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./B.C.E. and the others are for A.D./C.E. I’ll be pairing each Great Book with a guidebook that provides additional context.
2023 – Current
Completed
All completed books will show here. Click any book to see the guidebooks and supplemental books I’ve read along with the Great Book. View my 2023 reading list for full details.
Great Books Reading List
# | Author | Book | Est. Year |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Enheduana | Poems | -2300 |
2 | – | The Epic of Gilgamesh | -2100 |
3 | – | Writings from Ancient Egypt | -2000 |
4 | – | The Rig Veda | -1500 |
5 | – | Enuma Elish | -1100 |
6 | Homer | The Iliad, The Odyssey, Homeric Hymns | -730 |
7 | Hesiod | Theogony, Works and Days | -700 |
8 | Sappho | Poems | -600 |
9 | Aesop | Aesop’s Fables | -580 |
10 | Pindar | The Odes | -462 |
11 | Aeschylus | The Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides), Prometheus Bound | -458 |
12 | Sophocles | Selected Works | -442 |
13 | Herodotus | The Histories | -430 |
14 | Aristophanes | Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly | -411 |
15 | Thucydides | History of the Peloponnesian War | -405 |
16 | Euripides | Medea, The Bacchae | -405 |
17 | Plato | Apology, The Republic, Laches, Symposium, Philebus, Crito, Phaedo, Theatetus, Meno | -399 |
18 | Xenophon | Hellenika, Anabasis, Cyropaedia | -365 |
19 | Aristotle | Rhetoric, Physics, Politics, Nichomachean Ethics, Poetics | -350 |
20 | Confucius | Analects | -300 |
21 | Euclid | Elements | -300 |
22 | Epicurus | The Art of Happiness | -280 |
23 | Chuang Tzu | The Book of Chuang Tzu | -250 |
24 | Archimedes | Works | -220 |
25 | – | The Ramayana | -200 |
26 | Terence | Terence The Comedies | -165 |
27 | Lucretius | On the Nature of Things | -70 |
28 | Cicero | The Republic and The Laws, On the Nature of the Gods | -51 |
29 | Virgil | Aeneid | -20 |
30 | Livy | The History of Rome: Books 1 – 10 | -9 |
31 | Ovid | Metamorphoses | 8 |
32 | Seneca | Letters from a Stoic, The Madness of Hercules | 65 |
33 | Josephus | The Jewish War | 90 |
34 | Quintilian | Institutes of Oratory | 95 |
35 | Nicomachus | Arithmetic | 100 |
36 | Plutarch | Lives | 100 |
37 | Ptolemy | Almagest | 100 |
38 | Epictetus | Discourses / Enchiridion | 108 |
39 | Tacitus | Annals | 110 |
40 | Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | 180 |
41 | – | The Mishnah | 200 |
42 | Plotinus | The Enneads | 270 |
43 | – | The Bhagavad-Gita in the Mahabharata | 300 |
44 | Eusebius | Ecclesiastical History, On the Life of Pamphilus | 330 |
45 | St. Athanasius of Alexandria | Life of St Anthony, On the Incarnation | 367 |
46 | Gregory of Nyssa | Life of Moses | 380 |
47 | St. Augustine | Confessions, The City of God | 400 |
48 | St. Jerome | Selected Letters | 400 |
49 | – | The Talmud | 400 |
50 | Prudentius | Volumes I & II | 405 |
51 | Boethius | The Consolation of Philosophy | 523 |
52 | – | The Koran | 632 |
53 | – | Beowulf | 1000 |
54 | – | Arabian Knights | 1000 |
55 | – | The Forest of Thieves and the Magic Garden | 1000 |
56 | Shōnagon | The Pillow Book | 1002 |
57 | Abolqasem Ferdowsi | Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings | 1010 |
58 | Murasaki Shikibu | The Tale of Genji | 1021 |
59 | Saint Anselm | Proslogium | 1078 |
60 | – | The Song of Roland | 1100 |
61 | Anna Komnene | The Alexiad | 1148 |
62 | – | The Mabinogion | 1150 |
63 | Hildegard of Bingen | Selected Writings | 1160 |
64 | Marie de France | The Lais of Marie de France | 1160 |
65 | Maimonides | The Guide for the Perplexed | 1190 |
66 | – | The Saga of the Volsungs | 1200 |
67 | – | Njal’s Saga | 1200 |
68 | – | Magna Carta | 1215 |
69 | – | The Sundiata | 1250 |
70 | Rumi | The Essential Rumi | 1260 |
71 | – | The Poetic Edda | 1270 |
72 | Dante Alighieri | Divine Comedy | 1320 |
73 | – | The Tale of the Heike | 1330 |
74 | Boccacio | The Decameron | 1350 |
75 | – | Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 1390 |
76 | – | Flowers of Assisi | 1390 |
77 | Chaucer | Canterbury Tales | 1392 |
78 | Thomas à Kempis | The Imitation of Christ | 1420 |
79 | Margery Kempe | The Book of Margery Kempe | 1430 |
