Reading List

Below is my reading list for the next decade, or two. Taken almost entirely from here, with later additions from recommendations I’ve been given over time.

My post on why I’m doing this reading list.

Summary Video

I’ll be progressing through the Great Books and additional works roughly chronologically, updating books with as I finish with links to blog posts, essays, and videos on each. Here’s a link to the related Youtube channel.

For some authors I’ve liberally included more works of theirs which weren’t included in the “Great Books of the Western World” list by Encyclopedia Britannica (specifically, from Nietszche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Russell and Dostoevsky). I’ve also added quite a few extra authors and their works, as per suggestions from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (one of the main editors of this list) and Jordan Peterson’s reading list – Jordan Peterson was a major influence for embarking on this task. You’ll note his particular additions later in the list (20th century authors) which are more focused on historical atrocities and psychology. Other than that, the majority of this list consists of a huge body of philosophy, classic literature, mythology, sociology, scientific treatises and ancient Greek and Roman works.

Pre-Reading

• Mortimer Adler
  • How to Read a Book (Blog) (Video)
  • How To Speak, How to Listen  (Video)
  •  How to Think About the Great Ideas (Blog)
• Robert Anton Wilson
  • Prometheus Rising 
• Bulfinch’s Mythology: The Age of Fable

Homer (9th Century B.C. ?)

• The Iliad
• The Odyssey

The Epic of Gilgamesh (1600-2100 BC)

The Old Testament (5th Century B.C. ?)

Aeschylus (c. 525-456 B.C.)

• The Suppliant Maidens
• The Persians
• Seven Against Thebes
• Prometheus Bound
• The Oresteia
  • Agamemnon
  • Choephoroe
  • The Eumenides

Sophocles (c. 495-406 B.C.)

• The Oedipus cycle
  • Oedipus the King
  • Oedipus at Colonus
  • Antigone
• Ajax
• Electra
• The Trachiniae
• Philoctetes

Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.)

• The History

Euripides (c. 485 – 406 B.C.)

• Rhesus
• Medea
• Hippolytus
• Alcestis
• Heracleidae
• The Suppliants
• Trojan Women
• Ion
• Helen
• Andromache
• Electra
• Bacchantes
• Hecuba
• Heracles Mad
• Phoenician Women
• Orestes
• Iphigeneia in Tauris
• Iphigeneia at Aulis
• Cyclops

Thucydides (c. 460 – 400 B.C.)

• History of the Peloponnesian War

Hippocrates (c. 460-377? B.C.)

• Works

Aristophanes (c. 448 – 380 B.C.)

• The Acharnians
• The Knights
• The Clouds
• The Wasps
• Peace
• The Birds
• The Frogs
• Lysistrata
• Thesmophoriazusae
• Ecclesiazousae
• Plutus

Plato (c. 427 – 347 B.C.)

• The Dialogues
  • Charmides
  • Lysis
  • Laches
  • Protagoras
  • Euthydemus
  • Cratylus
  • Phaedrus
  • Ion
  • Symposium
  • Meno
  • Euthyphro
  • Apology
  • Crito
  • Phaedo
  • Gorgias
  • The Republic
  • Timaeus
  • Parmenides
  • Theaetetus
  • Sophist
  • Statesman
  • Philebus
  • Laws
• The Seventh Letter

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

• Categories
• On Interpretation
• Prior Analytics
• Posterior Analytics
• Topics
• Sophistical Refutations
• Physics
• On the Heavens
• On Generation and Corruption
• Meteorology
• Metaphysics
• On the Soul
• History of Animals
• Parts of Animals
• On the Motion of Animals
• On the Gait of Animals
• On the Generation of Animals
• Nicomachean Ethics
• Politics
• The Athenian Constitution
• Rhetoric
• Poetics

Epicurus (c. 341-270 B.C.)

• Works

Euclid (c. 300 B.C.)

