For at least a couple of months we have been reading The Story of the World (by Susan Wise Bauer) together as a family for a few minutes each evening. We are just finishing Volume 2 of this four volume set. It has been an enriching experience for all of us.
The Story of the World is a history of civilization survey written for 8-10 year olds. But it has a lot to teach 38 year olds too. It turns out that Akkadians aren't from Louisiana and that Istanbul is not Constantinople now after a final Ottoman blow to the impressively long-lived Byzantine Empire, details barely intimated by They Might be Giants. It also seems that the Spanish Inquisition lamentably involved far fewer comfy chairs than my Monty-Python-based education led me to believe.
Our family has enjoyed reading these books together. I have enjoyed reading them aloud. Audrey has enjoyed listening. Valerie has crochet more than one blanket in two volumes. Lizzie has joined us for every reading session, usually with a Calvin and Hobbes book to pass the time.
The exposure to history and geography, not only of the West, but of Africa, India, China, Pre-Columbus America, and other areas has been a great experience for all of us. For certain eras, the treatment in the books tends to over-emphasize military history over the history of ideas and culture for my tastes and interests, but the sense of chronology, space, people, and ideas has provided us a valuable framework that we have been fleshing out with other sources from Wikipedia to Studio C (with a library in between). The Story of the World pairs especially nicely with the In Our Time with Melvin Bragg podcast from BBC.
Note also that Jim Weiss does an excellent unabridged audio-recording of the books that we used for part of Volume 1 on a road trip.
I like it
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