Difference between revisions of "Summer Reading List"
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* [[Great Books of the Western World]] | * [[Great Books of the Western World]] | ||
| − | == Other books == | + | ==Other books== |
''Note: The little icon to the left of each title indicates how much of that book I have read.'' | ''Note: The little icon to the left of each title indicates how much of that book I have read.'' | ||
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''À la Recherche du Temps Perdu''''' — Marcel Proust | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] {{gutenberg|no=1954|name='''Le Colonel Chabert'''|author=Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)}} |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Anxiety of Influence, The''''' — Harold Bloom | + | *[[Image:100per.png]] '''''[http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era]''''' — Vernor Vinge |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Art of War, The''''' — Sun Tzu | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Rainbows End''''' — Vernor Vinge |
| − | * [[Image:100per.png]] '''''Brothers Karamazov, The''''' — Fyodor Dostoevsky | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist''''' — Victor J Stenger |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Childhood and Society''''' — Erik Erikson | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/index.htm The Essence of Christianity]''''' — Ludwig Feuerbach |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''City of God''''' — Saint Augustine | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''À la Recherche du Temps Perdu''''' — Marcel Proust |
| − | * [[Image:50per.png]] '''''Double Helix, The''''' — James Watson | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Anxiety of Influence, The''''' — Harold Bloom |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Either/Or''''' — Søren Kierkegaard | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Art of War, The''''' — Sun Tzu |
| − | * [[Image:25per.png]] '''''Emma''''' — Jane Austen | + | *[[Image:100per.png]] '''''Brothers Karamazov, The''''' — Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| − | * [[Image:100per.png]] '''''Frankenstein''''' — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Childhood and Society''''' — Erik Erikson |
| − | * [[Image:100per.png]] '''''Genealogy of Morals, The''''' — Friedrich Nietzsche | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''City of God''''' — Saint Augustine |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Human Comedy, The''''' — Honoré de Balzac | + | *[[Image:50per.png]] '''''Double Helix, The''''' — James Watson |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''I and Thou''''' — Martin Buber | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Either/Or''''' — Søren Kierkegaard |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Idea of a Christian Society, The''''' — T.S. Eliot | + | *[[Image:25per.png]] '''''Emma''''' — Jane Austen |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Law in Modern Society''''' — Roberto Unger | + | *[[Image:100per.png]] '''''Frankenstein''''' — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley |
| − | * [[Image:75per.png]] '''''Meditations''''' — Marcus Aurelius | + | *[[Image:100per.png]] '''''Genealogy of Morals, The''''' — Friedrich Nietzsche |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter''''' — Simone de Beauvoir | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Human Comedy, The''''' — Honoré de Balzac |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''One Hundred Years of Solitude''''' — Gabriel García Márquez | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''I and Thou''''' — Martin Buber |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''On War''''' — Carl von Clausewitz | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Idea of a Christian Society, The''''' — T.S. Eliot |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, The''''' — Julian Jaynes | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Law in Modern Society''''' — Roberto Unger |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Pensées''''' — Blaise Pascal | + | *[[Image:75per.png]] '''''Meditations''''' — Marcus Aurelius |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Praise of Folly, The''''' — Desiderius Erasmus | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter''''' — Simone de Beauvoir |
| − | * [[Image:25per.png]] '''''Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey''''' — Jane Austen | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''One Hundred Years of Solitude''''' — Gabriel García Márquez |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The''''' — Max Weber | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''On War''''' — Carl von Clausewitz |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Rembrandt's Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies''''' — Julius Held | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, The''''' — Julian Jaynes |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Rouge et le Noir, Le''''' — Stendhal | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Pensées''''' — Blaise Pascal |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Selected Poems''''' — Sappho | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Praise of Folly, The''''' — Desiderius Erasmus |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Selected Writings''''' — Hildegard of Bingen | + | *[[Image:25per.png]] '''''Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey''''' — Jane Austen |