80 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologica | 1485 |
81 | Erasmus | In Praise of Folly | 1511 |
82 | Thomas More | Utopia | 1516 |
83 | Martin Luther | The 95 Theses, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Bondage of the Will | 1520 |
84 | Niccolò Machiavelli | The Prince | 1531 |
85 | Rabelais | Gargantua and Pantagruel | 1532 |
86 | John Calvin | Institutes on the Christian Religion | 1536 |
87 | Copernicus | On the Revolution of the Spheres | 1543 |
88 | – | The Book of Common Prayer | 1549 |
89 | – | The Story of Hong Gildong | 1550 |
90 | Michael de Montaigne | Essays | 1580 |
91 | St. John of the Cross | The Dark Night of the Soul | 1580 |
92 | Edmund Spenser | The Fairie Queen | 1590 |
93 | Francis Bacon | Essays, Novum Organum | 1597 |
94 | William Shakespeare | Selected Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, and Sonnets* | 1600 |
95 | Johannes Kepler | Epitome IV | 1618 |
96 | John Donne | Poems | 1620 |
97 | William Harvey | Motion of the Heart and Blood | 1628 |
98 | George Herbert | The Temple | 1633 |
99 | Galileo Galilei | Two New Sciences | 1638 |
100 | René Descartes | Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind | 1641 |
101 | Miyamoto Musashi | The Book of Five Rings | 1643 |
102 | – | Westminster Confession of Faith | 1647 |
103 | Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan | 1651 |
104 | La Rochefoucauld | Maxims | 1665 |
105 | Molière | The Misanthrope | 1666 |
106 | John Milton | Paradise Lost, Aeropagiticia | 1667 |
107 | La Fontaine | Fables | 1668 |
108 | Benedict de Spinoza | Theological-Political Treatise | 1670 |
109 | Blaise Pascal | Pensées | 1670 |
110 | Julian of Norwich | Revelations of Divine Love | 1670 |
111 | John Baptiste Racine | Phaedra | 1677 |
112 | John Bunyan | Pilgrim’s Progress, The Holy War | 1678 |
113 | Aphra Behn | Oroonoko | 1680 |
114 | Isaac Newton | Principia Mathematica | 1685 |
115 | Christiaan Huygens | Treatise on Light | 1690 |
116 | John Locke | Second Treatise on Government, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding | 1700 |
117 | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | Monadology | 1714 |
118 | Daniel Defoe | Robinson Crusoe | 1719 |
119 | Alexander Pope | Major Works | 1720 |
120 | Jonathan Swift | Gulliver’s Travels | 1726 |
121 | David Hume | Treatise on Human Nature | 1740 |
122 | Montesquieu | The Spirit of Laws | 1755 |
123 | Voltaire | Candide | 1759 |
124 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | On the Origin of Inequality, Political Economy, The Social Contract, Confessions | 1762 |
125 | Adam Smith | The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments | 1776 |
126 | Edward Gibbon | The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire | 1776 |
127 | Founding Fathers | Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution | 1776 |
128 | Immanuel Kant | Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals | 1785 |
129 | Hamilton, Jay, Madison | The Federalist Papers | 1788 |
130 | William Blake | Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience | 1789 |
131 | Antoine Lavoisier | Elements of Chemistry | 1790 |
132 | Olaudah Equiano | The Interesting Narrative | 1790 |
133 | Boswell | Life of Johnson | 1791 |
134 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | The Ancient Mariner | 1798 |
135 | William Wordsworth | The Two Part Prelude | 1799 |
136 | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Logic | 1807 |
137 | Jane Austen | Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility | 1813 |
138 | David Ricardo | On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation | 1817 |
139 | Mary Shelley | Frankenstein | 1818 |
140 | John Keats | The Great Odes | 1819 |
141 | Sir Walter Scott | Ivanhoe | 1819 |
142 | De Tocqueville | Democracy in America | 1835 |
143 | Lobachevsky | Theory of Parallels | 1840 |
144 | Søren Kierkegaard | Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Sickness Unto Death | 1843 |
145 | Alexandre Dumas | The Count of Monte Cristo | 1844 |
146 | Karl Marx | The Communist Manifesto, Capital | 1844 |
147 | Ralph Waldo Emerson | Essays | 1844 |
