“Gathering data and reading…are not the same occupation…When you gather data, you become informed. When you read, you develop wisdom.” ~Susan Wise Bauer
“To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about.” ~Mortimer J. Adler
In this digital age, we’re inundated with facts and parcels of data. The internet offers up the world’s collective knowledge within the palm of your hand…which is wonderful, except that opportunities for deeper understanding seem scant. Plus, the ability to store everything in our phones and Google anything means that few of us bother to remember things.
I love technology and I love that I can Google anything, so I don’t mean to say it’s a bad thing. We never know where technology will take us. Socrates himself was against the new technology of writing, and we all agree now that the written word is a beautiful thing.
“[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” ~Socrates
I just know that, for myself, I’d like a better balance between information and understanding.
So, my desire is to cultivate wisdom. My intention is to read through this literary list mindfully, scribbling in the book margins, taking notes in my literary commonplace books, and committing portions of certain texts to memory (take note, Socrates!).
How This Works
There is a book called The Well-Educated Mind (TWEM) by Susan Wise Bauer, which is a wonderful guide to “The Great Books” (both from the traditional literary canon written by dead, white, European men–or DWEMs–as well as Great Books written by women and people of color).
TWEM presents 6 genres–each with a respective reading list (fiction, autobiography, history, drama, poetry, and science)–and explains how to go about reading them in the classical method: the Trivium. The Trivium is composed of a “Grammar Stage,” a “Logic Stage,” and a “Rhetoric Stage.” The grammar stage is where one simply takes in information and memorizes facts, the logic stage is where one learns to analyze, criticize, and identify fallacious arguments, and the rhetoric stage is where one learns to take the grammar knowledge together with the logic understanding to formulate arguments and persuade.
Bauer recommends reading chronologically genre-by-genre, but I’m afraid I’d get bored staying within the lines of one genre for such a long time. So I’ve decided to read chronologically across all genres and, in this way, read through history.
“Writers build on the work of those who have gone before them, and chronological reading provides you with a continuous story…You’ll find yourself following a story that has to do with the development of civilization itself…When you read through the poetry list, for example…[t]he structure of the poetry will change as each poet moves beyond what former writers have done. But beyond these technical differences, the concerns of the poets shift and change as the world itself hurtles toward modernity…When you’ve finished this particular list, you’ve done more than read poetry. You have learned something about the spiritual evolution of the West.” ~Susan Wise Bauer
“If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.” ~C.S. Lewis, on reading old books vs. new
The Reading List
Without further ado, here is the full book list from The Well-Educated Mind, plus many more. I took the liberty of adding a plethora of additional titles, as well as a “philosophy” category. And, just to contradict everything I said above, I don’t actually plan to read through perfectly chronologically. The fact is that this list will take me years to get through, and I’m not willing to wait 15 years before I “allow” myself to read some of the later books down the line! I’m mostly going to read in order, but if I suddenly feel compelled to read a more modern classic, I will without hesitation.
Books I’ve read are crossed out, and those for whom I’ve written up my thoughts are linked to that particular essay. (Note: I don’t bother with plot summaries because there are already hundreds of sites out there that do just that. My essays assume general knowledge of the work in question.)