| − | * [[Image:00per.png]] '''''Sound and the Fury, The''''' — William Faulkner | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The''''' — Max Weber |
| − | * [[Image:25per.png]] '''''Thus Spake Zarathustra''''' — Friedrich Nietzsche | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Rembrandt's Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies''''' — Julius Held |
| − | * [[Image:25per.png]] '''''War and Peace''''' — Leo Tolstoy | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Rouge et le Noir, Le''''' — Stendhal |
| − | * [[Image:100per.png]] '''''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''''' — Eric Steven Raymond | + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Selected Poems''''' — Sappho |
| + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Selected Writings''''' — Hildegard of Bingen | ||
| + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''Sound and the Fury, The''''' — William Faulkner | ||
| + | *[[Image:25per.png]] '''''Thus Spake Zarathustra''''' — Friedrich Nietzsche | ||
| + | *[[Image:25per.png]] '''''War and Peace''''' — Leo Tolstoy | ||
| + | *[[Image:100per.png]] '''''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''''' — Eric Steven Raymond | ||
| + | *[[Image:00per.png]] '''''[[wikipedia:Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence|Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence]]''''' | ||
== Masters and Masterpieces of Literature == | == Masters and Masterpieces of Literature == | ||
| Line 45: | Line 51: | ||
=== Indispensable Books === | === Indispensable Books === | ||
| − | Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe. | + | Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Goethe. |
(The best translation of Homer for the ordinary reader is by Chapman. Norton's translation of Dante and Taylor's translation of Goethe's Faust are recommended.) | (The best translation of Homer for the ordinary reader is by Chapman. Norton's translation of Dante and Taylor's translation of Goethe's Faust are recommended.) | ||
| Line 51: | Line 57: | ||
=== A Good Library === | === A Good Library === | ||
| − | Besides the works mentioned everyone should | + | Besides the works mentioned everyone should endeavour to have the following: |
Plutarch's Lives, Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Chaucer, Imitation of Christ (Thomas a Kempis), Holy Living and Holy Dying (Jeremy Taylor), Pilgrim's Progress, Macaulay's Essays, Bacon's Essays, Addison's Essays, Essays of Elia (Charles Lamb), Les Miserables (Hugo), Heroes and Hero Worship (Carlyle), Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Wordsworth, Vicar of Wakefield, Adam Bede (George Eliot), Vanity Fair (Thackeray), Ivanhoe (Scott), On the Heights (Auerbach), Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson, History of the English People (Green), Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer. | Plutarch's Lives, Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Chaucer, Imitation of Christ (Thomas a Kempis), Holy Living and Holy Dying (Jeremy Taylor), Pilgrim's Progress, Macaulay's Essays, Bacon's Essays, Addison's Essays, Essays of Elia (Charles Lamb), Les Miserables (Hugo), Heroes and Hero Worship (Carlyle), Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Wordsworth, Vicar of Wakefield, Adam Bede (George Eliot), Vanity Fair (Thackeray), Ivanhoe (Scott), On the Heights (Auerbach), Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson, History of the English People (Green), Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer. | ||
| − | A good | + | A good encyclopaedia is very desirable and a reliable dictionary indispensable. |
=== Masterpieces of American Literature === | === Masterpieces of American Literature === | ||
| − | Scarlet Letter, Parkman's Histories, Motley's Dutch Republic, Grant's Memoirs, Franklin's Autobiography, Webster's Speeches, Lowell's Bigelow Papers, also his Critical Essays, Thoreau's Walden, Leaves of Grass (Whitman), Leather-stocking Tales (Cooper), Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ben Hur and Uncle Tom's Cabin. | + | Scarlet Letter, Parkman's Histories, Motley's Dutch Republic, Grant's Memoirs, Franklin's Autobiography, Webster's Speeches, Lowell's Bigelow Papers, also his Critical Essays, Thoreau's Walden, Leaves of Grass (Whitman), Leather-stocking Tales (Cooper), Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ben Hur, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. |
=== Ten Greatest English Poets === | === Ten Greatest English Poets === | ||
| Line 67: | Line 73: | ||
=== Ten Greatest American Poets === | === Ten Greatest American Poets === | ||
