Starting in 2023, I’m embarking on Phase II of this project where I will read through The Great Books. Can you help me gather the best list, supplementary materials, and translations/versions?
Ways You Can Help:
- What books have I missed in the list below?
- What is the best translation/version of each book?
- What is the best guide to better understanding each book? This can be a supplementary book or article, a subject matter expert, or another work of art (opera, play, movie, etc.).
The Plan
I have generated this list from a variety of sources that are listed below. My plan is to read the books in the order you see them from oldest to newest. A negative number before a year signifies B.C.E. and the others are for C.E.
My Rules:
I will start each year by reading a different translation of the Bible (suggestions welcome). I anticipate this taking the first two months of each year. I will also take the months of July and December as breaks. Therefore, each year, I will read The Great Books for 8 months and use Jan, Feb, July, and Dec for the Bible / other books.
I’m in this for the long haul. I anticipate this project taking 10 years at a minimum. I am dropping my Phase I goal of 52 books per year. I know some of these books will take months to read.
- Read in order oldest to newest
- No books written within the last 50 years
Since I’m doing this project by myself, I know I will need help in understanding each book. I will first read each Great Book. I will then consult a book, article, subject matter expert, or work of art in the hope of better understanding the Great Book. Please help me in compiling a list of guides.
I will continue The Books of Titans Podcast through this new phase. I plan to cover each book first and then cover the guides in a separate episode.
I’d love for you to participate in one of the following ways:
- Read The Great Books with me.
- Read some of these books with me.
- Participate in in-person or online discussions about some of the books.
- Help me finalize this list of books and guides.
Please email me at erik@booksoftitans.com if any of these ideas strike your fancy.
Proposed Reading List
# | Book | Author | Est. Year |
---|---|---|---|
1 | The Epic of Gilgamesh | -2100 | |
2 | Writings from Ancient Egypt | -2000 | |
3 | The Rigveda | -1500 | |
4 | Enuma Elish | Babylonian | -1100 |
5 | The Iliad | Homer | -730 |
6 | Theogony & Works and Days | Hesiod | -700 |
7 | The Odyssey | Homer | -700 |
8 | Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments | Sappho | -600 |
9 | Aesop’s Fables | Aesop | -580 |
10 | Selected Works | Aeschylus | -458 |
11 | Selected Works | Sophocles | -442 |
12 | The Histories | Herodotus | -430 |
13 | Lysistrata, Comedies | Aristophanes | -411 |
14 | Selected Works | Euripides | -405 |
15 | History of the Peloponnesian War | Thucydides | -405 |
16 | Apology, Symposium, The Republic, Timaeus | Plato | -399 |
17 | Rhetoric, Physics, Politics, Nichomachean Ethics, Poetics | Aristotle | -350 |
18 | Analects | Confucius | -300 |
19 | Elements | Euclid | -300 |
20 | The Art of Happiness | Epicurus | -280 |
21 | The Book of Chuang Tzu | Chuang Tzu | -250 |
22 | Works | Archimedes | -220 |
23 | Terence The Comedies | Terence | -165 |
24 | On the Nature of Things | Lucretius | -70 |
25 | The Republic and The Laws, On the Nature of the Gods | Cicero | -51 |
26 | Aeneid | Virgil | -20 |
27 | The History of Rome: Books 1 – 10 | Livy | -9 |
28 | Metamorphoses | Ovid | 8 |
29 | Letters from a Stoic | Seneca | 65 |
30 | The Jewish War | Josephus | 90 |
31 | Institutes of Oratory | Quintilian | 95 |
32 | Arithmetic | Nicomachus | 100 |
33 | Lives | Plutarch | 100 |
34 | Almagest | Ptolemy | 100 |
35 | Discourses / Enchiridion | Epictetus | 108 |
36 | Annals | Tacitus | 110 |
37 | Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | 180 |
38 | The Mishnah | 200 | |
39 | The Enneads | Plotinus | 270 |
40 | The Bhagavad-Gita in the Mahabharata | 300 | |
41 | Ecclesiastical History, On the Life of Pamphilus | Eusebius | 330 |
42 | Life of St Anthony, On the Incarnation | Athanasius | 367 |
43 | Confessions, The City of God | St. Augustine | 400 |
44 | Selected Letters | St. Jerome | 400 |
45 | The Talmud | 400 | |
46 | The Consolation of Philosophy | Boethius | 523 |
47 | The Koran | 632 | |
48 | Beowulf | 1000 | |
49 | Arabian Knights | 1000 | |
50 | The Forest of Thieves and the Magic Garden | 1000 | |
51 | The Pillow Book | Shōnagon | 1002 |
52 | Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings | Abolqasem Ferdowsi | 1010 |
53 | The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | 1021 |
54 | Proslogium | Saint Anselm | 1078 |
55 | The Song of Roland | 1100 | |
56 | The Alexiad | Anna Komnene | 1148 |
57 | Selected Writings | Hildegard of Bingen | 1160 |
58 | The Lais of Marie de France | Marie de France | 1160 |
59 | The Guide for the Perplexed | Maimonides | 1190 |
60 | The Saga of the Volsungs | 1200 | |
61 | Njal’s Saga | 1200 | |