| Year (From BCE to CE) |
Title (*denotes books not listed in TWEM) |
Author | Genre | |
| 1 | -2000 | Gilgamesh | unknown | POETRY |
| 2 | -1500 | The Rg Veda (selections)* | anonymous | PHILOSOPHY |
| 3 | -800 | The Iliad | Homer | POETRY |
| 4 | -800 | The Odyssey | Homer | POETRY |
| 5 | -600 | Greek Lyricists | various | POETRY |
| 6 | -500 | Fragments* | Heraclitus | PHILOSOPHY |
| 7 | -500 | Tao Te Ching* | Lao Tzu | PHILOSOPHY |
| 8 | -483 | Dhammapada* | Siddhartha Gautama | PHILOSOPHY |
| 9 | -479 | The Analects* | Confucius | PHILOSOPHY |
| 10 | -458 | Agamemnon | Aeschylus | DRAMA |
| 11 | -450 | Oedipus the King | Sophocles | DRAMA |
| 12 | -441 | The Histories | Herodotus | HISTORY |
| 13 | -431 | Medea | Euripides | DRAMA |
| 14 | -430 | Zeno’s Paradoxes* | Zeno of Elea | PHILOSOPHY |
| 15 | -430 | On Airs, Waters, and Places | Hippocrates | SCIENCE |
| 16 | -400 | Bhagavad Gita* | Krishna Dvaipāyana Vyāsa | PHILOSOPHY |
| 18 | -400 | The Peloponnesian War | Thucydides | HISTORY |
| 19 | -400 | The Birds | Aristophanes | DRAMA |
| 20 | -375 | The Republic | Plato | HISTORY |
| 21 | -340 | Nicomachean Ethics* | Aristotle | PHILOSOPHY |
| 22 | -330 | Poetics | Aristotle | DRAMA |
| 23 | -330 | Physics | Aristotle | SCIENCE |
| 24 | -320 | The Art of Rhetoric* | Aristotle | PHILOSOPHY |
| 25 | -300 | Mencius* | Mencius | PHILOSOPHY |
| 26 | -280 | The Argonautica* | Apollonius Rhodius | POETRY |
| 27 | -270 | The Essential Epicurus* | Epicurus | PHILOSOPHY |
| 28 | -65 | Odes | Horace | POETRY |
| 29 | -60 | On the Nature of Things (De Rerun Natura) | Lucretius | SCIENCE |
| 30 | -43 | Treatises on Old Age and Friendship* | Marcus Tullius Cicero | PHILOSOPHY |
| 31 | -29 | The Aeneid* | Virgil | POETRY |
| 32 | 8 | The Metamorphoses* | Ovid | POETRY |
| 33 | 64 | Letters From A Stoic* | Seneca | PHILOSOPHY |
| 34 | 100 | Lives | Plutarch | HISTORY |
| 36 | 180 | Meditations* | Marcus Aurelius | PHILOSOPHY |
| 37 | 250 | Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nagarjuna* | Nagarjuna | PHILOSOPHY |
| 38 | 400 | The Confessions | Augustine | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 39 | 415 | Float Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria* |
Hypatia (modern Bio) |
AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 40 | 426 | The City of God | Augustine | HISTORY |
| 41 | 700 | Arabian Nights: A Selection* | various | NOVEL |
| 42 | 731 | The Ecclesiastical History of the English People | Bede | HISTORY |
| 43 | 868 | The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-Neng* | Hui-Neng | PHILOSOPHY |
| 44 | 1000 | Beowolf | unknown | POETRY |
| 45 | 1002 | The Pillow Book* | Sei Shōnagon | HISTORY |
| 46 | 1021 | The Tale of Genji* | Murasaki Shikibu | NOVEL |
| 47 | 1155 | Physica* | Hildegard Von Bingen | SCIENCE |
| 48 | 1253 | The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo* | Dogen Kigen | PHILOSOPHY |
| 49 | 1265 | The Divine Comedy | Dante | POETRY |
| 50 | 1273 | The Essential Rumi * | Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī | POETRY |
| 51 | 1300 | Everyman | unknown | DRAMA |
| 52 | 1343 | The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | POETRY |
| 53 | 1350 | Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | unknown | POETRY |
| 54 | 1372 | Water Margin* | Shi Naian | NOVEL |
| 55 | 1430 | The Book of Margery Kempe | Margery Kempe | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 56 | 1485 | Le Mort D’Arthur* | Sir Thomas Malory | NOVEL |
| 57 | 1513 | The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli | HISTORY |
| 58 | 1514 | Commentariolus | Nicolaus Copernicus | SCIENCE |
| 59 | 1516 | Utopia | Sir Thomas More | HISTORY |
| 60 | 1564 | Sonnets | Shakespeare | POETRY |
| 61 | 1572 | The Complete English Poems | John Donne | POETRY |
