Yes it’s here — Great Books of Greater Cleveland (GBofGC) presents the reading list for 2024-2025. This is our 79th year, and we open the year with an undisputed, worldwide classic. We will discuss Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece, on September 17, 2024.
You’ll see plenty of classics on GB 79, some GBofGC favorites such as Perpetual Peace by Kant, Wilde’s comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. Additionally GB 79 showcases a few widely known classics that have not been part of the GBofGC pantheon. Most of us have read the delightful novel Watership Down, and now our group will take up the discussion for the first time. You may not be familiar with the 1946 novel The Street by Ann Petry, the first novel by a Black woman to sell over a million copies. It is a classic that deserves to be on a list of great literature. In the science arena we are debuting the book by Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa.
Finally, GB 79 contains more gems: Everyman, the fifteenth century morality play, four stories from Alice Munro who is one of the greatest short story writers of the twentieth century, and several speeches by Abraham Lincoln. This year promises to be the best yet. (Of course, we say that every single year!)
I hope you will join in the reading and then join us for lively, serious and meaningful discussions of these important works.