The Athenaeum Book Club
An online book club studying the great texts of Western Civilization.
How to Join Our Book Club
The Athenaeum was founded to resist our age of noise, speed, and amnesia. We are a community of readers who still believe that ideas matter — that Plato, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dostoevsky are not just names in a syllabus, but guides to a deeper and more ordered life.
We are working through the classic texts of the Western canon, together. The Great Books of our tradition have immense depth and insight to offer, but it takes effort to read them, and even more to read them well. That’s what we’re doing here, in dialogue with each other.
So far, we’ve read works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Iliad, and Augustine’s Confessions. Works that represent major stepping stones in the great journey of Western thought.
Give more details about what’s in the picture. Highlight a particular feature of your business like product quality, unique offer, or limited sale price. Provide social proof by sharing a customer review. Introduce yourself and your team to gain trust.
What are we reading?
To see what we’re reading currently, head to our homepage and you’ll see the “Current Read-Along” section near the top, including a link to the reading schedule.
There is no formal reading list, and we are reading through the great texts in no particular order. However, our members vote from a pre-selected list of classics, similar to those in the image below.
We have chosen a list of approximately 60-70 great works that we feel qualified to discuss and explain at length. They are books that tackle the big questions on morality and the human condition, and that have contributed significantly to the great journey of Western thinking — from ancient times to modern.