| 62 | 1580 | Essays | Michel De Montaigne | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 63 | 1588 | Doctor Faustus | Christopher Marlowe | DRAMA |
| 64 | 1588 | The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself | Teresa of Ávila | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 65 | 1592 | Richard III | Shakespeare | DRAMA |
| 66 | 1594 | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Shakespeare | DRAMA |
| 67 | 1600 | Hamlet | Shakespeare | DRAMA |
| 68 | 1605 | Don Quixote | Miguel De Cervantes | NOVEL |
| 69 | 1608 | Paradise Lost | John Milton | POETRY |
| 70 | 1611 | Pslams, King James Version | various | POETRY |
| 71 | 1620 | Novum Organum | Francis Bacon | SCIENCE |
| 72 | 1632 | Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems | Galileo Galilei | SCIENCE |
| 73 | 1641 | Meditations | René Descartes | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 74 | 1641 | Discourse on Method* | René Descartes | PHILOSOPHY |
| 75 | 1642 | The Book of Five Rings* | Miyamoto Musashi | PHILOSOPHY |
| 76 | 1651 | Leviathan* | Thomas Hobbes | PHILOSOPHY |
| 77 | 1665 | Micrographia | Robert Hooke | SCIENCE |
| 78 | 1666 | Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners | John Bunyan | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 79 | 1669 | Tartuffe | Molière | DRAMA |
| 80 | 1677 | Ethics* | Spinoza | PHILOSOPHY |
| 81 | 1679 | The Pilgrim’s Progress | John Bunyan | NOVEL |
| 82 | 1682 | The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration | Mary Rowlandson | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 83 | 1689 | Two Treatises of Government* | John Locke | PHILOSOPHY |
| 84 | 1690 | The True End of Civil Government | John Locke | HISTORY |
| 85 | 1694 | Candide* | Voltaire | NOVEL |
| 86 | 1694 | Basho’s Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho* | Matsuo Basho | POETRY |
| 87 | 1700 | The Way of the World | William Congreve | DRAMA |
| 88 | 1716 | Philosophical Essays* | Leibniz | PHILOSOPHY |
| 89 | 1726 | Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift | NOVEL |
| 90 | 1729 | “Rules” and “General Scholium” from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica |
Isaac Newton | SCIENCE |
| 91 | 1746 | Critique of Pure Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals* | Immanuel Kant | PHILOSOPHY |
| 92 | 1748 | A Treatise of Human Nature* | David Hume | PHILOSOPHY |
| 93 | 1754 | The History of England, Volume V | David Hume | HISTORY |
| 94 | 1757 | Songs of Innocence and of Experience | William Blake | POETRY |
| 95 | 1762 | The Social Contract | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | HISTORY |
| 96 | 1763 | Dream of the Red Chamber* | Cao Xueqin | NOVEL |
| 97 | 1770 | Selected Poetry of… | William Wordsworth | POETRY |
| 98 | 1772 | Selected Poems | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | POETRY |
| 99 | 1773 | She Stoops to Conquer | Oliver Goldsmith | DRAMA |
| 100 | 1773 | Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* | Phillis “Phyllis” Wheatley | POETRY |
| 101 | 1774 | The Sorrows of Young Werther | Goethe | NOVEL |
| 102 | 1776 | Common Sense | Thomas Paine | HISTORY |
| 103 | 1776 | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | HISTORY |
| 104 | 1776 | The Wealth of Nations* | Adam Smith | PHILOSOPHY |
| 105 | 1777 | The School for Scandal | Richard Brinsley Sheridan | DRAMA |
| 106 | 1781 | Confessions | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 107 | 1791 | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Benjamin Franklin | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 108 | 1792 | A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | Mary Wollstonecraft | HISTORY |
| 109 | 1795 | Complete Poems | John Keats | POETRY |
