Boulder Great Books

Site last modified on 07/23/2009

Boulder Great Books meets year-round on even-date Wednesday nights from 7:30 - 8:45PM at the Meadows Branch of the Boulder Public Library.  The book discussion group is sponsored by the Boulder Public Library.  The group is free and open to the public.  Newcomers are welcome anytime!

Boulder Great Books uses discussion guidelines and some materials from the Great Books Foundation.  Some selections come from the 54 volume set Great Books of the Western World. Volume 1, The Great Conversations, contains a Ten Year Reading Plan for the set. (Here is the plan in html format or pdf format.) There is a reference set of the Great Books at the Main Library and volumes available for checkout, call number 808.8. You can check out volumes from the Meadows Branch (there is a second set available for checkout from the Meadows in the back storage room - ask at the head desk if you don't see the volume you want on the shelf). Norlin library at CU has two sets available for checkout, as does the Denver Public Library. The Longmont Public Library has a set of the 1990 expanded 60 volume set available.  Another source of readings for the 54 volume set comes from the Great Ideas Program, a 10 volume set with reading lists and commentaries on the readings.  The Great Ideas Program reading list is available on this web site in pdf format. The Main Library has this 10 volume set (also call number 808.8). Other sources of book choices are the running list of books people are interested in discussing, maintained by Bill.  Around Christmas we try to have at least one selection that has a religious connection. In the summer we discuss at least one of the plays put on by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. The 2009 summer choice is “Hamlet”. The 2009 selections are built around a theme of Nobel Prize winners for literature.

The first rule of the group is to read the selection twice. This rule is relaxed when we read very long selections. (Deanna Hawkins is the group's hero for reading Joyce's Ulysses twice.) The second rule is to stick to the selection, do not bring in comments from other sources that people in the group have not read. Expect to spend about eight hours a week reading for the discussion. If a selection one week can be read in less time, read ahead for the next meeting. Some effort is made to schedule alternate short and long selections with this in mind as well as taking advantage of the occasional three week gap between even-date Wednesdays.

 Reading schedule (HTML and PDF files):

    2008 Great Books Schedule (html)       2008 Great Books Schedule (pdf)

    2009 Great Books Schedule (html)       2009 Great Books Schedule (pdf)

Note - The PDF files are for printing. If you are unable to read the PDF files with your browser, save the file as a pdf file to your computer and view with Acrobat Reader (free download) or another Portable Document Format reader. The HTML files have links and reference information not included in the PDFs or the two-sided schedules handed out at group when they won't fit on one page.    Selections six months or more into the future are subject to change - feedback is requested for this schedule so e-mail Bill with what you do and don't like about it.

Group History

Boulder Great Books was started in the fall of 1988 by the Boulder Public Library.  It first met in the auditorium of the old main library building before it was renovated.  The meeting place was affectionately called the “toaster oven” since it was small and hot.  Meetings were changed to the Meadows Branch soon after it opened in 1990.  The original group met every other week, primarily reading and discussing works in the Great Books Foundation five year adult series, but also mixing in other books. This series was completed in the spring of 1993.  (Early history courtesy of Carol Heepke, Boulder Public Library.)

In the fall of 1993 Boulder Great Books began reading and discussing the five year series again.  In the spring of 1994 the group started to meet every week, making some selections from the Ten Year Reading Plan. In the fall of 1998 the group began the 50th Anniversary Series from the Great Books Foundation (nine paperbacks focusing on various themes). In April 2003 the group meetings moved from the Meadows Branch to the George Reynolds Branch of the library because budget cutbacks necessitated closure of Meadows on Tuesdays. In 2004 the meetings returned to the Meadows. On February 16, 2005 the group changed its meeting day from Tuesdays to Wednesdays, again driven by budget cuts that threatened closing the branch libraries an hour earlier. In 2007 the group eased off a little, meeting on even-date Wednesdays instead of every week.

See the following link for a list of all readings done by the group since it started:
                All discussion group readings.
We're always looking for books to put on our schedule, so if you have looked at the list of all our readings and think we have missed a great book please send an e-mail to Bill.

Other links: