About This Site
What this is
The Augustine Bookshelf (book.themodel.be) is a book guide for people who have been defeated by a great classic before — who picked up the Confessions and stalled in its abstract later books, or looked at the thousand-plus pages of the City of God and put it down. This English edition selects five titles currently available on amazon.com and presents them in a reading order that won't defeat you — from a short introduction, through the Confessions, to the City of God. A Japanese edition is also maintained, alongside sister shops such as The Socrates Bookshelf and The Nietzsche Bookshelf.
The editorial room runs a family of philosopher bookshelves and a section-by-section reading archive of the primary texts (in Japanese) — for example Heidegger's Being and Time, introduction. Every review and reading-order recommendation on this site rests on that first-hand reading and on explicit bibliographic checking. Augustine has been read in many ways, in faith and in philosophy alike; this site does not push a single reading. Its one aim is to hand you the man's own text and a reliable map, and let you judge for yourself.
A note on this English edition and its editions
Augustine wrote in Latin, and our Japanese edition necessarily recommends Japanese translations (Iwanami, Chūkō, and others) that have no bearing on English-speaking readers. So this English edition does not copy that list book for book. Instead it mirrors the same roles — introduction, flagship primary work, study, a further primary work, and the magnum opus — with the most respected English editions in print: Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Classics for the primary texts, an Oxford Very Short Introduction, Peter Brown's standard biography from University of California Press, and a Hackett Classics dialogue. Where our Japanese edition lists the Confessions twice in rival translations, this edition uses that slot for a second primary work instead, so no title is redundant for an English reader.
How books are chosen and rated
- Judgements about the works themselves rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
- Where a book is a short introduction, a biography, or a primary text, the review says exactly what it is and what role it can honestly play. An introduction is scaffolding, not the building — and we say so.
- All descriptions are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced.
- Quotations from the Confessions and other works are standard renderings or our own editorial glosses of the Latin, identified as such — not reproductions of the translations under review.
- Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
- Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.
Amazon link disclosure
As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Augustine Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.
Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, rather than books that merely sell, is in the end what serves readers best.
Privacy policy
This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.
Contact
For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com.