A friend of mine inquired about a reading list. I compiled this about three years ago, and I am sure one can improve the list; nonetheless, for anyone interested, here it is:
Eclectic
and Interdisciplinary Reading
List
Antiquity
The Holy
Bible
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Beowulf
The
Heart of Hebrew History, Hester
The
Sayings of Confucius
Bhagva
Gita
The
Art of War, Sun Tzu
The
Koran
The
Arabs in History, Barnard Lewis
The
Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, Lewis
Greco-Roman
The
Aeneid, Virgil
The
Iliad, Homer
The
Odyssey, Homer
Oedipus
Rex, Sophocles
Nichomachean
Ethics, Aristotle
Physics,
Aristotle
Politics,
Aristotle
Poetics,
Aristotle
Aristotle
for Everybody, Adler
The
Republic, Plato
The
Symposium, Plato
Deruram
Natura (“On the Nature of Things”), Lucretius
Middle Ages
The
Cloud of Unknowing
The
Consolation of Philosophy
The
Imitation of Christ, Thomas a’Kempis
King
Arthur, Malory
The Song of Roland
Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot
Renaissance
Shakespeare’s
plays and sonnets (read in historical context)
How to Achieve True Greatness,
Castiglione
The
Divine Comedy, Dante
Don
Quixote, Cervantes
Utopia,
More
The
Prince, Machiavelli
Dr. Faustus, Marlowe
Reformation
The
Praise of Folly, Erasmus
Paradise Lost, John Milton
The
Bondage of the Will, Luther
Pilgrim’s
Progress, Bunyan
Robinson
Crusoe, Defoe
“A
Divine and Supernatural Light,” Edwards
“Freedom
of the Will,” Edwards
“Of
Original Sin,” Edwards
“A
Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,” Edwards
“Charity
and its Fruits,” Edwards
Enlightenment
Candide,
Voltaire
Theodicy,
Leibniz
Of
Miracles, David Hume
An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume
Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion, Hume
A
Treatise of Human Nature, Hume
An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke
Two
Treatises of Government, Locke
Emile,
Rousseau
The
Social Contract, Rousseau
De
l'esprit des lois ((On) The Spirit of the Laws), Montesquieu
La
défense de «L'Esprit des lois» (In Defence of "The Spirit of the
Laws"), Montesquieu
A
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant
“A
Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan,” Kant
“What is
Enlightenment,” Kant
Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon
The
Age of Reason, Paine
The
Declaration of Independence, Jefferson
“Letter
to the Danbury Baptists,” Jefferson
Virginia
Statute of Religious Freedom, Jefferson
The United States
Constitution
“The
Bloody Tenet,” Williams
The
Wealth of Nations, Smith
Democracy
in America, de Tocqueville
“Theodicy,”
Leibniz
“Essay
on Man,” Pope
Romanticism
“Nature,”
Emerson
Walden,
Thoreau
“Civil
Disobedience,” Thoreau
Any work
by Byron, Shelly, Keats (especially) or Wordsworth
Victorianism
“Stanzas
from the Grand Chartreuse,” Arnold
“Dover Beach,”
Arnold
“Hebraism
and Hellenism,” Arnold
“Sweetness
and Light,” Arnold
“The
Idea of a University,” Newman
“Liberty,” Mill
“Utilitarianism,”
Mill
Hard
Times, Dickens
A
Tale of Two Cities, Dickens
The
Idylls of the King, Tennyson
Poetry
of Browning, Dickinson, et. al.
Essays
by Carlisle, Arnold,
Ruskin, Newman, et. al.
Metropolitan
Tabernacle Pulpit, C. H. Spurgeon
The Picture of Dorian Grey, Wilde
Literature, 18th century to present
The
Last of the Mohicans, Cooper
The
Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
Moby
Dick, Melville
Huckleberry
Finn, Twain
The Red Badge of Courage, Crane
All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
Heart
of Darkness, Conrad
Dr.
Faustus, Mann
Farewell
to Arms, Hemingway
The
Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man,
Joyce
Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot
The Wasteland, Eliot
“Metamorphosis,”
Kafka
Thus
Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche
Beyond
Good and Evil, Nietzsche
On
the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Darwin (Norton Edition)
Autobiography,
Darwin
Voyage
of the Beagle, Darwin
Ideas
and Opinions, Einstein
The
World as I See it, Einstein
Out
of My Life and Thought, Schweitzer
The
Fall, Camus
The
Plague, Camus
The
Stranger, Camus
Death
of a Salesman, Miller
The
Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder
A
Brief History of Time, Hawking
The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn
The
Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis
The
Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis
The
Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
The
Closing of the American Mind, Bloom
Physics
and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Physics, Heisenberg
Philosophical
Problems of Quantum Physics, Heisenberg
Night,
Elie Wiesel
For a more detailed list of “great books,” see
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/gbww.html
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