| − | Bryant, Poe, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whitman, Lanier, Aldrich and Stoddard. | + | Bryant, Poe, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whitman, Lanier, Aldrich, and Stoddard. |
=== Ten Greatest English Essayists === | === Ten Greatest English Essayists === | ||
| − | Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold. | + | Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray, and Matthew Arnold. |
=== Best Plays of Shakespeare === | === Best Plays of Shakespeare === | ||
In order of merit are: ''Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Tempest.'' | In order of merit are: ''Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Tempest.'' | ||
| + | |||
| + | ==Inspectional and syntopical reading list== | ||
| + | ''Note: The following list is from "[[:wikipedia:How to Read a Book|How to Read a Book]]" by Mortimer Adler (1972 edition).'' | ||
| + | # Homer — Iliad, Odyssey | ||
| + | # The Old Testament | ||
| + | # Aeschylus — Tragedies | ||
| + | # Sophocles — Tragedies | ||
| + | # Herodotus — Histories | ||
| + | # Euripides — Tragedies | ||
| + | # Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War | ||
| + | # Hippocrates — Medical Writings | ||
| + | # Aristophanes — Comedies | ||
| + | # Plato — Dialogues | ||
| + | # Aristotle — Works | ||
| + | # Epicurus — Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus | ||
| + | # Euclid — Elements | ||
| + | # Archimedes — Works | ||
| + | # Apollonius of Perga — Conic Sections | ||
| + | # Cicero — Works | ||
| + | # Lucretius — On the Nature of Things | ||
| + | # Virgil — Works | ||
| + | # Horace — Works | ||
| + | # Livy — History of Rome | ||
| + | # Ovid — Works | ||
| + | # Plutarch — Parallel Lives; Moralia | ||
| + | # Tacitus — Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania | ||
| + | # Nicomachus of Gerasa — Introduction to Arithmetic | ||
| + | # Epictetus — Discourses; Encheiridion | ||
| + | # Ptolemy — Almagest | ||
| + | # Lucian — Works | ||
| + | # Marcus Aurelius — Meditations | ||
| + | # Galen — On the Natural Faculties | ||
| + | # The New Testament | ||
| + | # Plotinus — The Enneads | ||
| + | # St. Augustine — On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine | ||
| + | # The Song of Roland | ||
| + | # The Nibelungenlied | ||
| + | # The Saga of Burnt Njál | ||
| + | # St. Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica | ||
| + | # Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy | ||
| + | # Geoffrey Chaucer — Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales | ||
| + | # Leonardo da Vinci — Notebooks | ||
| + | # Niccolò Machiavelli — The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy | ||
| + | # Desiderius Erasmus — The Praise of Folly | ||
| + | # Nicolaus Copernicus — On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres | ||
| + | # Thomas More — Utopia | ||
| + | # Martin Luther — Table Talk; Three Treatises | ||
| + | # François Rabelais — Gargantua and Pantagruel | ||
| + | # John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion | ||
| + | # Michel de Montaigne — Essays | ||
| + | # William Gilbert — On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies | ||
| + | # Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote | ||
| + | # Edmund Spenser — Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene | ||
| + | # Francis Bacon — Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis | ||
| + | # William Shakespeare — Poetry and Plays | ||
| + | # Galileo Galilei — Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences | ||
| + | # Johannes Kepler — Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World | ||
| + | # William Harvey — On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals | ||
| + | # Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan | ||
| + | # René Descartes — Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy | ||
| + | # John Milton — Works | ||
| + | # Molière — Comedies | ||
| + | # Blaise Pascal — The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises | ||
| + | # Christiaan Huygens — Treatise on Light | ||
| + | # Benedict de Spinoza — Ethics | ||
| + | # John Locke — Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education | ||
| + | # Jean Baptiste Racine — Tragedies | ||
| + | # Isaac Newton — Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics | ||
| + | # Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology | ||
| + | # Daniel Defoe — Robinson Crusoe | ||
| + | # Jonathan Swift — A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal | ||
| + | # William Congreve — The Way of the World | ||
| + | # George Berkeley — Principles of Human Knowledge | ||
| + | # Alexander Pope — Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man | ||
| + | # Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu — Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws | ||
| + | # Voltaire — Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary | ||
| + | # Henry Fielding — Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones | ||
| + | # Samuel Johnson — The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets | ||
