's Guide to Reading the Great Books

Finally—the first unit of reading this year! We are reading all kinds of English literature, from histories to plays, and even some poetry, and this is the episode I share with you what’s on the list.

When we decided to go on this trip to England, I thought this was a great time to combine an old routine of “pre-vacation reading” with my newfound enjoyment of old, classic, and even “great” books. This is the first time I’ve put together anything more than just one or two titles, though, and I’m interested to see how it works...

This week we take a look at two novels that were on last year’s reading list. Why are we revisiting them? Because we only read a couple of chapters of each one, and that wasn’t enough!

First up, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I shared last year that this was one I only had bad memories of from high school, but rediscovering it as an adult was a real treat. In particular, we talk about:

This week is a treat! A few weeks ago I joined Fr. Brian McGreevy for a talk at St. Philip’s Theology on Tuesdays, a biweekly group of young adults who meet at Henry’s on the Market in Charleston. Most weeks they talk about aspects of Christian living or theology—this week is was books and the WHY of reading.

Fr. Brian shares some interesting statistics on reading, and the benefits it has for your brain. It won’t surprise long-time listeners that I wanted to talk about how reading great books can change your heart.

We kick off our once-a-month Shakespeare series with one of my favorites from last year, Henry IV, Part One. The trilogy of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, and Henry V form The Henriad and are a great way to learn about the way England thinks about its own history.

I review my method of reading Shakespeare (see last season's Week 26 for more information), and then we move on to the actual history of the period these plays are about. It looked a lot like the world of Shakespeare, and his audience, with its tumultous succession issues.<...

Welcome to Season 3 of Crack the Book! In this episode:

A quick review of big events that happened during the break—

Then we talk a little bit about how this season is going to g...

While we are on a break, enjoy this episode from Season 2. Season 3 starts May 19!

This week, we take on Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, a hilarious surprise from Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course. Written in the mid-300s A.D., this is the very first Latin prose novel, penned by Algerian-born Apuleius. Lucius, our hero, is a young man who meddles in magic, transforms into a donkey, and embarks on wild adventures before returning to human form. We were so captivated that note-taking fell by the wayside, much like with Herodotus’ Histories. This rollicking tale, brimming with late-R...

While we are on a break, enjoy this episode from Season 2. Season 3 starts May 19!

Week 39 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course takes on nineteenth-century American literature. To my surprise, this became one of the most enjoyable weeks so far. I went in dreading familiar names and old high-school resentments, but came out newly energized.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (chapters 1–6) was funny, humane, and immediately engaging. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and “The Raven” used ornate language to heighten unease, while Emily Dickinson’s poems felt weightles...

While we are on a break, enjoy this episode from Season 2. Season 3 starts May 19!

My son Jack is back as we discuss Paradiso, Jack's favorite part of Dante's Divine Comedy. I absolutely love getting to chat with him again (see a couple of earlier episodes linked below). We talk about why he loves Dante in general, and Paradiso in particular. Highlights include:

While we are on a break, enjoy this episode from Season 2. Season 3 starts May 19!

While we are on a break, enjoy this episode from Season 2!

This week we pair two early-modern comedies that show how laughter can reveal truth. But first, we do a quick review of European history, looking at France, Spain, Italy and England, trying to place the things we're reading inside history. (I knew next to nothing about Spain at this time so it was really helpful for me!)

This is a replay of one of my favourite episodes, episode 32. New episodes out May 19th!

Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) introduces a middle-aged dreamer who decides to...

After a year of reading through Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities list, I’ve finally reached the end. How surprising that it doesn’t feel like an ending at all! This final episode is less about individual books and more about what the project revealed over time: how we read, how we think, and how we change.

Having finished, I genuinely believe in occasional deep projects, for a variety of reasons. I offer a wide variety of ideas for proceeding, the mechanics that make it possible. For me, that included physical books, note-taking, weekly writing. I also share...

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Week 52 and, somehow, the end of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities project. We've got time to process all the emotions next week. For now, on to the readings!

