Welcome back to my series of posts celebrating tiered readers as I count down to the launch party for The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4. In Part 1, I spoke about old tiered readers which are now in the public domain. In Part 2, I spoke about tiered texts in 20^th century textbooks. Now in Part 3, I will talk about recently published 21^st century tiered readers.

This is a difficult subject to talk frankly about, because recently published tiered texts suffer from the same quality control issues which plague nearly the whole genre of self-published Latin CI material. But in a post series like this, I want to *celebrate* the creation of tiered readers. I also want people to be able to find these titles and know they exist. These texts are going to be helpful to at least some people, and I hope I can help people try new things and form their own opinions.

The elephant in the room is that most of the recently self-published CI print-on-demand books contain a number of mistakes, errors, misspellings, and misunderstandings, both minor and major. This number is objectively much higher than the number found in traditionally published textbooks. It is natural that raw, unedited written work contains a large amount of errors. But when getting a book ready for print, it has long been standard practice in the publishing industry to hire a professional line-editor (for sentence editing and checking for factual errors) and a proofreader (for checking minor errors and misspellings) to find and resolve as many of the different mistakes as possible. An author should not be blamed for being unable to do this task on their own. Neither should an unpaid volunteer (or a committee of unpaid beta readers) be expected to do such a lengthy and detail-oriented job to such a high standard without reasonable compensation. Editing a book to meet industry standards means paying professionals to do a professional job.

The good news is that this is a completely solvable problem. We just need to look outside of the Latin teaching bubble for proof that high quality books can in fact be produced by independent authors. In the indepdent publishing scene, authors are strongly encouraged to hire professional editors and proof-readers before putting their book into print, even though the standard prices sit at around hundreds of dollars per book. The result is that indie books – those which have been taken through the standard professional editing process – do in fact become nearly indistinguishable from their traditionally published counterparts. Latin authors just need to do what is normal and expected for indie authors outside of Latin CI: pay for professional editing prior to initial publication.

The authors I am spotlighting in this post have *not yet* spent hundreds of dollars per book on getting their books professionally edited. How much can we blame them? Dropping hundreds on a side project is ultimately their decision, and they might never do it if they feel that the books in question will never earn back these costs. This cost would be particularly difficult to justify in the case of Robert Amstutz’ tiered readers, which are based on the core texts of the IB curriculum (which, as far as I can gather, changes every seven years? Correct me, IB teachers!). If a book is only going to be sold for a handful of years, there isn’t much time for it to recoup its initial production costs.

But even unfinished books can be very useful to readers. They are certainly helpful for teachers, in that they save the substantial labour of having to write all the tiers of these texts from scratch. I feel that the Pareto principle is at play here, where the final 20% of polishing a book would take about 80% of the effort. To me, personally, a printed book is worth polishing all the way to normal publishing standards even if that final 20% triples or quadruples the effort, time, and cost (and this is not the place for me to go into all my reasons for wanting to wait until my book is fully polished to industry standards before initial publication). But for teachers just wanting to use and share materials that are good enough to get the job done, something that is processed to the 80% mark would seem worth it.

With that in mind, here are some useful (though roughly finished to the Pareto tipping point) tiered readers which have been published in recent years.

Robert Amstutz has published eight volumes of tiered readers to date. The volumes published in 2023 include all the lines of the Latin IB curriculum which will be first testing in 2024. The volume titled Scalae Latinae: Tiered Selections from Cicero, Livy, Ovid, and Vergil contains the selections from all four authors tested in IB, but individual author selections also be purchased separately in the other volumes titled Quarta Pars (each representing a quarter of the whole). His tiers are aimed at getting students to read the original text relatively soon: differences between tiers are fairly slight, and Tier 1 already reflects much of the structure of the final text, but changes some of its vocabulary. Tier 2 is a prose paraphrase that rearranges the words from the original text. Tier 3 for prose texts is called the ‘Segmented Reader’ and features the original text in original word order, but with line breaks that help group words into sense units.