| + | # David Hume — Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding | ||
| + | # Jean-Jacques Rousseau — On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract | ||
| + | # Laurence Sterne — Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy | ||
| + | # Adam Smith — The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations | ||
| + | # Immanuel Kant — Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace | ||
| + | # Edward Gibbon — The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography | ||
| + | # James Boswell — Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. | ||
| + | # Antoine Laurent Lavoisier — Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) | ||
| + | # Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison — Federalist Papers | ||
| + | # Jeremy Bentham — Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions | ||
| + | # Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust; Poetry and Truth | ||
| + | # Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier — Analytical Theory of Heat | ||
| + | # Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History | ||
| + | # William Wordsworth — Poems | ||
| + | # Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Poems; Biographia Literaria | ||
| + | # Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice; Emma | ||
| + | # Carl von Clausewitz — On War | ||
| + | # Stendhal — The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love | ||
| + | # Lord Byron — Don Juan | ||
| + | # Arthur Schopenhauer — Studies in Pessimism | ||
| + | # Michael Faraday — Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity | ||
| + | # Charles Lyell — Principles of Geology | ||
| + | # Auguste Comte — The Positive Philosophy | ||
| + | # Honoré de Balzac — Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet | ||
| + | # Ralph Waldo Emerson — Representative Men; Essays; Journal | ||
| + | # Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Scarlet Letter | ||
| + | # Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America | ||
| + | # John Stuart Mill — A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography | ||
| + | # Charles Darwin — The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography | ||
| + | # Charles Dickens — Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times | ||
| + | # Claude Bernard — Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine | ||
| + | # Henry David Thoreau — Civil Disobedience; Walden | ||
| + | # Karl Marx — Capital; Communist Manifesto | ||
| + | # George Eliot — Adam Bede; Middlemarch | ||
| + | # Herman Melville — Moby-Dick; Billy Budd | ||
| + | # Fyodor Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov | ||
| + | # Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary; Three Stories | ||
| + | # Henrik Ibsen — Plays | ||
| + | # Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales | ||
| + | # Mark Twain — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger | ||
| + | # William James — The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism | ||
| + | # Henry James — The American; The Ambassadors | ||
| + | # Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power | ||
| + | # Jules Henri Poincaré — Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method | ||
| + | # Sigmund Freud — The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis | ||
| + | # George Bernard Shaw — Plays and Prefaces | ||
| + | # Max Planck — Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography | ||
| + | # Henri Bergson — Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion | ||
| + | # John Dewey — How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry | ||
| + | # Alfred North Whitehead — An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas | ||
| + | # George Santayana — The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places | ||
| + | # Vladimir Lenin — The State and Revolution | ||
| + | # Marcel Proust — Remembrance of Things Past | ||
| + | # Bertrand Russell — The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits | ||
| + | # Thomas Mann — The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers | ||
| + | # Albert Einstein — The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics | ||
| + | # James Joyce — 'The Dead' in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses | ||
| + | # Jacques Maritain — Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism | ||
| + | # Franz Kafka — The Trial; The Castle | ||
| + | # Arnold J. Toynbee — A Study of History; Civilization on Trial | ||
| + | # Jean-Paul Sartre — Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness | ||
| + | # Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — The First Circle; The Cancer Ward | ||
[[Category:Books]] | [[Category:Books]] | ||
Latest revision as of 12:26, 23 December 2018
I am calling this article my Summer Reading List. This does not mean I will only read these books during the summer; it is more for historical reasons. Obviously, it will take me a very long time to complete this list, however, I am taking it one book at a time.