| 110 | 1807 | Selected Poems | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | POETRY |
| 111 | 1809 | Idylls and In Memoriam | Alfred, Lord Tennyson | POETRY |
| 112 | 1811 | Sense & Sensibility* | Jane Austen | NOVEL |
| 113 | 1812 | Preliminary Discourse | Georges Cuvier | SCIENCE |
| 114 | 1813 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | NOVEL |
| 115 | 1814 | Mansfield Park* | Jane Austen | NOVEL |
| 116 | 1815 | Emma* | Jane Austen | NOVEL |
| 118 | 1817 | Persuasion* | Jane Austen | NOVEL |
| 119 | 1819 | Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman | POETRY |
| 120 | 1830 | Final Harvest | Emily Dickinson | POETRY |
| 121 | 1830 | Poems and Prose | Christina Rossetti | POETRY |
| 122 | 1830 | The Red & The Black* | Stendhal | NOVEL |
| 123 | 1831 | Principles of Geology | Charles Lyell | SCIENCE |
| 124 | 1835 | Democracy in America | Alexis De Tocqueville | HISTORY |
| 125 | 1838 | Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens | NOVEL |
| 126 | 1843 | Introduction to the Philosophy of History* | Hegel | PHILOSOPHY |
| 127 | 1843 | Fear and Trembling* | Kierkegaard | PHILOSOPHY |
| 128 | 1844 | Hopkins: Poems and Prose | Gerard Manley Hopkins | POETRY |
| 129 | 1844 | Essays* | Ralph Waldo Emerson | PHILOSOPHY |
| 130 | 1844 | The Count of Monte Cristo* | Alexandre Dumas | NOVEL |
| 131 | 1847 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte | NOVEL |
| 132 | 1847 | Wuthering Heights* | Emily Brontë | NOVEL |
| 133 | 1848 | The Communist Manifesto | Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels | HISTORY |
| 134 | 1848 | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall* | Anne Brontë | NOVEL |
| 135 | 1849 | Selected Works* | Edgar Allan Poe | POETRY |
| 136 | 1850 | The Scarlett Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | NOVEL |
| 137 | 1851 | Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | NOVEL |
| 138 | 1851 | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe | NOVEL |
| 139 | 1851 | Essays & Aphorisms (esp. The World as Will and Idea)* | Arthur Schopenhauer | PHILOSOPHY |
| 140 | 1853 | 12 Years a Slave* | Solomon Northup | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 142 | 1857 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | NOVEL |
| 143 | 1859 | On Liberty* | John Stuart Mill | PHILOSOPHY |
| 144 | 1859 | On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin | SCIENCE |
| 145 | 1859 | A Tale of Two Cities* | Charles Dickens | NOVEL |
| 146 | 1860 | The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy | Jacob Burckhardt | HISTORY |
| 147 | 1861 | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself | Harriet Jacobs | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 148 | 1862 | Les Miserables* | Victor Hugo | NOVEL |
| 149 | 1865 | The Collected Poems | William Butler Yeats | POETRY |
| 150 | 1865 | Experiments in Plant Hybridization | Gregor Mendel | SCIENCE |
| 151 | 1866 | Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | NOVEL |
| 152 | 1867 | War and Peace* | Leo Tolstoy | NOVEL |
| 153 | 1868 | Little Women* | Louisa May Alcott | NOVEL |
| 154 | 1871 | Middlemarch* | George Eliot | NOVEL |
| 155 | 1872 | The Collected Poetry of… | Paul Laurence Dunbar | POETRY |
| 156 | 1874 | The Poetry of… | Robert Frost | POETRY |
| 157 | 1877 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | NOVEL |
| 158 | 1878 | Selected Poems | Carl Sandburg | POETRY |
| 159 | 1878 | The Return of the Native | Thomas Hardy | NOVEL |
| 160 | 1879 | A Doll’s House | Henrik Ibsen | DRAMA |
| 161 | 1881 | Life and Times of Frederick Douglass | Frederick Douglass | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 162 | 1881 | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | NOVEL |
| 163 | 1882 | Cecilia Valdes* | Cirilo Villaverde | NOVEL |
| 164 | 1883 | Selected Poems | William Carlos Williams | POETRY |