This final week brings together a really cool set of 20th and 21st century works—Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Tim O'Brien, the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, and David Foster Wallace—all circling what Gioia calls “untenable situations.” How do you find your way through a problem that seems to have no exit?

Butler’s "Bloodchild" is visceral and unsettli...

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We have a treat this week: My husband Bill read Brave New World shortly after I did, so today we discuss it together!

BNW presents a dystopian world that feels less like oppression and more like a perfectly engineered system. In this world, humans are no longer born but manufactured, sorted into castes, and conditioned for their roles. The goal is “community, identity, stability,” maintained through constant consumption, casual sex, and a drug called soma that keeps everyone comfortably numb.

When Bernard, an uneasy insider, brings John “the Savage...

Week 50 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brings us to three mid-20th-century thinkers wrestling with art, media, and the modern world: Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gasset.

I begin with Susan Sontag’s famous essay “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography. Writing in 1972, she asks how photography changes our relationship to memory and experience. At the time, photographs were printed objects. We saved them in albums, books, or wallets. Today we carry thousands in our pockets. If photographs once captured moments, now they seem to overwhelm them.

Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the...

Week 49 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities list brings three modern French thinkers into conversation: Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and René Girard. Unlike many earlier weeks in this project, these readings aren’t novels or unified texts—they’re philosophical excerpts that stand largely on their own. So rather than forcing a single theme, I consider how each of these writers might still be shaping the world we live in today.

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex asks why “man” is treated as the default while woman becomes the “other,” raising questions that still echo in modern debates about biolo...

For Week 48 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List, I step into the strange, shimmering world of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Borges' Ficciones, and Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude.

We start with a review of myth, fantasy, fairy stories, and magic: why we need them and what purpose they can serve in our lives (aside from being really fun). Kafka’s tragic insect-turned-son is an isolated, powerless creature, unable to find even a way to communicate. Borges dazzles at a remove, writing about books that never existed and worlds that ought to. García Márquez slows us dow...

With only five weeks left in this year-long journey, I can feel the end approaching—less like a high-wire act and more like gathering momentum toward something unknown. Week 47 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities course explores twentieth-century American fiction through short stories and novel excerpts, revealing a distinctly American voice: sharp dialogue, vivid settings, and an experimental edge.

Week 46 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brought me to two works by Sigmund Freud: An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I finished reading a few days early but needed time to let these ideas settle—and disturb me.

What struck me first was Freud’s immense influence. What followed was a growing discomfort with how fully his ideas have saturated modern thought. Freud offers a powerful explanatory system: the division of personality into id, ego, and superego; the dominance of unconscious drives; the reduction of human action to instinct, repetition, and adaptation. In Bey...

Week 45 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brought me fully into the early 20th century—and, to my surprise, it wasn’t an easy transition. I don’t dislike these works, but I find myself missing the older books and trying to name what feels absent. The shadow of World War I certainly looms, but there’s something more elusive at work.

This week’s readings were Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Woolf was entirely new to me, and her novel took my breath away. Influen...

Week 44 takes us firmly into the 20th century, with a strong Irish lineup: James Joyce’s “The Dead" from The Dubliners, the opening of Ulysses, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Joyce surprised me—in the very best way. “The Dead” is rich, intimate, and beautifully written, capturing married love, memory, and Dublin itself as if the city were another character. The opening of Ulysses was stranger and more dreamlike, but not impenetrable; I’m no longer afraid of it, even if I’m not sure the whole novel is in my future.

Beckett, on the other han...

This week’s reading was heavy—emotionally and intellectually. We paired Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass(1845) with W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and the contrast was striking.

Douglass’ firsthand account of slavery is harrowing, beautifully written, and unforgettable. From his stolen childhood to his carefully guarded escape, his story exposes not only the cruelty of slavery but its spiritual damage to everyone caught in its system. His reflections on faith, suffering, and corrupted Christianity are especially powerful. This is one book I believe every American should read.