• Elements

Archimedes (287 B.C.)

• On the Sphere and Cylinder
• Measurement of a Circle
• On Conoids and Sphereoids
• On Spirals
• On the Equilibrium of Planes
• The Sand Reckoner
• The Quadrature of the Parabola
• On Floating Bodies
• Book of Lemmas
• The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems

Apollonius of Perga (262- 190 A.D.)

• On Conic Sections

Cicero (106 – 43 B.C.)

• Works

Lucretius (c. 95-55 B.C.)

• On the Nature of Things

Virgil (70-19 B.C.)

• Works

Horace (65 – 8 B.C.)

• Odes and Epodes
• Ars Poetica

Livy (59 B.C. – A.D. 17)

• History of Rome

Ovid (43 B.C. – A.D. 17)

• Metamorphoses
• Ars Amatoria

Plutarch (c. 45 – 120)

• The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Moralia

Tacitus (c. 55-117)

• Histories
• Annals
• Agricola
• Germania

Nicomachus of Gerasa (60 – 120)

• Introduction to Arithmetic

Epicetus (55 – 135)

• The Discourses
• Encheiridion

Ptolemy (c. 100-178)

• Almagest

Lucian of Samosata (c. 120-190)

• True History
• The Way to Write History
• Comedies

Marcus Aurelius (121-180)

• The Meditations

Galen (130 – 210)

• On the Natural Faculties

The New Testament (c. 1st Century A.D. ?)

The New Testament Apocrypha (c. 1st Century A.D. ?)

Plotinus (205-270)

• The Six Enneads

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

• The Confessions
• The City of God
• On Christian Doctrine
• On the Teacher

Bulfinch’s Mythology (1850s)

• The Age of Chivalry
• Legends of Charlemagne

The Song of Roland (12th Century ?)

The Nibelungelied (13th Century)

The Saga of Burnt Njal (13th Century)

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274)

• Summa Theologica

Dante (1265 – 1321)

• The Divine Comedy
• The New Life
• On Monarchy

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – 1400)

• Troilus and Criseyde
• The Canterbury Tales

Leonardo da Vinci (1425 – 1519)

• Notebooks

Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536)

• The Praise of Folly
• Adagia

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

• The Prince
• Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy

Desiderius Erasmus (1469 – 1536)

• The Praise of Folly

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543)

• On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres

Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535)

• Utopia

Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)

• Three Treatises
• Table-Talk

François Rabelais (1495 – 1553)

• Gargantua and Pantagruel

John Calvin (1509 – 1564)

• Institutes of the Christian Religion

Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)

• Essays

William Gilbert (1540 – 1603)

• On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies

Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616)

•  Don Quixote

Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599)

• Prothalamion
• The Faerie Queene

Francis Bacon

• Essays
• The Advancement of Learning
• Novum Organum
• New Atlantis

Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

• The First, Second and Third Part of King Henry the Sixth
• The Tragedy of Richard the Third
• The Comedy of Errors
• Titus Andronicus
• The Taming of the Shrew
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Love’s Labour’s Lost
• Romeo and Juliet
• The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Life and Death of King John
• The Merchant of Venice
• The First and Second Part of King Henry the Fourth
• Much Ado About Nothing
• The Life of King Henry the Fifth
• Julius Caesar
• As You Like It
• Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
• The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Troilus and Cressida
• All’s Well That Ends Well
• Measure for Measure
• Othello, the Moor of Venice
• King Lear
• Macbeth
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Coriolanus
• Timon of Athens
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• Cymbeline
• The Winter’s Tale
• The Tempest
• The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
• Sonnets

Galileo (1564 – 1642)

• The Starry Messenger
• Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences

Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630)

• Mysterium Cosmographicum
• New Astronomy
• Harmony of the Worlds
• Tablulae Rudolphinae
• Somnium

William Harvey (1578 – 1657)

