Disclaimer: I have not finished reading every book on this list and, for that reason, cannot unequivocally recommend every single one of them. Some of them didn’t interest me at all. I had strong feelings of dislike for a couple of them. I can say, however, that each selection on the list edified at least one person in the group. I don’t think there is anything on the list that every member of the group thought was a waste of time. Since most of these books are classics, I believe they are worth sampling, even if a reader does not choose to embrace them. For fiction I have read and can recommend, please see “My Favorite Clean Fiction.”


2006

  1. Initial meeting of the group to decide on a list of books to read for the year.
  2. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables.
  3. Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
  4. Everyone read something by C.S. Lewis; I picked Mere Christianity.
  5. The Constitution of the United States.
  6. Louisa May Alcott. Eight Cousins. Rose in Bloom.
  7. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.
  8. William Shakespeare. Sonnets.
  9. Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Oedipus at Colonus. Antigone.
  10. Charles Dickens. “A Christmas Carol.”

2007

  1. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God, Volume 1.
  2. Lew Wallace. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
  3. William Shakespeare. The Taming of the Shrew.
  4. Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
  5. The Declaration of Independence of the United States.
  6. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House in the Big Woods and sequels.
  7. Johanna Spyri. Heidi.
  8. Eleanor H. Porter. Pollyanna.
  9. Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility.
  10. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre.
  11. Lloyd C. Douglas. The Robe.

2008

  1. Plato. The Republic.
  2. R.D. Blackmore. Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor.
  3. Thomas Hardy. Under the Greenwood Tree.
  4. C.S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters.
  5. Frederic Bastiat. “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen.”
  6. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Song of Hiawatha.
  7. Conrad Richter. The Light in the Forest.
  8. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.
  9. Chaim Potok. The Chosen. The Promise.
  10. Lloyd C. Douglas. Magnificent Obsession.
  11. John Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress.

2009

  1. Spencer W. Kimball. The Miracle of Forgiveness. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. Henry David Thoreau. Walden.
  3. William Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. A Midsummer’s Night Dream.
  4. Edward Gibbon. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume 1.
  5. Jane Austen. Mansfield Park.
  6. David McCullough. 1776.
  7. Louisa May Alcott. Little Women.
  8. Rudyard Kipling. Just So Stories for Little Children.
  9. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables.
  10. Pearl S. Buck. The Good Earth.
  11. James Hilton. Random Harvest.

2010

  1. We took the evening off because of snow.
  2. James E. Talmage. Jesus the Christ. (Latter-day Saint)
  3. Elizabeth Gaskell. North and South.
  4. Plutarch. Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans.
  5. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina.
  6. Joseph Addison. Cato, a Tragedy.
  7. C.S. Lewis. Chronicles of Narnia.
  8. Frances Hodgson Burnett. A Little Princess.
  9. Irving Stone. The Agony and the Ecstasy.
  10. Charles Dickens. Bleak House.
  11. E.M. Forster. A Room with a View.

2011

  1. James E. Talmage. The Great Apostasy. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter.
  3. William Shakespeare. Much Ado about Nothing.
  4. Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities.
  5. George Eliot. Daniel Deronda.
  6. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
  7. L.M. Montgomery. Anne of Green Gables and sequels.
  8. Maud Hart Lovelace. Betsy-Tacy and sequels.
  9. William L. Shirer. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany.
  10. George Orwell. Animal Farm.
  11. Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.

2012

  1. Neal A. Maxwell. One More Strain of Praise. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. Jane Austen. Emma.
  3. Sir Walter Scott. Ivanhoe.
  4. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The House of the Seven Gables.
  5. Voltaire. Candide.
  6. Henry Grady Weaver. The Mainspring of Human Progress.
  7. Louisa May Alcott. An Old-Fashioned Girl.
  8. Margaret Sidney. Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.
  9. George Eliot. Middlemarch.
  10. Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo.
  11. Robert Bolt. A Man for All Seasons.

2013

  1. David O. McKay. Secrets of a Happy Life. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. George Eliot. Romola.
  3. Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
  4. Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind.
  5. Thomas B. Costain. Below the Salt.
  6. The Magna Carta.
  7. Jean Webster. Daddy-Long-Legs.
  8. Gene Stratton-Porter. Freckles.
  9. Henryk Sienkiewicz. Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero.
  10. Elizabeth Gaskell. Wives and Daughters.
  11. Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest.