- The Oxford's World Classics — 700+ titles
- The Harvard Classics
- Great Books of the Western World
Contents
Other books
Note: The little icon to the left of each title indicates how much of that book I have read.
Le Colonel Chabert — by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850); available freely at Project Gutenberg
The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era — Vernor Vinge- Rainbows End — Vernor Vinge
- God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist — Victor J Stenger
- The Essence of Christianity — Ludwig Feuerbach
- À la Recherche du Temps Perdu — Marcel Proust
- Anxiety of Influence, The — Harold Bloom
- Art of War, The — Sun Tzu
- Brothers Karamazov, The — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Childhood and Society — Erik Erikson
- City of God — Saint Augustine
Double Helix, The — James Watson- Either/Or — Søren Kierkegaard
Emma — Jane Austen- Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- Genealogy of Morals, The — Friedrich Nietzsche
- Human Comedy, The — Honoré de Balzac
- I and Thou — Martin Buber
- Idea of a Christian Society, The — T.S. Eliot
- Law in Modern Society — Roberto Unger
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius- Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter — Simone de Beauvoir
- One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
- On War — Carl von Clausewitz
- Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, The — Julian Jaynes
- Pensées — Blaise Pascal
- Praise of Folly, The — Desiderius Erasmus
- Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen
- Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The — Max Weber
- Rembrandt's Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies — Julius Held
- Rouge et le Noir, Le — Stendhal
- Selected Poems — Sappho
- Selected Writings — Hildegard of Bingen
- Sound and the Fury, The — William Faulkner
- Thus Spake Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
- War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar — Eric Steven Raymond
- Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence
Masters and Masterpieces of Literature
Note: Taken from "How to Speak and Write Correctly", by Joseph Devlin (1910).
Indispensable Books
Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Goethe.
(The best translation of Homer for the ordinary reader is by Chapman. Norton's translation of Dante and Taylor's translation of Goethe's Faust are recommended.)
A Good Library
Besides the works mentioned everyone should endeavour to have the following:
Plutarch's Lives, Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Chaucer, Imitation of Christ (Thomas a Kempis), Holy Living and Holy Dying (Jeremy Taylor), Pilgrim's Progress, Macaulay's Essays, Bacon's Essays, Addison's Essays, Essays of Elia (Charles Lamb), Les Miserables (Hugo), Heroes and Hero Worship (Carlyle), Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Wordsworth, Vicar of Wakefield, Adam Bede (George Eliot), Vanity Fair (Thackeray), Ivanhoe (Scott), On the Heights (Auerbach), Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson, History of the English People (Green), Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer.
A good encyclopaedia is very desirable and a reliable dictionary indispensable.
Masterpieces of American Literature
Scarlet Letter, Parkman's Histories, Motley's Dutch Republic, Grant's Memoirs, Franklin's Autobiography, Webster's Speeches, Lowell's Bigelow Papers, also his Critical Essays, Thoreau's Walden, Leaves of Grass (Whitman), Leather-stocking Tales (Cooper), Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ben Hur, and Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Ten Greatest English Poets
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning.
Ten Greatest American Poets
Bryant, Poe, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whitman, Lanier, Aldrich, and Stoddard.
Ten Greatest English Essayists
Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray, and Matthew Arnold.
Best Plays of Shakespeare
In order of merit are: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Tempest.
Inspectional and syntopical reading list
Note: The following list is from "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler (1972 edition).