• On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
• On the Circulation of Blood
• On the Generation of Animals

Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679)

• Leviathan

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650)

• Rules for the Direction of the Mind
• Discourse on the Method
• Meditations on First Philosophy
• Objections Against the Meditations and Replies
• The Geometry

John Milton (1608 – 1674)

• English Minor Poems
• Paradise Lost
• Samson Agonistes
• Areopagitica

Molière (1622 – 1673)

• The School for Wives
• The Critique of The School for Wives
• Tartuffe
• Don Juan
• The Miser
• The Would-Be Gentleman
• The Imaginary Invalid

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662)

• The Provincial Letters
• Pensées
• Scientific and Mathematical Essays

Christian Huygens (1623 – 1662)

• Treatise on Light

Benedict de Spinoza (1632 – 1677)

• Ethics

John Locke (1632 – 1704)

• A Letter Concerning Toleration
• Of Civil Government
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
• Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Jean Baptiste Racine (1639 – 1699)

• Andromache
• Phaedra

Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727)

• Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
• Optics

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 – 1716)

• Discourses on Metaphysics
• New Essays Concerning Human Understanding
• Monadology

Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731)

• Robinson Crusoe

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)’

• A Tale of a Tub
• Journal to Stella
• A Modest Proposal
• Gulliver’s Travels

William Congreve (1670 – 1729)

• The Way of The World

George Berkeley (1685 – 1753)

• The Principles of Human Knowledge

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)

• Essay on Criticism
• Rape of the Lock
• Essay on Man

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689 – 1755)

• Persian Letters
• Spirit of the Laws

Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

• Candide
• Letters on the English
• Philosophical Dictionary

Henry Fielding (1707 – 1754)

• Joseph Andrews
• Tom Jones

Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)

• The Vanity of Human Wishes
• Dictionary
• Rasselas
• The Lives of Poets
• Essays

David Hume (1711 – 1776)

• Treatise of Human Nature
• Essays on Moral and Political
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Jean Jaques Rousseau (1712 – 1778)

• A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
• A Discourse on Political Economy
• Emile
• The Social Contract

Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768)

• Tristram Shandy
• A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784)

• Rameau’s Nephew
• D’Alembert’s Dream

Adam Smith (1723 – 1790)

• The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)

• Critique of Pure Reason
• Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
• Critique of Practical Reason
• The Science of Right
• The Metaphysics of Morals
• The Critique of Judgement
• Perpetual Peace

Edward Gibbon (1737 – 1794)

• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Autobiography

James Boswell (1740 – 1795)

• Journal
• The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743 – 1794)

• Elements of Chemistry

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison & John Jay

• Federalist Papers
• Articles of Confederation
• The Constitution of the United States of America
• Declaration of Independence

Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832)

• Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislations
• Theory of Fictions

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

• Faust
• Poetry and Truth

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 – 1830)

• Analytical Theory of Heat

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831)

• Phenomenology of Spirit
• The Philosophy of Right
• The Philosophy of History

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

• Lyrical Ballads
• Lucy Poems
• Sonnets

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

• Poems
• Biographia Literaria

Jane Austen (1775 – 1817)

• Emma
• Sense and Sensibility
• Pride and Prejudice

Karl von Clausewitz (1780 – 1831)

• On War

Stendhal (1783 – 1842)

• The Red and The Black
• The Charterhouse of Parma
• On Love

Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)

• Don Juan

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1824)

• Studies in Pessimism

Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867)

• Chemical History of a Candle
• Experimental Researches in Electricity

Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875)

• Principles of Geology

Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857)

• The Positive Philosophy

Honoré  de Balzac (1799 – 1850)

• Pére Goriot
• Eugénie Grandet

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

• Representative Men
• Essays
• Journal

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864)

• The Scarlet Letter

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859)

• Democracy in America

John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873)

• A System of Logic
• On Liberty
• Representative Government
• Utilitarianism
• The Subjection of Women
• Autobiography

