From How to Read
a Book by
Mortimer
Adler and
Charles Van
Doren. (1940, 1972). The list is
provided by Wikipedia.
- Homer: The Iliad, The 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: The Elements
- Archimedes: Works
- Apollonius: The Conic Sections
- Cicero: Works
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- Virgil: Works
- Horace: Works
- Livy: The History of Rome
- Ovid: Works
- Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
- Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
- Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
- Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion
- 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 New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; The Divine Comedy
- 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
- Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
- John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Michel de Montaigne: Essays
- William Gilbert: On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
- Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
- Edmund Spenser: "Prothalamion"; The Faerie Queene
- Francis Bacon: Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; The New Atlantis
- William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
- Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
- Johannes Kepler: The 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 Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
- John Milton: Works
- Molière: Comedies
- Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensées; 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; Opticks
- Gottfried Wilhelm von 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"; "The Rape of the Lock"; "Essay on Man"
- Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws
- Voltaire: Letters on the English Nation, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary
- Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
- Samuel Johnson: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", Dictionary, Rasselas, 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 Political Economy, Emile, 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; The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
- Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The 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: The Phenomenology of Spirit; The 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; Stendhal
- 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: Le 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: The Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
- Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
- Henry David Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience"; Walden
- Karl Marx: Capital; The 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
- Lenin: The State and Revolution
- Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (the revised translation is In Search of Lost Time; the original French title is À la recherche du temps perdu)
- 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; Cancer Ward