The Purpose of Literature and List Making

For the end of great books is ethical: that is, to teach what it means to be fully human.  Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes the norms of human nature.  What my old friend T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things" - the ancient standards, the norms - have been the concern of the poet ever since Job and Homer.  Until recent years, critics took it for granted that literature exists to form the normative consciousness - that is, to teach human beings their rightful place in the scheme of things.  Such was the endeavor of Sophocles and Aristophanes, of Thucydides and Tacitus, of Plato and Cicero, of Hesiod and Virgil, of Dante and Shakespeare, of St. Augustine and St. Thomas More. - Russell Kirk in Educating For Virtue

Over at The Imaginative Conservative, there is a blog symposium being conducted on books that make us human.  If you like lists of great books, head over and check them out.