Reading List From *How to Read a Book*
Ancient (Before AD 500)
Homer – Iliad; Odyssey.
The Old Testament.
Aeschylus – Tragedies.
Sophocles – Tragedies.
Herodotus – Histories.
Euripides – Tragedies.
Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War.
Hippocrates – Medical Writings.
Aristophanes – Comedies.
Plato – Dialogues.
Aristotle – Works.
Epicurus – “Letter to Herodotus;” “Letter to Menoecus.”
Euclid – Elements.
Archimedes – Works.
Apollonius – Conics.
Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices).
Lucretius – On the Nature of Things.
Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid).
Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry).
Livy – History of Rome.
Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses).
Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory.
Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia.
Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory).
Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic.
Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion.
Ptolemy – Almagest.
Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds; Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead).
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations.
Galen – On the Natural Faculties.
The New Testament.
Plotinus – The Enneads.
St. Augustine – “On the Teacher;” Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine.
Medieval (AD 500 – 1450)
The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied.
The Song of Roland.
The Saga of Burnt Njál.
Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed.
St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica.
Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); “On Monarchy;” Divine Comedy.
Giovanni Boccaccio – The Decameron.
Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales.
Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ.
Modern (After AD 1450)
Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks.
Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy.
Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies.
Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.
Thomas More – Utopia.
Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises.
François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel.
John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Michel de Montaigne – Essays.
William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies.
Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote.
Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene.
Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis.
William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays.
Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences.
Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi.
William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals.
Grotius – The Law of War and Peace.
Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philosophy.
René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul.
Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna).
John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes).
Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies).
Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises.
John Bunyan – The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Boyle – The Sceptical Chymist.
Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light.
Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics.
John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education.
Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah)).
Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology.
Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders.
Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal.
William Congreve – The Way of the World.
George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man.
Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws.
Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary.
Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones.
Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets.
David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile: or, On Education; The Social Contract; Confessions.
Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations.
William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace.
Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography.
James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry).
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence).
Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth.
Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population.
John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy.
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy Poems; Sonnets; The Prelude).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner); Biographia Literaria.
David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma.
Carl von Clausewitz – On War.
Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love.
François Guizot – History of Civilization in France.
Lord Byron – Don Juan.
Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism.
Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity.
Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels.
Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology.
Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy.
Honoré Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau).
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal.
Victor Hugo – Les Misérables.
Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter.
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America.
John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography.
Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography.
William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis).
Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times).
Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.
George Boole – The Laws of Thought.
Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto.
George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch.
Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov.
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories.
Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England.
Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development.
Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry.
Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll’s House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder).
Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; “What Is Art?;” Twenty-Three Tales.
Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers.
Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology.
Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; The Mysterious Stranger.
Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma.
Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers.
William Sumner – Folkways.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers.
William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism.
Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist.
Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers.
Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science.
Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces.
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; The Quest for Certainty; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas.
George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places.
Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution.
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past).
Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; 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 Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics.
James Joyce – “The Dead” in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses.
Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism.
Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle.
Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial.
Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward.
Contemporary Books
Excluded from the Second Edition
Ivan Pavlov – Conditioned Reflexes.
Thorstein Veblen – The Theory of the Leisure Class; The Higher Learning in America; The Place of Science in Modern Civilization; Vested Interests and the State of Industrial Arts; Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times.
Franz Boas – The Mind of Primitive Man; Anthropology and Modern Life.
Leon Trotsky – The History of the Russian Revolution.
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Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. (1st and 2nd Editions). [Note: Both lists have been collected and combined here].
