Book Club

The Jefferson Center Book Club is one of the mainstays of our program. The club typically meets on Mondays from 6:00-7:30 in Waggener 212. Each semester, we build a program of readings around a theme, and meet every other week with a volunteer leader. For the most part, we try to keep the readings relatively short.

Our theme for Fall 2025 is leisure, the problem of boredom, and the good life. The readings have been chosen to address the question of how one can best make use of one's time outside of one's career, and to think through the specific obstacles to its good use found in the modern world. The full list can be found on our Events Page.

Our book club is run by student presidents, with the assistance of our Assistant Director, Erik Dempsey. For more information about the book club, contact Dr. Dempsey or the student presidents, who are listed on our peer mentor page.

For further details on these events, please see Upcoming Events. PDFs of the readings are posted on the Events page about two weeks in advance of each book club meeting. 

 

You may also find our collection of archived readings online.

Past Events

1001 Nights, (Selections)
Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (excerpts)
Aristotle on Friendship
Aristotle, Physics
The Arthashastra: Law, Governance, and Society in Ancient India
Augustine, City of God (excerpt)
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Francis Bacon, Great Instauration
Essays of Francis Bacon
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (excerpt)
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (excerpt)
Albert Camus, "The Retreat of Helen"
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Essays of Winston Churchill
Living Ethically, selections from Confucius
Dante, Purgatorio (excerpt)
Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor and other selections)
Essays and Letters of Albert Einstein
Euclid, Elements (Selections)
Franklin's Autobiography, parts 1 and 2
Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Heraclitus, Fragments
Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy
Thomas Jefferson (Selections)
The Sermon on the Mount
Kafka, Before the Law
Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death (excerpt)
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Abraham Lincoln (Selections)
Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses (excerpt)
Herman Melville, "The Lightning-Rod Man"
John Milton, Paradise Lost (excerpts)
Essai (selections), Michel de Montaigne
What is happiness? (Selections from the Stoics and Montaigne)
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche, "The Problem of Socrates"
Plato, Phaedo (excerpt)
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (selections)
Ayn Rand, Anthem
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to D'Alembert
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "The Levite of Ephraim"
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Preface to Narcisse"
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries
William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, American Shakespeare Center performance followed by discussion
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
William Shakespeare, Tempest (following Actors from the London Stage performances)
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, selections
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago (excerpts)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart
John Steinbeck, East of Eden (excerpt)
Leo Strauss, "What is Liberal Education?"
Jonathan Swift, "Battle of the Books"
Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yacqzan
Mark Twain, "The Diaries of Adam and Eve"
Voltaire, Candide
Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron
David Foster Wallace, Everything and More
Xenophon, Apology

Movie Night: All the King's Men
Movie Night: Blade Runner
Movie Night: Casablanca
Movie Night, Chariots of Fire
Movie Night: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Movie Night: Bernardo Bertolucci's Il Conformista
Movie Night: Metropolitan
Movie Night: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Movie Night: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Movie Night: Pleasantville
Movie Night: Spartacus
Movie Night: The Counterfeit Traitor
Movie Night: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Movie Night: The Seventh Seal
Movie Night: Tristan and Isolde
Movie Night: Barcelona