• Amstutz, Robert. Carmina Amoris: Pars Prima (A Tiered Reader). 2018.
• Amstutz, Robert. Social Criticism Through Horace and Martial: A Tiered Reader (Volume 2). 2018.
• Amstutz, Robert. Villains: From Vergil, Livy, and Sallust: A Tiered Reader. 2019.
• Amstutz, Robert. Scalae Latinae: Tiered Selections From Cicero, Livy, Ovid, and Vergil. 2023.
• Amstutz, Robert. Scalae Latinae: Quarta Pars: Selections from Book II of Vergil’s Aeneid. 2023.
• Amstutz, Robert. Scalae Latinae Quarta Pars Selections from Book I of Ovid’s Amores. 2023.
• Amstutz, Robert. Scalae Latinae Quarta Pars: Selections from Book II of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. 2023.
• Amstutz, Robert. Scalae Latinae Quarta Pars: Selections from Cicero’s Pro Caelio. 2023.

Andrew Olimpi has published three volumes of tiered readers to date. I have taught with Daedalus et Icarus: A Tiered Latin Reader across two years now, using it to introduce students to the Icarus and Daedalus episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As an author of novellas, Olimpi has a flair for fleshing out the story. He delivers a great deal of extra narrative content to practice the words which will appear in the final tier. Tiers 1 and 2 are not so much adaptations of the original text, but complete retellings in much simpler language, while Tier 3 rearranges the original words in prose-like order. There is a significant jump in difficulty between Tier 2 and 3 of which the teacher will need to be aware. On the subject of editing, I have recently worked with the author to provide editing suggestions to Daedalus and Icarus and I would advise people to hold off ordering the current version until he publishes a second edition with some of these changes (which he says he aims to do by the end of September). I have not read Olimpi’s other two tiered readers. However, I can recommend his style of adaptation as being popular with the students. His looseness and narrative freedom in the lower tiers helps make the story more vivid and immediate.

• Olimpi, Andrew. Daedalus et Icarus: A Tiered Latin Reader. 2019.
• Olimpi, Andrew. The Mysterious Traveler: A Medieval Play about Saint Nicholas: A Tiered Latin Reader (Latin Edition). 2019.
• Olimpi, Andrew. Reckless Love: The Story of Pyramus and Thisbe: A Tiered Latin Reader (Latin Edition). 2020.

I hope you find value in these recently published tiered readers! Tiered readers take a very long time to write, so it is important for us to know what has already been written so we can avoid duplicating work (unless we really want to).

I have mostly limited myself to only mentioning published books, but honourable mention should be made of freely available resources such as the Practomime AP Tiered Readings of Caesar and Vergil, and Mike Saridakis’ free tiered resources on his online Resources page.

Last, but definitely not least, Irene Regini (of Satura Lanx) writes very well-crafted, well-edited and polished tiered readings – much more polished than any of the other resources mentioned in this post (and about on par with the editing standard of my own book). One of these tiered readings is an e-booklet on Catullus Carmen 3, which can be accessed for free by signing up to her email newsletter. It also comes with a free video lesson, in which Irene explains the poem completely in spoken Latin. Most of her other tiered readings can’t be accessed individually, but are bundled into Gustatio Linguae Latinae, a full introductory Latin course featuring 70 videos, which she is currently re-making and renovating. Nevertheless, Irene will occasionally release free pdfs of tiered readings of short Latin texts in her promotional events, along with free video lectures and workbook activities. It is well worth signing up to her email newsletter to get advanced notice of her lectures and tiered text giveaways.

Thank you for reading and I hope to see you this weekend at the launch party for The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4! I’ll also be back tomorrow with Part 4, a short post about future publications of tiered readers.

P.S.: On Saturday I’ll be sending out free digital copies of my tiered reader book, The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 to everyone on my Latin email newsletter list. Subscribe here to receive your free digital copy this weekend!