Welcome to the home of the Aviano Literature class. This is a homeschool course in reading and understanding fiction. We read the classics, but they are not those books that are on every single reading list. You may have heard of some of them, but you probably haven't read all of them. The books we read may be somewhat less famous but are not any less fascinating. Here you will read a fascinating assortment of literature from Kenneth Grahame's simple but wonderful The Wind in the Willows to C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet to Charles Dickens' David Copperfield.
In his treatise, How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler wrote:
"The great majority of books that are read are stories of one kind or another. People who cannot read listen to stories. We even make them up for ourselves. Fiction seems to be a necessity for human beings. Why is this?
"One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. it would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it also touches the unconscious."
We love fiction so much because it satisfies what we unconsciously wish for. Or to phrase it differently, we like what we can relate to.
