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The Great Books Plus

The Great Books +

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.

View My Reading List
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.

Enheduana
Enheduana
Epic Of Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Writings from Ancient Egypt
Writings from Ancient Egypt
The Rig Veda
The Rig Veda
Enuma Elish
Enuma Elish
The Histories
The Histories
Theogony & Works and Days
Theogony & Works and Days
Stung With Love
Sappho: Stung with Love
The Iliad Emily Wilson
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Odyssey
The Homeric Hymns
The Homeric Hymns

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.

The Great Books Suggestions

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.