62 | Magna Carta | 1215 | |
63 | The Essential Rumi | Rumi | 1260 |
64 | Divine Comedy | Dante Alighieri | 1320 |
65 | The Tale of the Heike | 1330 | |
66 | The Decameron | Boccacio | 1350 |
67 | Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 1390 | |
68 | Canterbury Tales | Chaucer | 1392 |
69 | The Imitation of Christ | Thomas à Kempis | 1420 |
70 | The Book of Margery Kempe | Margery Kempe | 1430 |
71 | Summa Theologica | Thomas Aquinas | 1485 |
72 | In Praise of Folly | Erasmus | 1511 |
73 | Utopia | Thomas More | 1516 |
74 | The 95 Theses, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church | Martin Luther | 1520 |
75 | The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli | 1531 |
76 | Gargantua and Pantagruel | Rabelais | 1532 |
77 | Institutes on the Christian Religion | John Calvin | 1536 |
78 | On the Revolution of the Spheres | Copernicus | 1543 |
79 | The Book of Common Prayer | 1549 | |
80 | The Story of Hong Gildong | 1550 | |
81 | Essays | Michael de Montaigne | 1580 |
82 | The Dark Night of the Soul | St. John of the Cross | 1580 |
83 | The Fairie Queen | Edmund Spenser | 1590 |
84 | Essays, Novum Organum | Francis Bacon | 1597 |
85 | Selected Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, and Sonnets | William Shakespeare | 1600 |
86 | Epitome IV | Johannes Kepler | 1618 |
87 | Poems | John Donne | 1620 |
88 | Motion of the Heart and Blood | William Harvey | 1628 |
89 | The Temple | George Herbert | 1633 |
90 | Two New Sciences | Galileo Galilei | 1638 |
91 | Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind | René Descartes | 1641 |
92 | The Book of Five Rings | Miyamoto Musashi | 1643 |
93 | Westminster Confession of Faith | 1647 | |
94 | Leviathan | Thomas Hobbes | 1651 |
95 | Maxims | La Rochefoucauld | 1665 |
96 | The Misanthrope | Molière | 1666 |
97 | Paradise Lost, Aeropagiticia | John Milton | 1667 |
98 | Fables | La Fontaine | 1668 |
99 | Theological-Political Treatise | Benedict de Spinoza | 1670 |
100 | Pensées | Blaise Pascal | 1670 |
101 | Revelations of Divine Love | Julian of Norwich | 1670 |
102 | Phaedra | John Baptiste Racine | 1677 |
103 | Pilgrim’s Progress, The Holy War | John Bunyan | 1678 |
104 | Oroonoko | Aphra Behn | 1680 |
105 | Principia Mathematica | Isaac Newton | 1685 |
106 | Treatise on Light | Christiaan Huygens | 1690 |
107 | Second Treatise on Government, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding | John Locke | 1700 |
108 | Monadology | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | 1714 |
109 | Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe | 1719 |
110 | Major Works | Alexander Pope | 1720 |
111 | Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift | 1726 |
112 | Treatise on Human Nature | David Hume | 1740 |
113 | The Spirit of Laws | Montesquieu | 1755 |
114 | Candide | Voltaire | 1759 |
115 | On the Origin of Inequality, Political Economy, The Social Contract, Confessions | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | 1762 |
116 | The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments | Adam Smith | 1776 |
117 | The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | 1776 |
118 | Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution | Founding Fathers | 1776 |
119 | Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals | Immanuel Kant | 1785 |
120 | The Federalist Papers | Hamilton, Jay, Madison | 1788 |
121 | Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience | William Blake | 1789 |
122 | Elements of Chemistry | Antoine Lavoisier | 1790 |
123 | The Interesting Narrative | Olaudah Equiano | 1790 |
124 | Life of Johnson | Boswell | 1791 |
125 | The Ancient Mariner | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | 1798 |
126 | The Two Part Prelude | William Wordsworth | 1799 |
127 | Logic | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | 1807 |
128 | Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | 1813 |
129 | On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation | David Ricardo | 1817 |
130 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | 1818 |
131 | The Great Odes | John Keats | 1819 |
132 | Ivanhoe | Sir Walter Scott | 1819 |
133 | Democracy in America | De Tocqueville | 1835 |
134 | Theory of Parallels | Lobachevsky | 1840 |
135 | Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Sickness Unto Death | Søren Kierkegaard | 1843 |
136 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | 1844 |
137 | The Communist Manifesto, Capital | Karl Marx | 1844 |
138 | Stories | Edgar Allen Poe | 1845 |
139 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | 1847 |
140 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | 1847 |
141 | Economic Sophisms | Frederic Bastiat | 1847 |
142 | The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | 1850 |
143 | Essays and Aphorisms | Arthur Schopenhauer | 1851 |
144 | Moby Dick, Benito Cereno | Herman Melville | 1851 |
145 | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe | 1852 |