2014

  1. James E. Talmage. The House of the Lord. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot.
  3. Blaise Pascal. The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal.
  4. Willa Cather. O Pioneers!
  5. Charlotte Brontë. Shirley.
  6. Thomas Paine. “Common Sense.”
  7. L.M. Montgomery. The Blue Castle.
  8. George MacDonald. “The Light Princess.”
  9. Roy J. Cook. 101 Famous Poems.
  10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust.
  11. Charles Dickens. Our Mutual Friend.

2015

  1.  Sheri Dew. Women and the Priesthood: What One Mormon Woman Believes. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. George Eliot. Adam Bede.
  3. Owen Wister. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.
  4. George Bernard Shaw. The Devil’s Disciple.
  5. Pat Frank. Alas, Babylon.
  6. David Hackett Fischer. Paul Revere’s Ride.
  7. SydneyTaylor. All-of-a-Kind Family.
  8.  Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Secret Garden.
  9. Charlotte Brontë. Villette.
  10. Emile Zola. The Ladies’ Paradise.
  11. Henry Van Dyke. “The Story of the Other Wiseman.” “The Mansion.”

2016

  1. Parley P. Pratt. Key to the Science of Theology. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. Sir Walter Scott. Kenilworth.
  3. Jane Austen. Persuasion.
  4. Ivan Turgenev. Fathers and Sons.
  5. Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot.
  6. Alexis De Tocqueville. Democracy in America, Volume 1.
  7. J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit.
  8. Howard Pyle. The Story of King Arthur and His Knights.
  9. Miguel Cervantes. Don Quixote.
  10. Mark Twain. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Volume 1 and Volume 2.
  11. C.S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold.

2017

  1. J.R.R. Tolkien. The Fellowship of the RingThe Two TowersThe Return of the King.
  2. John A. Widtsoe and Leah D. Widtsoe. The Word of Wisdom: A Modern Interpretation. (Latter-day Saint)
  3. Henrik Isben. An Enemy of the People.
  4. George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss.
  5. Charlotte Brontë. The Professor.
  6. Esther Forbes. Johnny Tremain.
  7. Rudyard Kipling. The Jungle Book.
  8. Mary Mapes Dodge. Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates.
  9. Charles Dickens. Nicholas Nickleby.
  10. Clark B. Hinckley. Christopher Columbus: A Man Among the Gentiles. (Latter-day Saint)
  11. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.

2018

  1. The Revelation of John with a focus on the temple.
  2. Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace.
  3. Edwin A. Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.
  4. Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Most of us read a modern translation.
  5. Willa Cather. The Song of the Lark.
  6. Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America, Volume 2.
  7. Robert Lewis Stevenson. A Child’s Garden of Verses.
  8. Mark Twain. The Prince and the Pauper.
  9. Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice.
  10. Elizabeth Gaskell. Cranford.
  11. Catherine Marshall. Christy.

2019

  1. Bruce R. McConkie. Millennial Messiah: The Second Coming of the Son of Man. (Latter-day Saint)
  2. Katherine Padilla. Fall to Eden: An Apocalyptic Fantasy. (Latter-day Saint)
  3. E.M. Forster. Howards End.
  4. Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey.
  5. Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Gift from the Sea.
  6. Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws.
  7. William J. Bennett. Children’s Book of Virtues.
  8. Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows.
  9. Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels.
  10. C.S. Lewis. Out of the Silent PlanetPerelandraThat Hideous Strength.
  11. Michael Wilcox. Fire in the Bones: William Tyndale—Martyr, Father of the English Bible. (Latter-day Saint)

2020

  • Sheri Dew. Insights from a Prophet’s Life: Russell M. Nelson. (Latter-day Saint)
  • Katherine Padilla. Alien Roads. (Latter-day Saint)

The books below were scheduled for 2020 but were not discussed.

  1. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of ManThe Great Divorce.
  2. Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April.
  3. Catherine Marshall, Julie.
  4. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery.
  5. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
  6. Louisa May Alcott, Eight CousinsRose in Bloom.
  7. George Eliot, Silas Marner.
  8. Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place.
  9. George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie, a.k.a. The Baronet’s Song. There is a sequel to this book entitled Donal Grant, a.k.a. The Shepherd’s Castle.

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