Twelve years of grade school, a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and three years of teaching college composition soured me on institutional learning, so I've compiled this catalog of enlightening, amusing, and beautiful books to serve as a 21st century syllabus for homeschoolers and self-educators.

I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books.... Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.
—Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

How many a man has dated a new era in his life
from the reading of a book. —Thoreau, Walden

I hope your visit here launches a new era for you.