Classical Et Cetera continues our best-books-by-century series, this time spanning 1500 to 1799 — from Gutenberg's press to the eve of the Romantics. Returning guest Kyle Janke joins Jessica, Paul, and Tanya to build a reading list from Don Quixote, Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, and more. Along the way: is Dracula secretly a Christian classic, why this era gave us more thinkers than storytellers, and how to read difficult old books without giving up.
Don Quixote – Cervantes
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Pilgrim's Progress – John Bunyan
Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
Candide – Voltaire
The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spenser
Lyrical Ballads – Wordsworth & Coleridge
Shakespeare
John Donne
George Herbert
Samuel Johnson
The King James Bible
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Adam Smith, Machiavelli, Thomas More
Newton, Galileo, Copernicus
Common Sense – Thomas Paine
The U.S. Constitution
The Federalist Papers
Benjamin Franklin's autobiography
Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather
*Best Books by Era*
Greece: https://youtu.be/dijEqf0kcAM?si=9kVIpElDUhPlexqW
Rome: https://youtu.be/gMcuWkz6XQ4?si=HzXnHEfm6wQBlzhz
Middle Ages: https://youtu.be/rDB05FAPP0U?si=YuKH062Kr6uBrRak