148 | Edgar Allen Poe | Stories | 1845 |
149 | Charlotte Brontë | Jane Eyre | 1847 |
150 | Emily Brontë | Wuthering Heights | 1847 |
151 | Frederic Bastiat | Economic Sophisms | 1847 |
152 | Nathaniel Hawthorne | The Scarlet Letter | 1850 |
153 | Arthur Schopenhauer | Essays and Aphorisms | 1851 |
154 | Herman Melville | Moby Dick, Benito Cereno | 1851 |
155 | Harriet Beecher Stowe | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | 1852 |
156 | Gustave Flaubert | Madame Bovary | 1856 |
157 | Charles Darwin | Origin of Species | 1859 |
158 | Charles Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield | 1859 |
159 | Elizabeth Stuart Phelps | The Gates Ajar | 1868 |
160 | Emily Dickinson | Complete Poems | 1870 |
161 | George Eliot | Middlemarch | 1871 |
162 | John Stuart Mill | Autobiography, On Liberty | 1873 |
163 | Leo Tolstoy | Anna Karenina | 1877 |
164 | Alfred Tennyson | Complete Poems | 1880 |
165 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground | 1880 |
166 | Frederick Douglass | The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass | 1881 |
167 | Henry James | The Portrait of a Lady | 1881 |
168 | Mark Twain | Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn | 1884 |
169 | Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche | Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science | 1886 |
170 | Ludwig Wittgenstein | Philosophical Investigations | 1887 |
171 | Thomas Hardy | Tess of the D’Urbervilles | 1891 |
172 | William James | Briefer Course | 1892 |
173 | Stephen Crane | The Red Badge of Courage | 1895 |
174 | Bram Stoker | Dracula | 1897 |
175 | Joseph Conrad | Heart of Darkness | 1899 |
176 | Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Civilization and its Discontents | 1899 |
177 | G.K. Chesterton | The Everyman Chesterton, The Thing Essay | 1900 |
178 | Richard Dedekind | Essays on the Theory of Numbers | 1901 |
179 | Howard Pyle | King Arthur and His Knights | 1903 |
180 | W. E. B. Du Bois | The Souls of Black Folk | 1903 |
181 | Marcel Proust | In Search of Lost Time | 1909 |
182 | Booker T. Washington | Selected Writings | 1910 |
183 | Robert A. Millikan | The Electron | 1917 |
184 | James Joyce | Ulysses | 1920 |
185 | William Butler Yeats | Poems | 1920 |
186 | Sigrid Undset | The Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy | 1920 |
187 | Franz Kafka | The Trial | 1925 |
188 | Virginia Woolf | Mrs. Dalloway | 1925 |
189 | Albert Einstein | Special & General Relativity | 1926 |
190 | William Faulkner | The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absolom | 1929 |
191 | Werner Heisenberg | The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory | 1930 |
192 | Thomas Mann | Joseph and his Brothers | 1933 |
193 | John Maynard Keynes | The General Theory | 1936 |
194 | Zora Neale Hurston | Their Eyes Were Watching God | 1937 |
195 | C. S. Lewis | The Space Triology | 1938 |
196 | Daphne Du Maurier | Rebecca | 1938 |
197 | T.S. Elliot | The Wasteland, Four Quartets | 1941 |
198 | Friedrich Hayek | The Road to Serfdom | 1944 |
199 | George Orwell | 1984 | 1949 |
200 | Simone de Beauvoir | The Second Sex | 1949 |
201 | Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Letters and Papers from Prison | 1951 |
202 | John Steinbeck | East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath | 1952 |
203 | Martin Heidegger | The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays | 1956 |
204 | Chinua Achebe | Things Fall Apart | 1958 |
205 | Iris Murdoch | The Bell | 1958 |
206 | Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird | 1960 |
207 | Walker Percy | The Moviegoer, Lancelot | 1961 |
208 | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Harvard Address | 1962 |
209 | Thomas S. Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | 1962 |
210 | Mikhail Bulgakov | The Master and Margarita | 1966 |
211 | John Kenneth Galbraith | The New Industrial State | 1967 |
212 | Flannery O’Connor | Selected Stories, Revelation | 1971 |
213 | John Rawls | A Theory of Justice | 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
- C.S. Lewis List
- Ryan Holiday Books to Base Your Life On
- Jordan B. Peterson Great Books