- Homer — Iliad, Odyssey
- The Old Testament
- Aeschylus — Tragedies
- Sophocles — Tragedies
- Herodotus — Histories
- Euripides — Tragedies
- Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War
- Hippocrates — Medical Writings
- Aristophanes — Comedies
- Plato — Dialogues
- Aristotle — Works
- Epicurus — Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
- Euclid — Elements
- Archimedes — Works
- Apollonius of Perga — Conic Sections
- Cicero — Works
- Lucretius — On the Nature of Things
- Virgil — Works
- Horace — Works
- Livy — History of Rome
- Ovid — Works
- Plutarch — Parallel Lives; Moralia
- Tacitus — Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
- Nicomachus of Gerasa — Introduction to Arithmetic
- Epictetus — Discourses; Encheiridion
- Ptolemy — Almagest
- Lucian — Works
- Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
- Galen — On the Natural Faculties
- The New Testament
- Plotinus — The Enneads
- St. Augustine — On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
- The Song of Roland
- The Nibelungenlied
- The Saga of Burnt Njál
- St. Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica
- Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
- Geoffrey Chaucer — Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
- Leonardo da Vinci — Notebooks
- Niccolò Machiavelli — The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
- Desiderius Erasmus — The Praise of Folly
- Nicolaus Copernicus — On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
- Thomas More — Utopia
- Martin Luther — Table Talk; Three Treatises
- François Rabelais — Gargantua and Pantagruel
- John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Michel de Montaigne — Essays
- William Gilbert — On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
- Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
- Edmund Spenser — Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
- Francis Bacon — Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
- William Shakespeare — Poetry and Plays
- Galileo Galilei — Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
- Johannes Kepler — Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
- William Harvey — On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
- Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan
- René Descartes — Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
- John Milton — Works
- Molière — Comedies
- Blaise Pascal — The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
- Christiaan Huygens — Treatise on Light
- Benedict de Spinoza — Ethics
- John Locke — Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
- Jean Baptiste Racine — Tragedies
- Isaac Newton — Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
- Daniel Defoe — Robinson Crusoe
- Jonathan Swift — A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
- William Congreve — The Way of the World
- George Berkeley — Principles of Human Knowledge
- Alexander Pope — Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
- Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu — Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
- Voltaire — Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
- Henry Fielding — Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
- Samuel Johnson — The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
- David Hume — Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau — On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract
- Laurence Sterne — Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
- Adam Smith — The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
- Immanuel Kant — Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
- Edward Gibbon — The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
- James Boswell — Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier — Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
- Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison — Federalist Papers
- Jeremy Bentham — Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust; Poetry and Truth
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier — Analytical Theory of Heat
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
- William Wordsworth — Poems
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Poems; Biographia Literaria
- Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice; Emma
- Carl von Clausewitz — On War
- Stendhal — The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
- Lord Byron — Don Juan
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Studies in Pessimism
- Michael Faraday — Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
- Charles Lyell — Principles of Geology
- Auguste Comte — The Positive Philosophy
- Honoré de Balzac — Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
- Ralph Waldo Emerson — Representative Men; Essays; Journal
- Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Scarlet Letter
- Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America
- John Stuart Mill — A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
- Charles Darwin — The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
- Charles Dickens — Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
- Claude Bernard — Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
- Henry David Thoreau — Civil Disobedience; Walden
- Karl Marx — Capital; Communist Manifesto
- George Eliot — Adam Bede; Middlemarch
- Herman Melville — Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
- Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary; Three Stories
- Henrik Ibsen — Plays
- Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
- Mark Twain — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
- William James — The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
- Henry James — The American; The Ambassadors
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
- Jules Henri Poincaré — Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
- Sigmund Freud — The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- George Bernard Shaw — Plays and Prefaces
- Max Planck — Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
- Henri Bergson — Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
- John Dewey — How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
- Alfred North Whitehead — An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
- George Santayana — The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
- Vladimir Lenin — The State and Revolution
- Marcel Proust — Remembrance of Things Past
- Bertrand Russell — The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
- Thomas Mann — The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
- Albert Einstein — The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
- James Joyce — 'The Dead' in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
- Jacques Maritain — Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
- Franz Kafka — The Trial; The Castle
- Arnold J. Toynbee — A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
- Jean-Paul Sartre — Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — The First Circle; The Cancer Ward
