200 Books by 2030

The Great Books

I’m 41 years old and I’d like to read through 200 of The Great Books by the time I’m 50 (by the year 2030). I’m starting the list below and reading the books in order beginning in 2022.

My Proposed Reading List

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.

Suggest a Book

#	Book	Author	Est. Year	Pages
1	The Epic of Gilgamesh		-2100	199
2	Writings from Ancient Egypt		-2000	384
3	The Rigveda		-1500	352
4	Enuma Elish	Babylonian	-1100	120
5	Iliad	Homer	-730	683
6	Odyssey	Homer	-700	592
7	Theogony & Works and Days	Hesiod	-700	112
8	Aesop’s Fables	Aesop	-580	352
9	The Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides)	Asechylus	-458	336
10	The Three Theban Plays – Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Colonus	Sophocles	-442	430
11	Prometheus Bound	Asechylus	-430	160
12	The Histories	Herodotus	-430	664
13	Lysistrata	Aristophanes	-411	241
14	History of the Peloponnesian War	Thucydides	-405	656
15	The Bacchae	Euripides	-405	432
16	Apology	Plato	-399	86
17	Comedies	Aristophanes	-386	352
18	Symposium	Plato	-385	74
19	The Republic	Plato	-375	416
20	Rhetoric	Aristotle	-350	144
21	Politics	Aristotle	-350	675
22	Nichomachean Ethics	Aristotle	-340	336
23	Poetics	Aristotle	-335	160
24	Elements	Euclid	-300	481
25	Analects	Confucius	-300	221
26	The Art of Happiness	Epicurus	-280	251
27	The Book of Chuang Tzu	Chuang Tzu	-250	352
28	Works	Archimedes	-220	576
29	On the Nature of Things	Lucretius	-70	363
30	The Republic and The Laws	Cicero	-51	288
31	Aeneid	Virgil	-20	386
32	The History of Rome: Books 1 – 10	Livy	-9	880
33	The Bible		0	1,816
34	Metamorphoses	Ovid	8	636
35	Letters from a Stoic	Seneca	65	254
36	The Jewish War	Josephus	90	528
37	Institutes of Oratory	Quintilian	95	730
38	Lives	Plutarch	100	462
39	Arithmetic	Nicomachus	100
40	Almagest	Ptolemy	100	712
41	Discourses / Enchiridion	Epictetus	108	304
42	Annals	Tacitus	110	576
43	Meditations	Marcus Aurelius	180	93
44	The Enneads	Plotinus	270	688
45	The Bhagavad-Gita in the Mahabharata		300	224
46	Confessions	St. Augustine	397	338
47	Selected Letters	St. Jerome	400	528
48	The Talmud		400	896
49	The City of God	St. Augustine	426	867
50	The Consolation of Philosophy	Boethius	523	114
51	The Koran		632	464
52	Beowulf	Tolkien Translation	1000	105
53	Arabian Knights		1000	674
54	The Forest of Thieves and the Magic Garden		1000	384
55	The Pillow Book	Shōnagon	1002	416
56	Proslogium	S. Anselm	1078	88
57	The Song of Roland		1100	208
58	The Guide for the Perplexed	Maimonides	1190	484
59	The Saga of the Volsungs		1200	160
60	Njal’s Saga		1200	384
61	Magna Carta		1215	54
62	The Essential Rumi	Rumi	1260	281
63	The Tale of the Heike		1330	784
64	The Decameron	Boccacio	1350	1,072
65	Sir Gawain and the Green Knight		1390	214
66	Canterbury Tales	Chaucer	1392	627
67	The Imitation of Christ	Thomas à Kempis	1420	100
68	Divine Comedy	Dante	1472	541
69	Summa Theologica	Thomas Aquinas	1485	1,116
70	In Praise of Folly	Erasmus	1511	256
71	Utopia	Thomas More	1516	152
72	The 95 Theses	Martin Luther	1520	272
73	The Babylonian Captivity of the Church	Martin Luther	1520	108
74	Discourses	Machiavelli	1531	544
75	The Prince	Machiavelli	1532	173
76	Gargantua and Pantagruel	Rabelais	1532	312
77	Institutes on the Christian Religion	John Calvin	1536	540
78	On the Revolution of the Spheres	Copernicus	1543	352
79	The Story of Hong Gildong		1550	128
80	Essays	Michael de Montaigne	1580	476
81	The Dark Night of the Soul	St. John of the Cross	1580	146
82	Essays	Francis Bacon	1597	242
83	Shakespeare’s Comedies*	William Shakespeare	1600	1,000
84	Shakespeare’s Tragedies**	William Shakespeare	1600	1,000
85	Shakespeare’s Histories***	William Shakespeare	1600	600
86	Sonnets	William Shakespeare	1609	154
87	Epitome IV	Kepler	1618	254
88	Novum Organum	Francis Bacon	1620	124
89	Poems	John Donne	1620	736
90	Motion of the Heart and Blood	William Harvey	1628	116
91	The Temple	George Herbert	1633	336
92	Two New Sciences	Galileo Galilei	1638	200
93	Meditations	René Descartes	1641	256
94	Leviathan	Thomas Hobbes	1651	410
95	Maxims	La Rochefoucauld	1665	400
96	The Misanthrope	Molière	1666	400
97	Paradise Lost	John Milton	1667	624
98	Fables	La Fontaine	1668	504
99	Pensées	Blaise Pascal	1670	368
100	Theological-Political Treatise	Benedict de Spinoza	1670	329
101	Phaedra	John Baptiste Racine	1677	50
102	Pilgrim’s Progress	John Bunyan	1678	320
103	Oroonoko	Aphra Behn	1680	272
104	Rules for the Direction of the Mind	Descartes	1684	24
105	Principia Mathematica	Isaac Newton	1685	992
106	Second Treatise on Government	John Locke	1689	104
107	Treatise on Light	Christiaan Huygens	1690	134
108	An Essay Concerning Human Understanding	Locke	1690	416
109	Monadology	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	1714	304
110	Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe	1719	258
111	Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift	1726	304
112	Treatise on Human Nature	David Hume	1740	444
113	The Theory of Moral Sentiments	Adam Smith	1759	494
114	Candide	Voltaire	1759	108
115	The Spirit of Laws	Montesquieu	1755	315
