Great Books: A List of Books for the Learned
1. Bible--Old and New Testaments plus the Apocrypha and any related works of ancient origin; e.g., Epic of Gilgamesh, Dead Sea Scrolls, other ancient biblical texts.
2. Shakespeare--particularly Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear--but read all if possible
3. Dante--The Divine Comedy
4. Cervantes--Don Quixote
5. Plato--Republic, Apology, Phaedo, Meno, Crito, Gorgias, and others
6. Aristotle--Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Metaphysics, Poetics, and others
7. Thucydides--Pelopponesian Wars
8. Herodotus--Histories
9. Virgil--Annead
10. Homer--Iliad and Odyssey
11. Dostoyevsky--Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground
12. Freud--Civilization and Its Discontents, Future of an Illusion
13. Augustine--City of God, Confessions
14. Milton--Paradise Lost
15. John Donne--poetical writings
16. Gerard Manley Hopkins--poetical writings
17. Descartes--Meditations on First Philosophy, Discourse on Method
18. Kant--Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason
19. Chaucer--Canterbury Tales
20. John Bunyan--Pilgrim's Progress
21. Herman Melville--Moby Dick, Billy Budd
22. Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States, Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers
23. The speeches of A. Lincoln, esp. Gettysburg Address, 2nd Inaugural Address and House Divided speech
24. Ovid--Metamorphoses
25. Franz Kafka--Collected Short Stories
26. James Baldwin--selected works
27. Langston Hughes--selected works
28. Martin Luther King--selected writings and speeches, esp. Letter from the Birmingham Jail
29. John Steinbeck--East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
30. Ernest Hemingway--Old Man and the Sea, Farewell to Arms
31. St. Thomas Aquinas--selections from both the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica
32. David Hume--Treatise on Human Nature
33. Leo Tolstoy--War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Death of Ivan Ilyich
34. Turgenev--Fathers and Sons
35. Sophocles--Tragedies (Antigone, Oedipus Rex)
36. Goethe--Faust
37. Edith Hamilton--The Greek Way, The Roman Way
38. Bulfinch--Mythology
39. Barbara Tuchman--A Distant Mirror
40. Karl Marx--1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Communist Manifesto
41. Sir Thomas More--Utopia
42. Niccolo Machiavelli--The Prince
43. Jean-Jacques Rousseau--The Social Contract, On the Origin of Inequalities
44. Friedrich Nietzsche--Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Birth of Tragedy
45. Hawthorne--The Minister's Black Veil, A Scarlett Letter
46. Edgar Allen Poe--Best Known Writings
47. George Orwell--Animal Farm, 1984
48. Kurt Vonnegut--Slaughterhouse Five
49. Joseph Heller--Catch 22
50. Albert Camus--The Plague, The Stranger, The Fall
51. Charles Darwin--Origin of Species
52. John Stuart Mill--On Liberty, Utilitarianism
53. Beowulf
54. Joseph Campbell--The Hero with a Thousand Faces
55. Carl Jung--Symbols of Transformation
56. C. S. Lewis--The Chronicles of Narnia, Screwtape Letters
57. Thomas Malory--Le Mort d'Arthur
58. Alexander Pope--Diary
59. Confucius--Analects
60. Lao Tzu--Tao Te Ching
61. Henry David Thoreau--On Walden Pond, Civil Disobedience
62. Ralph Waldo Emerson--Self-Determination
63. Thomas à Kempis--The Imitation of Christ
64. Ben Franklin--The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
65. Thomas Paine--Common Sense
66. Galileo--Concerning the Two New Sciences
67. Walt Whitman--Leaves of Grass, and other selected works
68. Euclid--The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements
69. Isaac Newton--Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
70. Copernicus--The Commentariolus of Copernicus, The Almagest
71. Francis Bacon--Advancement of Learning
72. John Locke--2nd Treatise on Government
73. Thomas Hobbes--Leviathan
74. J. R. R. Tolkien--The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings
75. Edward Gibbons--Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
76. Edmund Burke--Reflections on the French Revolution
77. Thomas Carlyle--French Revolution
78. Alexander Solzhenitsyn--Gulag Archipelago, First Circle, Cancer Ward
79. G. K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy, Everlasting Man, Heretics, Eugenics and Other Evils, Father Brown mysteries
80. Elie Wiesel--Night Trilogy
81. Cicero—On Duties, On the Commonwealth
82. Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea, Being and Nothingness
83. Soren Kierkegaard--Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscripts
84. Livy--Roman History
85. Marcus Aurelius--Meditations
86. Julius Caesar--Gallic Wars
87. Plutarch-Lives
88. Jonathon Swift--Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal
89. Voltaire--Candide
90. Rabelais--Gargantua and Pantagruel
91. Charles Dickens--Hard Times, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol
92. Nikos Kazantzakis--Greek Passion, Last Temptation of Christ, Zorba the Greek
93. Aeschuyles--Prometheus Bound
94. Montesquieu--Spirit of the Laws
95. Tacitus--Annals, The Histories
96. Henry Fielding--The History of Tom Jones a Foundling
97. Martin Heidegger--Being and Time
98. Ludwig Wittgenstein--Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations
99. Arnold Toynbee--A Study of History
100. Weber--The Protestant Work Ethic