Home-Schooler Makes the Grade
Ask 17-year-old Matthew Smedberg what he has been reading lately.
The Roman historian Livy tops the list, part of his Great Books curriculum. For fun, there have been a trilogy by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz (“very well written and exciting”), “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” (“one of the few history books to get that period just right”) and the sci-fi thriller “Speaker for the Dead” (“the best work of fiction of the 20th century”).