The Learning Umbrella

Eight Categories, Eight Books each, with 8 overlaps allowed  

1.  Continuing Classical Education:

1.  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

2.  The Autobiography by Ben Franklin

3.  Confessions by Augustine of Hippo

4.  The Tale of Genji by Murusaki Shikibu

5.  Gargantua and Patagruel by Francois Rabelais

6.  Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

7.  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

8.  White Noise by Don Delillo

2.  Personal/Professional/Parental Development:

1.  Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four by Vivian Gussin Paley

2.  Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times by Zoe Weil

3.  The Hurried Child by David Elkind

4.  Play = Learning by Dorothy G. Singer

5.  Lessons Learned from Years of Homeschooling by Andrea Schwartz

6.  A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver Van DeMille

7.  Radical Hospitality by Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt

8.  Together We’re Better by Bev Bos

3.  Children’s/Young Adult Books:

1.  Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

3.  The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman

4.  The Children of Green Knowe by L.M. and Peter Boston

5.  The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo and Timothy Basil Ering

6.  Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

7.  The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry

8.  The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

4.  Just For Fun

1.  Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

2.  How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel edited by Sarah Franklin

3.  A Dirty Job: A Novel by Christopher Moore

4.  Fluke: Or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore

5.  American Gods by Neil Gaiman

6.  Making Money by Terry Pratchett 

7-8.  TBA

5.  Contemporary Literature

1.  The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2.  A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

3.  Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson

4.  The God of Animals: A Novel by Aryn Kyle

5.  The Great Man: A Novel by Kate Christensen

6.  The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinah Mengestu

7.  The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

8.  Charity Girl by Michael Lowenthal

6.  American History and Politics

1.  Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith

2.  The Failure of the Founding Fathers by Bruce Ackerman

3.  A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

4.  A Magnificent Catatrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by Edward J. Larson

6.  Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers by Brooke Allen

7.  The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

8. Patriot Hearts by Barbara Hambly

7.  Non-Fiction and Science

1.  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond

2.  QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

3.  The Ape and the Sushi Master by Franz de Waal

4.  Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human by Matt Ridley

5.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

6.  The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen

7.  The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins

8.  Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal

8.  Books on My Shelves I Haven’t Read

1.  White Noise by Don Delillo

2.  Above All Be Kind by Zoe Weil

3.  East by Edith Pattou

4.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

5.  Together We’re Better by Bev Bos

6.  Contact by Carl Sagan

7.  The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein

8.  The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner