The Silmarillion and the Problem of the Novel , by @DrBOBassett benjaminbassett.substack.com…

You must accept that, without a classical education, the best literature is inaccessible to you. You may, with a talented and privately-educated editor, catch, as if from an enormous distance, a glimpse of its brilliance, but you were not made for it. You were made for emails.

A student can now complete modern education in the West without reading a single word of Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, or Milton. This is how you erase a culture, and it's working. If schools and universities won't teach the Great Books, we must form our own reading circles independently. This is why we set up the Athenaeum. Below are some of the texts we've read, or intend to cover soon. Join our reading group if you'd like to study the great works in dialogue with others. We're about to start The Brothers Karamazov. If you've been on the fence about joining our group, now's the time. You do not want to miss this. We are reading it over the next 6-7 weeks. First discussion is on August 4, covering Books 1-4. Take out a paid subscription if you'd like to support and join the discussions directly — it makes a huge difference to the time and resources we can dedicate to this. You'll get: - Live book club discussions (biweekly) - Access to our incredible community chat - Essays to guide you through the Great Books - All past recordings, essays, and podcasts - Ability to vote on what we read next athenaeumbooks.com/welcome Join us.

Forgiving student loans is unethical. The taxpayers should not pay for higher education.