A good lawn replacement, as long as you get the right variety

Thanks! My mom used Kolbe Academy for the curriculum, and I'm sure there's plenty on that list that I've forgotten about. Some that were influential for me were The Histories by Heroditus, History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucidedies, The Oresteia trilogy, The Republic by Plato, The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, Confessions and City of God by Augustine, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy by Dante, The Song of Roland, The Canterbury Tales, a whole bunch of the Summa Theologiae by Aquinas, a whole bunch of Shakespeare, The Federalist Papers, and The Communist Manifesto by Marx. Very much a Catholic list of literature, and weighted towards Western stuff, but outside of the curriculum I picked up the Analects of Confuscius, The Quran, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and The Book of Five RIngs by Musashi to read in my free time, so the stuff I read for class was very much giving me the intellectual tools to comprehend other things. There was also a bunch more stuff for the modern and contemporary eras, but I had senioritis by then so I can't recall much from those texts.

I was homeschooled through high school, and the thing that helped me most was how many primary sources we read. I got to college and I had pretty much already read everything that was assigned, even in grad school I was getting assigned stuff I had already read in high school. It wasn't easy at the time, but reading Plato and Aristotle when I was 13 (for example), just sets the stage for being able to read anything.