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)

• The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
• The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
• Autobiography

Charles Dickens (1809 – 1882)

• Little Dorrit
• Pickwick Papers
• The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
• The Adventures of Oliver Twist
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
• The Old Curiosity Shop
• Barnaby Rudge
• A Christmas Carol
• The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
• Dombey and Son
• David Copperfield
• Bleak House
• Hard Times: For These Times
• A Tale of Two Cities
• Great Expectations
• Our Mutual Friend

Claude Bernard (1813 – 1878)

• Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855)

• Either/Or
• Fear and Trembling
• Repetition
• Philosophical Fragment
• The Concept of Anxiety
• The Sickness Unto Death

 

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

• Civil Disobedience
• Walden

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

• Capital
• Communist Manifesto

George Eliot (1819-1880)

• Middlemarch
• Adam Bede
• The Mill on the Floss

Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)

• Moby Dick
• Billy Budd

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881)

• Crime and Punishment
• Poor Folk
• Notes from the Underground
• The Idiot
• Demons
• The Brothers Karamazov
• A Writers Diary

Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880)

• Madame Bouvary
• Three Stories

Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906)

• Hedda Gabler
• A Doll’s House
• The Wild Duck
• The Master Builder

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

• War and Peace
• Anna Karenina
• What is Art?
• Twenty-three Tales

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

• Huckleberry Finn
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• The Prince and the Pauper
• The Mysterious Stranger

William James (1842 – 1910)

• The Principles of Psychology
• The Varieties of Religious Experience
• Pragmatism
• Essays in Radical Empiricism

Henry James (1843 – 1916)

• The American
• The Ambassadors
• The Beast in the Jungle

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
• Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
• The Gay Science
• Beyond Good and Evil
• The Antichrist
• The Will to Power
• Ecce Homo

Sir James George Frazer (1854 – 1941)

• Myths of the Origin of Fire
• The Golden Bough

Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 – 1912)

• Science and Hypothesis
• Science and Method

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

• The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
• Selected Papers on Hysteria
• The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
• The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
• Observations on “Wild” Psycho-Analysis
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• On Narcissism
• Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
• Repression
• The Unconscious
• A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
• The Ego and the Id
• Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
• Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
• Civilization and Its Discontents
• A New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

• Man and Superman
• Major Barbara
• Caesar and Cleopatra
• Pygmalion
• Saint Joan

Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929)

• The Theory of the Leisure Class
• The Theory of Business Enterprise
• The Instinct of Workmanship and State of the Industrial Arts
• The Engineers and the Price System

Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924)

• Heart of Darkness
• Lord Jim
• The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus;
• Nostromo

Max Planck (1858 – 1947)

• Origins and Development of Quantum Theory
• Where is Science Going?
• Scientific Autobiography

Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941)

• Time and Free Will
• Matter and Memory
• Creative Evolution
• The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
• An Introduction to Metaphysics

John Dewey (1859 – 1952)

• How We Think
• Democracy and Education
• Experience and Education
• Experience and Nature
• Logic, the Theory of Inquiry
• Knowing and the Known

Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904)

• Ivanov
• The Seagull
• Uncle Vanya
• Three Sisters
• The Cherry Orchard

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947)

• Science and the Modern World
• An Introduction to Mathematics
• The Aims of Education and Other Essays
• Adventures of Ideas

George Santayana (1863 – 1952)

• The Life of Reason
• Skepticism and Animal Faith
• Persons and Place

Max Weber (1864 – 1920)

• Economy and Society
• Essays in Sociology

Luigi Pirandello (1867 – 1936)

• Six Characters in Search of an Author
• Henry IV
• Right You Are

Nikolai Lenin (1870 – 1924)

• The State and Revolution

Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922)

• Remembrance of Things Past

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1920)

