Reading List
Here's a list of books that are recommended by both How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren and the Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer.Novel
1. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
2. Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
3. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
4. Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
5. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
6. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
7. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
8. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
9. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
11. The Trial (Franz Kafka)
Autobiography and Memoir
1. The Confessions (Augustine)
2. The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne)
3. Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)
4. Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
History
1. The Histories (Herodotus)
2. The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
3. The Republic (Plato)
4. Lives (Plutarch)
5. City of God (Augustine)
6. The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
7. Utopia (Sir Thomas More)
8. The Social Contract (Jean Jaques Rousseau)
9. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon)
10. Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)
11. The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx)
Drama
1. Agamemnon (Aeschylus)
2. Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
3. Medea (Euripides)
4. The Birds (Aristophanes)
5. Poetics (Aristotle)
6. Richard III (William Shakespeare)
7. A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare)
8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
9. Tartuffe (Moliere)
10. The Way of the World (William Congreve)
11. A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)
12. Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw)
13. No Exit (Jean Paul Sartre)
Poet
1. The Iliad (Homer)
2. The Odyssey (Homer)
3. Odes (Horace)
4. Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
5. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
6. Sonnets (William Shakespeare)
7. Paradise Lost (John Milton)
8. Selected Poetry (William Wordsworth)
9. The Complete Poems (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Click here for a list from the Great Books program at St. John's College.
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