Summer Reading List

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

Other books

Note: The little icon to the left of each title indicates how much of that book I have read.

• God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist — Victor J Stenger
• 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

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 endeavor 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 encyclopoedia 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.