Reading List

Please follow links under the “Academics” heading to the left to find more information.

The curriculum of Veritas Christi Hybrid Academy takes a classical approach and uses the Socratic method of discussion. The following list readings is suggestive of those we use. We use a mix of full works to get a sense of the whole, and excerpts to provide focused coverage.

Literary Perspectives and Rhetoric (Western Civilization)

• Shakespearean sonnets
• Hamlet, Shakespeare
• Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan
• Oliver Twist, Dickens
• Romantic and Victorian poetry by Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Byron, Coleridge
• Animal Farm, Orwell
• Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, Swift
• A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn
• The Chosen, Potok
• War poetry, including The Hollow Men, Dover Beach, They, Dead Man’s Dump

Reflections on Western Civilization

• The Prince, Machiavelli
• Erasmus Reader, Rummel
• Utopia, More
• A Man for All Seasons, Bolt
• Faith and 95 Theses, Luther
• Act of Supremacy
• Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius
• Council of Trent
• Edict of Nantes
• Peace of Westfalia
• Novum Organum, Bacon
• A Discourse on Method, Descartes
• Optiks, Newton
• Two Treatises of Government, Locke
• Leviathan, Hobbes
• Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke
• Leeds Woollen Workers
• Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII
• Wealth of Nations, Smith
• The Law, Bastiat
• Inequality, Rousseau
• Socialism, Engels
• Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
• Memoirs of the Second World War, Churchill

Junior High Literature

• A Door in the Wall, de Angeli
• Matilda Bone, Cushman
• The King's Swift Rider, Hunter
• The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
• The Miracle Worker, Gibson
• Song of Roland, Sayers
• Short Stories and Poems