DuBois offers a sociol...

This week’s readings on Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List felt unexpectedly thin and disjointed. We stepped backward in time to Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, which made me keenly aware of how much I’ve come to rely on the list’s chronological momentum. I also continue to struggle with “selections,” especially in poetry, where I suspect I shortchange the material when time and energy are limited.

Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Life,” from Trois Contes, follows the entire life of Félicité, a housemaid whose quiet existence unfolds in a series of small, often bleak episodes...

Stepping inside an Impressionist painting? Yes, please.

Week 41 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course made me realize something startling: these books weren't picked for my enjoyment--and yet I loved them anyway. This week’s readings, Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton and the “Overture” to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, carry us right into the early twentieth century.

I approached James with dread, expecting a slow narrative, but instead I found a moody, infinitely readable novel built around obsession, property, and desire. With a small cast and dialogue-driven scenes, it feels almost theat...

Week 40 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course brings together three demanding—and deeply philosophical—works: Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. But before we get started, I offer a short primer on reading Russian lit. The names can be a real challenge!

Tolstoy’s novella, written after his spiritual “conversion,” is a devastating meditation on death, meaning, and self-deception—circular in structure but spiraling ever deeper. It may be the finest short work I’ve read so far. 

Dostoyevsky’s...

Week 39 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course takes on nineteenth-century American literature—and to my surprise, it became one of the most enjoyable weeks so far. I went in dreading familiar names and old high-school resentments, but came out newly energized. 

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (chapters 1–6) was funny, humane, and immediately engaging. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and “The Raven” used ornate language to heighten unease, while Emily Dickinson’s poems felt weightless and startlingly modern. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was quotable and provocative, if ultimately grating...

We take a little break from our reading list this week for some holiday cheer: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens!

I thought I knew this one inside out, which was ridiculous because I had never actually read it. (When will I learn?!) This is a punchy little novel, and you can read it aloud over the course of less than a week with your kids. I hope with this episode to offer a little reassurance and inspiration: You can do this, and you'll be so glad you did.

I end with a little discussion...

Week 38 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course pairs two seemingly unrelated works: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (chapters 1–4) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. What initially felt random turned out to be an enlightening combination!

Darwin’s early chapters focus not on sweeping conclusions but on careful observation—natural selection as a real, ongoing process, and the frustratingly blurry boundary between “species” and “variety.” His meticulous attention to detail is both humbling and persuasive, even if the book’s once-shocking claims now feel familiar.

Mill’s On Liberty complements Darwin perfectly by arguing that truth...

Such a treat this week! My daughter Darcy is joining me to talk about one of her favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice. For me, after several weeks of dense reading, returning to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice felt like revisiting an old friend—but this time, the experience was unexpectedly conflicted. While I still admire the novel’s perfectly engineered rom-com plot and its web of misunderstandings and romances, I found my patience thinner for the Regency language and social codes. What once felt transporting now felt distant and even claustrophobic. The novel’s narrow social world, sparse physical de...

This week on Crack the Book, we dive into a fascinating mix of political and philosophical texts from Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List: the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Communist Manifesto, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

I revisit the Declaration with fresh eyes—its sharp list of grievances and its insistence on mutual respect still sparkle with clarity. The Constitution, shorter than I expected, impressed me with how firmly it centers the individual while still designing a workable government.

From there we move to Marx and Engel...

This week is all poetry—our first all-poetry week of the Immersive Humanities project! After struggling through young Werther, I decided I needed to step back and understand Romanticism as a movement. I offer a brief review of the history leading up to Romanticism; after all, most movements are reactions against what precedes them. The printing press and Protestant Reformation blew open European thought, leading to centuries of philosophical upheaval. Empiricists like Bacon and Hume insisted that knowledge must be tested; rationalists like Descartes and Spinoza trusted pure reason. Kant eventually tried to unite both. Their world gave rise to...