• The Problems of Philosophy
• Why I Am Not a Christian
• Marriage and Morals
• Power: A New Social Analysis
• My Philosophical Development
• Has Man A Future
• Principia Mathematica
• Human Knowledge; Its Scope and Limits

Johan Huizinga (1872 – 1945)

• The Autumn of the Middle Ages
• Homo Ludens

Willa Cather (1873 – 1947)

• A Lost Lady
• My Antonia
• Song of the Lark

Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955)

• The Magic Mountain
• Joseph and His Brothers
• A Death in Venice

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961)

• Modern Man in Search of a Soul
• Answer to Job
• Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
• Aion
• East and West
• A Way of Being
• On Becoming a Person

G.H. Hardy (1877 – 1947)

• A Mathematician’s Apology
• Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Works

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

• The Meaning of Relativity
• On the Method of Theoretical Physics
• The Evolution of Physics

R.H. Tawney (1880 – 1962)

• The Acquisitive Society
• Equality

James Joyce (1882 – 1941)

• “The Dead” in Dubliners
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Ulysses

Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944)

• The Expanding Universe
• The Philosophy of the Physical Sciences
• The Nature of the Physical World

Jacques Maritain (1882 – 1973)

• Art and Scholasticism
• The Degrees of Knowledge
• The Rights of Man and Natural Law
• True Humanism

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)

• Mrs Dalloway
• To the Lighthouse

John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946)

• Essays in Persuasion
• The Economic Consequences of the Peace
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924)

• The Trial
• The Castle
• The Metamorphosis

D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

• The Prussian Officer
• Sons and Lovers
• The Rainbow

Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962)

• Atomic theory and the Description of Nature
• Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology

Karl Batrth (1886 – 1968)

• The Word of God and the Word of Man

Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961)

• What is Life?
• My View of the World
• Nature and the Greeks

T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)

• The Waste Land
• Four Quartets

Eugene O’Neill (1888 – 1953)

• Mourning Becomes Electra
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Arnold Toynbee (1889 – 1975)

• A Study of History
• Civilization on Trial

Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976)

• What is Metaphysics?
• Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
• Being and Time
• Discourse on Thinking
• On the Way to Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)

• Philosophical Investigations
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• On Certainty
• Culture and Value

Aldous Huxley

• Point Counter Point
• Brave New World
• The Doors of Perception
• Island

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940)

• The Great Gatsby

Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980)

• Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood
• The Moral Judgement of the Child

William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

• A Rose for Emily
• The Sound and the Fury

Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)

• Mother Courage and Her Children
• Life of Galileo

Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)

• The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
• Green Hills of Africa
• The Old Man and The Sea

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900 – 1975)

• Genetics and the Origin of Species
• Mankind Evolving
• Genetics and the Evolutionary Process

Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976)

• Physics and Philosophy
• Physics and Beyond
• Philosophical Problems of Quantum Physics
• Encounters with Einstein

George Orwell (1903 – 1950)

• Animal Farm
• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• The Road to Wigan Pier

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)

• Nausea
• No Exit
• Being and Nothingness

C.H. Waddington (1905 – 1975)

• An Introduction to Modern Genetics
• The Scientific Attitude
• The Nature of Life
• The Strategy of Genes

Viktor Frankl (1905 – 1997)

• Man’s Search for Meaning
• The Will to Meaning
• The Unconscious God

Eric Neumann (1905 – 1960)

• The Origins and History of Consciousness
• The Great Mother
• The Denial of Death

Samuel Becket (1906 – 1989)

• Waiting for Godot
• Endgame

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 – 2009)

• Structural Anthropology
• Myth and Meaning

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008)

• The First Circle
• Cancer Ward
• The Gulag Archipelago

Jerzy Kosiński (1933 – 1991)

• The Painted Bird

Christopher Browning (1944 – )

• Ordinary Men
• The Origins of the Final Solution

Iris Chang (1968 – 2004)

• The Rape of Nanking

A sour note to end of, I am aware. Sorry bout that 🙁