146 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 1856 |
147 | Origin of Species | Charles Darwin | 1859 |
148 | A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | 1859 |
149 | The Gates Ajar | Elizabeth Stuart Phelps | 1868 |
150 | Complete Poems | Emily Dickinson | 1870 |
151 | Middlemarch | George Eliot | 1871 |
152 | Autobiography, On Liberty | John Stuart Mill | 1873 |
153 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 1877 |
154 | Complete Poems | Alfred Tennyson | 1880 |
155 | The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 1880 |
156 | The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass | Frederick Douglass | 1881 |
157 | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | 1881 |
158 | Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 1884 |
159 | Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science | Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche | 1886 |
160 | Philosophical Investigations | Ludwig Wittgenstein | 1887 |
161 | Tess of the D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | 1891 |
162 | Briefer Course | William James | 1892 |
163 | The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | 1895 |
164 | Dracula | Bram Stoker | 1897 |
165 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 1899 |
166 | The Interpretation of Dreams, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Civilization and its Discontents | Sigmund Freud | 1899 |
167 | The Everyman Chesterton, The Thing Essay | G.K. Chesterton | 1900 |
168 | Essays on the Theory of Numbers | Richard Dedekind | 1901 |
169 | King Arthur and His Knights | Howard Pyle | 1903 |
170 | The Souls of Black Folk | W. E. B. Du Bois | 1903 |
171 | In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust | 1909 |
172 | Selected Writings | Booker T. Washington | 1910 |
173 | The Electron | Robert A. Millikan | 1917 |
174 | Ulysses | James Joyce | 1920 |
175 | Poems | William Butler Yeats | 1920 |
176 | The Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy | Sigrid Undset | 1920 |
177 | The Trial | Franz Kafka | 1925 |
178 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 1925 |
179 | Special & General Relativity | Albert Einstein | 1926 |
180 | The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absolom | William Faulkner | 1929 |
181 | The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory | Werner Heisenberg | 1930 |
182 | The General Theory | John Maynard Keynes | 1936 |
183 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 1937 |
184 | The Space Triology | C. S. Lewis | 1938 |
185 | Rebecca | Daphne Du Maurier | 1938 |
186 | The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909 – 1950 | T.S. Elliot | 1941 |
187 | The Road to Serfdom | Friedrich Hayek | 1944 |
188 | 1984 | George Orwell | 1949 |
189 | The Second Sex | Simone de Beauvoir | 1949 |
190 | Letters and Papers from Prison | Dietrich Bonhoeffer | 1951 |
191 | East of Eden | John Steinbeck | 1952 |
192 | The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays | Martin Heidegger | 1956 |
193 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1958 |
194 | The Bell | Iris Murdoch | 1958 |
195 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
196 | The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | 1961 |
197 | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Harvard Address | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1962 |
198 | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | Thomas S. Kuhn | 1962 |
199 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 1966 |
200 | The New Industrial State | John Kenneth Galbraith | 1967 |
201 | Selected Stories | Flannery O’Connor | 1971 |
202 | A Theory of Justice | John Rawls | 1971 |
*As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing / Romeo and Juliet, Julius Ceasar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus / Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, King Lear
Suggestions?
I’m sharing my proposed list to gather feedback. Any books I’m missing? Please make suggestions and I’ll consider them for the project. I’m specifically seeking Great Books I missed, suggested guidebooks to help in understanding any of the books listed above, or someone you know who is a subject matter expert about the book.
Sources
I pulled from the sources below to compile this Great Books list. Efforts were made to expand outside of the Western Canon. No books will be added that were written within the last 50 years.
- Tommy Collison Great Books – the idea for this Great Books project was largely inspired by Tommy – https://tommycollison.com/greatbooks
- https://fs.blog/2013/10/great-books/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books
- https://gutenberg.edu/academics/reading-list/
- The University of the South Reading List
- The Penguin Classics Book
- Invitation to the Classics – Os Guinness & Louise Cowan
- Ryan Holiday Books to Base Your Life On
- Jordan B. Peterson Great Books