I am happy to announce that my dissertation “Epic Explorations in Opera: The Hero’s Overture” has been published on ProQuest. As previously promised, here is the link to where you can read it for free. Enjoy! pqdtopen.proquest.com/pubnum…

Elite university students are now incapable of reading a book. Instead of fixing this, universities are simply reducing reading requirements to shorter and shorter excerpts. This is no mere literacy crisis. It is a civilizational one. To fight back, we started an online book club to study the great texts of Western Civilization — if the schools and universities won't teach the great books, we must form reading groups to study them ourselves. Every month, we read a new great work. We've covered texts like Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Inferno, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote. We're now reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. We must study the ideas upon which the West was built if we are to preserve it. It takes effort to read these texts, and even more to read them well. Thats what we're doing, slowly, in dialogue with each other. If you'd like to be part of this, please join our reading group and consider a paid subscription. It makes a HUGE difference to the time and resources we can dedicate to this project. We are entirely funded by our members. You'll get: - Live book club discussions (biweekly) - Access to our incredible community chat - Essays to guide you through the Great Books - All past recordings, essays, and podcasts - Ability to vote on what we read next athenaeumbooks.com/welcome Welcome!