116	On the Origin of Inequality, Political Economy, The Social Contract	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	1762	116
117	The Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	1776	416
118	Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution	Founding Fathers	1776	338
119	The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire	Edward Gibbon	1776	2,765
120	Confessions	Rousseau	1782	615
121	Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals	Immanuel Kant	1785	128
122	The Federalist Papers	Hamilton, Jay, Madison	1788	172
123	Elements of Chemistry	Lavoisier	1790	640
124	The Interesting Narrative	Olaudah Equiano	1790	156
125	Life of Johnson	Boswell	1791	343
126	The Two Part Prelude	William Wordsworth	1799	82
127	Logic	Hegel	1807	386
128	Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen	1811	505
129	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	1813	368
130	On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation	David Ricardo	1817	167
131	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	1818	252
132	The Great Odes	John Keats	1819	540
133	Ivanhoe	Sir Walter Scott	1819	569
134	Democracy in America	De Tocqueville	1835	452
135	Theory of Parallels	Lobachevsky	1840	52
136	Fear and Trembling	Kierkegaard	1843	160
137	Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844	Karl Marx	1844	243
138	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	1844	1,179
139	Stories	Edgar Allen Poe	1845	955
140	Economic Sophisms	Frederic Bastiat	1847	180
141	Wuthering Heights	Emily Brontë	1847	290
142	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Brontë	1847	760
143	The Sickness Unto Death	Kierkegaard	1849	192
144	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	1850	923
145	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	1850	258
146	Essays and Aphorisms	Schopenhauer	1851	240
147	Moby Dick	Herman Melville	1851	647
148	Uncle Tom’s Cabin	Harriet Beecher Stowe	1852	637
149	Benito Cereno	Herman Melville	1855	108
150	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	1856	190
151	Origin of Species	Charles Darwin	1859	505
152	A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	1859	390
153	Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	1860	491
154	Capital	Karl Marx	1867	429
155	Complete Poems	Emily Dickinson	1870	770
156	Middlemarch	George Eliot	1871	799
157	Autobiography	John Stuart Mill	1873	203
158	Anna Karenina	Tolstoy	1877	736
159	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoyevsky	1880	729
160	Complete Poems	Tennyson	1880	948
161	The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass	Frederick Douglass	1881	496
162	The Portrait of a Lady	Henry James	1881	362
163	Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	1884	559
164	Beyond Good and Evil	Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche	1886	240
165	Genealogy of Morals	Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche	1887	167
166	Twilight of the Idols	Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche	1888	208
167	Briefer Course	William James	1892	368
168	The Red Badge of Courage	Crane	1895	112
169	The Interpretation of Dreams	Sigmund Freud	1899	688
170	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	1899	106
171	The Everyman Chesterton	G.K. Chesterton	1900	899
172	Essays on the Theory of Numbers	Richard Dedekind	1901	128
173	The Souls of Black Folk	Du Bois	1903	92
174	In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust	1909	4,211
175	Selected Writings	Booker T. Washington	1910	356
176	General Introduction to Psychoanalysis	Freud	1916	178
177	The Electron	Millikan	1917	298
178	Ulysses	James Joyce	1920	768
179	Poems	William Butler Yeats	1920	214
180	Mrs. Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	1925	190
181	The Trial	Franz Kafka	1925	304
182	Special & General Relativity	Einstein	1926	192
183	Civilization and its Discontents	Freud	1929	192
184	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929	309
185	The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory	Heisenberg	1930	194
186	The General Theory	Keynes	1936	403
187	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston	1937	219
188	Four Quarters	T.S. Elliot	1941	64
189	Go Down, Moses	William Faulkner	1942	365
190	The Road to Serfdom	Hayek	1944	262
191	1984	George Orwell	1949	298
192	Letters and Papers from Prison	Dietrich Bonhoeffer	1951	309
193	East of Eden	John Steinbeck	1952	601
194	What Is Philosophy?	Heidegger	1956	104
195	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	1958	209
196	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	1960	270
197	The Moviegoer	Walker Percy	1961	212
198	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Harvard Address	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1962	159
199	The New Industrial State	Galbraith	1967	438
200	Selected Stories	Flannery O’Connor	1971	576

*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

The Plan

Year	# of Books
2022	6
2023	26
2024	28
2025	28
2026	38
2027	28
2028	21
2029	25
Total	200

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.

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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.