Category: Best Books

  • Best Board Books for Brainy Babies

    Best Board Books for Brainy Babies

    by Danielle Hitchen A child’s moral imagination is most often formed first by the books their parents read to them. From the basic counting primers to the garish yet calm Goodnight Moon to the emotional complexities of Llama Llama Red Pajama, books are fundamental to shaping our child’s early understanding of themselves, others, and their…

  • Best Books: Global Greats List

    While the Torrey Honors curriculum focuses on the Christian and Western great book traditions, there’s much goodness, truth, and beauty to be found beyond the Western tradition. Recently Torrey upperclassmen and faculty spent a semester reading and discussing great books from all around the globe—from South and East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and…

  • Seven Great Works by (Romantic) Authors Who Died Young

    John Keats’s Odes – Keats typifies the young romantic poet whose genius is tragically extinguished too soon.  Before his death at the age of 25, he wrote to Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved, “I have left no immortal work behind me…but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I…

  • Ten Great Roman Works

    The Torrey Honors curriculum includes a number of the greatest Roman works such as Cicero’s On Duties, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Plutarch’s Lives, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. For those who would like to expand their knowledge even further, here are ten additional Roman works, renowned through the centuries with…