This week we leave the Middle Ages far behind and land squarely in the emotional whirlwind of Romanticism with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Written in 1774 when Goethe was just twenty-five, the novel became what might be the first true worldwide bestseller—so influential that young men across Europe dressed like Werther, and suicides even spiked in imitation of his tragic end.

Werther himself is…a lot. His passion for Charlotte—who is engaged, then married, to another man—spirals into obsession. When he realizes life without her is unbearable, he stages an elaborate, melodramatic exit: visiti...

Ted Gioia warned this would be a tough week—and he wasn’t kidding. Week 33 of the Immersive Humanities Project had me wrestling with three giants of philosophy: Descartes, Kant, and Spinoza. I started with Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, where his famous “I think, therefore I am” felt surprisingly direct and human. His four rules for reasoning—question, divide, simplify, and review—made him seem less like an abstract philosopher and more like a kind, curious friend.

Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals was another story. Dense and demanding, it centers on the “Categorical Imperative”: act only a...

This week on Crack the Book, we move from Rousseau’s Social Contract to his Confessions, and let’s just say my opinion hasn’t improved.

Before we get to the books, I share some strategies for getting through a book you don't like (because I needed to take my own advice this week). Then we move on to our two books for the week.

In Confession's Book One, Rousseau recounts his early life with all the self-importance of a man convinced he’s unlike anyone else who’s ever lived. Between tragic beginnings, cruel masters, and a...

This week on Crack the Book marks a jarring shift in tone — and in time. After months steeped in medieval imagination, we start there with  Niccolò Machiavelli and end firmly in the Enlightenment with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Their works, The Prince (1513) and The Social Contract (1762), straddle that uneasy moment when faith and hierarchy gave way to “rational” thinking. And wow, does it sound different. I didn’t realize how accustomed my ear had become to the older world until now.

First up, The Prince. I had only known it practically caricatured as a manual for ruthless rulers. Instead, I found th...

This week we pair two early-modern comedies that show how laughter can reveal truth. But first, we do a quick review of European history, looking at France, Spain, Italy and England, trying to place the things we're reading inside history. (I knew next to nothing about Spain at this time so it was really helpful for me!)

Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) introduces a middle-aged dreamer who decides to become a knight-errant, setting out with his baffled squire Sancho Panza to defend honor and right wrongs. The famous windmill scene is only the start of his misadventures. Quixote is absu...

After three (very full!) weeks of Shakespeare, we reluctantly leave England for Italy—and step into the vivid world of Renaissance art. Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List serves up a refreshing change of scene with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography.

Both were brand-new to me, and both were a delight. Vasari, himself an accomplished painter and architect, profiles the greats—Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo—not as remote geniuses but as human beings: witty, flawed, brilliant, and endlessly ambitious. His writing reminded me of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars—a chr...

This week on Crack the Book, I’m still in awe of Shakespeare — and not ready to leave him behind. Somewhere between Falstaff’s jokes and Othello’s heartbreak, I realized just how much I’ve climbed the Shakespeare learning curve. The language that once felt impossible now feels like music, and these plays — Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, and Othello — have been my favorite week yet.

To start, though, I covered a little of Shakespeare's own history, so that we can better understand what was happening around him as he wrote his plays.

The Henry IV plays are part of Sha...

Back with more Shakespeare! Before we get started with Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest, I share a little about my experience with Shakespeare before this project.

In short, it was almost ZERO.

I tell you this so you can have confidence as you start your own Shakespeare journey. I have been shocked, amazed and gratified at how rewarding the time put in with Shakespeare has been. And now, on to the plays!

This week’s Shakespeare trio is a true mix of tones.

Romeo & Juliet isn’t mer...

After the last three weeks with Dante, we jump to another three-week series with Shakespeare and NINE plays!

Shakespeare can be daunting, so I offer a few thoughts on how to approach him:

Hamlet dazzles with layered characters and razor-sharp language. Prince Hamlet wrestles with grief, revenge, and perhaps madness, while Claudius broods over the cost of his own sin. My own final note: “Everyone die...