John Stuart Mill

The order you should read JS Mill:

• Autobiography
  • Most beautifully written and gets you interested.
• “Bentham” and “Coleridge”
  • Shows you the breadth of Mill’s thought
• Subjection of Women
  • In some ways Mill’s greatest and most victorious work
• “Civilization*
• (if an economist) “Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy”

On Liberty should be last. You have none of the context or intellectual equipment of Mill.

Mill is also very interesting on Tennyson, poetry, the ancients, French history, Tocqueville…

His thoughts on education reform: he understood the value of the classics, the need for more experimentation, and the value of educating people very early.

An MR post on John Stuart Mill and character development.

The Classics

• Shakespeare is the absolute priority.
• Proust, Kafka, Mann, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Spencer’s The Fairy Queen, British romantic poetry of the early 19C.
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, is actually a very good guide.
  • Shakespeare
  • Dante
  • Chaucer
  • Cervantes
  • Montaigne and Molière
  • Samuel Johnson
  • Goethe’s Faust
  • Wordsworth, Austen
  • Whitman
  • Emily Dickinson
  • Dickens, Bleak House, and George Eliot, Middlemarch
  • Tolstoy
  • Ibsen
  • Freud
  • Proust
  • Joyce
  • Woolf
  • Kafka
  • Borges, Neruda, Pessoa

Which 15 or so essays everyone should read

This should include William Hazlitt, “Why the arts are not progressive”.

Bach Cantatas

Suzuki’s recordings are by far the best.

Sources:

• Interview with Henry Oliver, largely about Mill