Words from literature, textbooks, and the SAT--words most likely to appear on high-stakes tests. Student books include 150 words per level in books 2-3 and 300 new words per level in books 4-12.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom is considered a masterpiece of Spanish Baroque literature. The work presents a collection of aphorisms, with commentary on various subjects, offering advice and guidance on how to live the best life and evolve as a human being. Written in 1647 by Baltasar Gracián y Morales (1601 - 1658), a Spanish writer, thinker, and Jesuit, it is a work belonging to didactic prose. The book contains three hundred precious aphorisms with commentary, which provide a set of rules and guidelines for achieving success in a complex and crisis-ridden society, as it was in his time and continues to be today, since human nature has hardly changed at all. The work contains such relevant knowledge that it was translated into German by Schopenhauer and influenced other great thinkers such as Nietzsche, Voltaire, and Jacques Lacan.

The enduring and engaging guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition. Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven’t because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. Newly expanded and updated to include standout works from the twenty-first century as well as essential readings in science (from the earliest works of Hippocrates to the discovery of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs), The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of six literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, poetry, and science—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to Cormac McCarthy, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Aristotle to Stephen Hawking—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing. The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there’s no reason you can’t read and enjoy Shakespeare’s sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the “Great Books” without a guide and a plan. Bauer will show you how to allocate time to reading on a regular basis; how to master difficult arguments; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. In her best-selling work on home education, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children; that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In The Well-Educated Mind, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading. Followed carefully, her advice will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

Tourists may think life on an island off the coast of Maine is quaint, but Charlotte knows better. She's tired of her island prison (it has a real name, but she calls it "Bleak"), and she's sure that a life in the great anywhere-else is heaps better than one that revolves around catching a ferry to the mainland. She even has the perfect solution: boarding school. But who will take care of the siblets? Will clinically crazy Mom or organic-obsessed Dad be able to hold things together without her there? And is Charlotte ready to leave love-of-her-life Noah behind? Susan Carlton has created a remarkably vivid, strong character in Charlotte; her intelligence, charm, and bitingly sarcastic wit are sure to win over anyone who has ever wanted more than Bleak. "A realistic picture of a girl who yearns for independence but secretly fears letting go of the familiar." - Publishers Weekly