In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren put forward a recommended reading list, of truly great books that are worth reading over and over again.
You can find my full summary of How to Read a Book here.
Adler and Van Doren explain that the books on this list go over most people’s heads, so will force you to stretch your mind. These are the books you should read if you want to improve your reading skills and understand some of the best thought from Western literary tradition.
Although the list is long, you should not feel discouraged by it. There’s no rush; you shouldn’t be disappointed if you only get through a handful of the books in one year. The aim is to read well, not to read widely.
The list contains only Western authors and books. Adler and Van Doren admit that they are not very knowledgeable about non-Western books, so their recommendations of such books wouldn’t hold much weight.
The list
Here is the full reading list, in chronological order. (I wish it were sorted by topic but unfortunately, it is not. Many of these books are available for free online at Project Gutenberg.)
- Homer
- Iliad
- Odyssey
- The Old Testament
- Aeschylus
- Tragedies
- Sophocles
- Tragedies
- Herodotus
- History (of the Persian Wars)
- Euripides
- Tragedies (especially Medea, Hippolytus, The Bacchae)
- Thucydides
- History of the Peloponnesian War
- Hippocrates
- Medical writings
- Aristophanes
- Comedies (especially The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs)
- Plato
- Dialogues (especially The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus)
- Artistotle
- Works (especially Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Nichomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics)
- Epicurus
- Letter to Herodotus
- Letter to Menoeceus
- Euclid
- Elements (of Geometry)
- Archimedes
- Works (especially On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Sand-Reckoner)
- Apollonius of Perga
- On Conic Sections
- Cicero
- Works (especially Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age)
- Lucretius
- On the Nature of Things
- Virgil
- Works
- Horace
- Works (especially Odes and Epodes, The Art of Poetry)
- Livy
- History of Rome
- Ovid
- Works (especially Metamorphoses)
- Plutarch
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Moralia
- Tacitus
- Histories
- Annals
- Agricola
- Germania
- Nichomachus of Gerasa
- Introduction to Arithmetic
- Epictetus
- Discourses
- Encheiridion (Handbook)
- Ptolemy
- Almagest
- Lucian
- Works (especially The Way to Write History, The True History, The Sale of Creeds)
- Marcus Aurelius
- Meditations
- Galen
- On the Natural Faculties
- The New Testament
- Plotinus
- The Enneads
- St Augustine
- Works (especially On the Teacher, Confessions, The City of God, Christian Doctrine)
- The Song of Roland
- The Nibelungenlied (The Völsunga Saga is the Scandinavian version of the same legend)
- The Saga of Burnet Njal
- St Thomas Aquinas
- Summa Theologica
- Dante Alighieri
- Works (especially The New Life, On Monarchy, The Divine Comedy)
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Works (especially Troilus and Criseyde, 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
- Sir Thomas More
- Utopia
- Martin Luther
- Three Treatises
- Table-Talk
- François Rabelais
- Gargantua and Pantagruel
- John Calvin
- Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Michel de Montaigne
- Essays
- William Gilbert
- On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Don Quixote
- Edmund Spenser
- Prothalamion
- The Faerie Queene
- Francis Baacon
- Essays
- Advancement of Learning
- Novum Organum
- New Atlantis
- William Shakespeare
- Works
- Galilieo Galilei
- The Starry Messenger
- Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
- Johannes Kepler
- 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
- The Leviathan
- René Descartes
- Rules for the Direction of the Mind
- Discourse on Method
- Geometry
- Meditations on First Philosophy
- John Milton
- Works (especially the minor poems, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes)
- Molière
- Comedies (especially The Miser, The School for Wives, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, Tartuffe)
- 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 (second treatise in Two Treatises on Government)
- Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Some Thoughts Concerning Education
- Jean Baptiste Racine
- Tragedies (especially Andromache, Phaedra)
- Isaac Newton
- Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
- Optics
- 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 Setlla
- Gulliver’s Travels
- A Modest Proposal
- William Congreve
- The Way of the World
- George Berkeley
- Principles of Human Knowledge
- Alexander Pope
- Essay on Criticism
- Rape of the Lock
- Essay on Man
- Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
- Persian Letters
- Spirit of Laws
- Voltaire
- Letters on the English
- Candide
- Philosophical Dictionary
- Henry Fielding
- Joseph Andrews
- Tom Jones
- Samuel Johnson
- The Vanity of Human Wishes
- Dictionary
- Rasselas
- The Lives of the Poets (especially the essays on Milton and Pope)
- David Hume
- Treatise of Human Nature
- Essays Moral and Political
- An Inquiry 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
- Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of 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 (especially London Journal)
- Life of Samuel Johnson Ll.D.
- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
- Elements of Chemistry
- John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton
- Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence)
- 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
- Phenomenology of Spirit
- Philosophy of Right
- Lectures on the Philosophy of History
- William Wordsworth
- Poems (especially Lyrical Ballads, Lucy poems, sonnets; The Prelude)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Poems (especially “Kubla Khan”, Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
- Biographia Literaria
- Jane Austen
- Pride and Prejudice
- Emma
- Karl von Clausewitz
- On War
- Stendhal
- The Red and the Black
- The Charterhouse of Parma
- On Love
- George Gordon, Lord Byron
- Don Juan
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Studies in Pessimism
- Michael Faraday
- Chemical History of a Candle
- Experimental Researches in Electricty
- Charles Lyell
- Principles of Geology
- Auguste Comte
- The Positive Philosophy
- Honoré de Balzac
- Père Goriot
- Eugénie 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
- Works (especially Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Hard Times)
- Claude Bernard
- Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
- Henry David Thoreau
- Civil Disobedience
- Walden
- Karl Marx
- Capital (together with 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 (especially Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck)
- 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) (especially Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan)
- 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
- Nikolai Lenin
- The State and Revolution
- Marcel Proust
- Remembrance of Things Past
- 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 (with L. Infeld)
- James Joyce
- “The Dead” in Dubliners
- 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 Toynbee
- A Study of History
- Civilization on Trial
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Nausea
- No Exit
- Being and Nothingness
- Aleksander I Solzhenitsyn
- The First Circle
- Cancer Ward