The Reading List
The Heart of Our Work
In Torrey Honors, we have the opportunity to step into a great conversation that stretches from the writers of the Old Testament and the ancient philosophers to the thinkers and authors of the modern day. We read and discuss enduring works that push us to think harder, grow in humility, deepen our faith and practice love.
The Iliad and The Odyssey
Homer
Meno, Phaedo, Republic and Symposium
Plato
Nicomachean Ethics and Physics
Aristotle
On the Incarnation
Athanasius
Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise
Dante
Basic Theological Writings
Martin Luther
Meditations of First Philosophy
Rene Descartes
Paradise Lost
John Milton
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois
Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis
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The majority of the Old Testament and the entirety of the New Testament
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The Iliad and The Odyssey
Homer
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The Oresteia
Aeschylus
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Antigone and Oedipus the King
Sophocles
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The Bacchae
Euripides
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History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
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Meno, Phaedo, Republic and Symposium
Plato
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Nicomachean Ethics and Physics
Aristotle
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On the Good Life
Cicero
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The Aeneid
Virgil
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Metamorphoses
Ovid
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Roman Lives
Plutarch
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Apologies
Justin Martyr
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Second Treatise on Government
John Locke
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Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume
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The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
Samuel Johnson
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The Federalist Papers
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay
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The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States of America
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Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant
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Reflections on the Revolution in France
Edmund Burke
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Selected Poems of William Wordsworth
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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
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Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
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Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
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On the Apostolic Preaching
Irenaeus
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History of the Christian Church
Eusebius
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Various Creeds of the Church
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On the Incarnation
Athanasius
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On God and Christ
Gregory of Nazianzus
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The City of God Against the Pagans, Confessions, and On Christian Teaching
Augustine
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The Complete Works of Pseudo-Dionysius
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Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius
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Why God Became Man
Anselm of Canterbury
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On Loving God
Bernard of Clairvaux
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Nature and Grace and Treatise on Law
Thomas Aquinas
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Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise
Dante
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Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerso
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Fear and Trembling
Sören Kierkegaard
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave and Selected Speeches
Frederick Douglass
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Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
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Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti
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Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
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Idea of a University
John Henry Newman
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On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
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Selected Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln
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Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
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The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
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Basic Theological Writings
Martin Luther
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The Institutes of Christian Religion
John Calvin
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The Heidelberg Catechism
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The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
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As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, and The Tempest
William Shakespeare
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The New Organon
Francis Bacon
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Selected Poems of John Donne
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The Temple
George Herbert
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Meditations of First Philosophy
Rene Descartes
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Paradise Lost
John Milton
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Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne
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Pensés
Blaise Pascal
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Selected Poems
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
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The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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On the Genealogy of Morals
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois
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Orthodoxy
G.K. Chesterton
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Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot
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Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Selected Stories of Flannery O’Connor
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Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis
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A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
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Selected Speeches and Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Read Beyond the Curriculum
With hundreds of great books to choose from, we know we can’t fit in everything we want to read. That’s why we developed other academic opportunities for students to study books outside the curriculum. Upperclassmen in Torrey Honors can take an elective course, called a “Meta-Torrey,” to study ideas, authors, and genres in greater depth. Here are examples of past Meta-Torrey classes:
Global Greats
In this course, students read and discuss great books that typically fall outside the Western tradition—from South and East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In addition to cultivating the virtue of cultural humility, we come to appreciate the global character of the Christian tradition, its riches and complexity.
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- Confucius: The Analects
- Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching
- The Bhagavad Gita
- Shūsaku Endō: Silence
- Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise
- Al-Ghazali: Deliverance from Error
- Ibn Tufayl: Hayy Ibn Yaqzan
- Bartolomé de las Casas: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected writings
- Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Athanasius: The Life of Antony
- Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African
- Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
Living Traditions
In this course, students read contemporary literature alongside classic literature. By juxtaposing the old and the new, we see how the enduring questions and conversations still pertain to contemporary American culture.
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- Cormac McCarthy: The Road
- Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet
- The Royal Ballet: Romeo and Juliet
- Augustine: Confessions
- Wendell Berry: Jayber Crow
- Psuedo-Dionysius: Complete Works
- Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Bible: Genesis
- Film: Tree of Life
- Douglass: Narrative of the Life
- Coltrane: A Love Supreme
- Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
American Literary Renaissance
This class centers on the American Literary Renaissance, featuring nationally formative American literature of the nineteenth century. These works signify a period of intense transformation and identity formation in the United States, during which the country’s literature became distinctly American.
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- Edgar Allan Poe: Selections
- Emerson: Nature & Selected Essays
- Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
- Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Brown: Clotel; or, The President's Daughter
- Thoreau: Walden
- Greenberg: The Confessions of Nat Turner
- Whitman: Leaves of Grass
- Douglass: My Bondage and My Freedom
- Melville: Bartleby and Benito Cereno
- Dickinson: Final Harvest: Poems
- Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Christianity & The Qur'an
Traditionally, Muslim commentators have ignored the Qur'an’s debt to biblical literature and Christian culture, but this class explores how the Qur'an grew out of the rich Christian tradition of the Middle East and also worked to separate itself from that same tradition.
View Course Reading List
- St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns of Paradise
- St. Cyril of Alexandria: On the Unity of Christ
- Brock and Harvey, ed: Holy Women of the Syrian Orient
- St. Isaac of Nineveh: On Ascetical Life
- The Qu'ran
- Timothy I and Al-Mahdi: The Patriarch and the Caliph: An Eighth-Century Dialogue between Timothy I and al-Mahdi
- Theodore Abu Qurrah: Theodore Abu Qurrah
- Abd al-Jabbar: A Critique of Christian Origins
- Tarif Khalidi: The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature
Dive Deep into the Entire Bible
Torrey Total Bible is an extracurricular opportunity for students to read the entire Bible, cover to cover. Torrey Total Bible sessions are led by Torrey Honors faculty and allow students to build community with students outside of their cohort and year.