| 165 | 1884 | Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | NOVEL |
| 166 | 1885 | Selected Poems of… | Ezra Pound | POETRY |
| 167 | 1886 | Thus Spoke Zarathustra* | Friedrich Nietzsche | PHILOSOPHY |
| 168 | 1887 | A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes)* | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | NOVEL |
| 169 | 1888 | The Waste Land and Other Poems | T.S. Eliot | POETRY |
| 170 | 1890 | The Picture of Dorian Gray* | Oscar Wilde | NOVEL |
| 171 | 1891 | Vercos Sencillos* | Jose Marti | POETRY |
| 172 | 1892 | Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases* | Ida B. Wells-Barnett | HISTORY |
| 173 | 1893 | Woman, Church, and State* | Matilda Joslyn Gage | PHILOSOPHY |
| 174 | 1895 | The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | NOVEL |
| 175 | 1895 | The Jungle* | Upton Sinclair | NOVEL |
| 176 | 1899 | The Importance of Being Earnest | Oscar Wilde | DRAMA |
| 177 | 1901 | Up From Slavery | Booker T. Washington | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 178 | 1902 | Selected Poems of… | Langston Hughes | POETRY |
| 179 | 1902 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | NOVEL |
| 180 | 1903 | The Souls of Black Folk | W.E.B. Du Bois | HISTORY |
| 181 | 1904 | The Cherry Orchard | Anton Chekhov | DRAMA |
| 182 | 1904 | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism | Max Weber | HISTORY |
| 183 | 1904 | Radioactive Substances* | Marie Curie | SCIENCE |
| 184 | 1905 | The House of Mirth | Edith Wharton | NOVEL |
| 185 | 1905 | Studies in Spermatogenesis* | Nettie M. Stevens | SCIENCE |
| 186 | 1907 | Selected Poems | W.H. Auden | POETRY |
| 187 | 1908 | Ecce Homo | Friedrich Nietzsche | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 188 | 1915 | The Origin of Continents and Oceans | Alfred Wegener | SCIENCE |
| 189 | 1916 | The General Theory of Relativity | Albet Einstein | SCIENCE |
| 190 | 1920 | The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond* | Alain Locke | PHILOSOPHY |
| 191 | 1921 | Queen Victoria | Lytton Strachey | HISTORY |
| 192 | 1922 | Collected Poems | Philip Larken | POETRY |
| 193 | 1922 | The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory | Max Planck | SCIENCE |
| 194 | 1922 | The Enchanted April* | Elizabeth Von Arnim | NOVEL |
| 195 | 1922 | Ulysses* | James Joyce | NOVEL |
| 196 | 1924 | Saint Joan | George Bernard Shaw | DRAMA |
| 197 | 1924 | A Passage to India* | E. M. Forster | NOVEL |
| 198 | 1924 | Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair* | Pablo Neruda | POETRY |
| 199 | 1925 | Mein Kampf | Adolf Hitler | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 200 | 1925 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | NOVEL |
| 201 | 1925 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | NOVEL |
| 202 | 1925 | The Trial | Franz Kafka | NOVEL |
| 203 | 1926 | Howl and Other Poems | Allen Ginsberg | POETRY |
| 204 | 1927 | Being and Time* | Heidegger | PHILOSOPHY |
| 205 | 1928 | Orlando* | Virginia Woolf | NOVEL |
| 206 | 1929 | Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose | Adrienne Rich | POETRY |
| 207 | 1929 | An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth | Mohandas Gandhi | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 208 | 1929 | The Sound and the Fury* | William Faulkner | NOVEL |
| 209 | 1932 | Plath: Poems | Sylvia Plath | POETRY |
| 210 | 1933 | The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas | Gertrude Stein | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 211 | 1934 | Mark Strand: Selected Poems | Mark Strand | POETRY |
| 212 | 1935 | Murder in the Cathedral | T.S. Eliot | DRAMA |
| 213 | 1935 | Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver | Mary Oliver | POETRY |
| 214 | 1937 | The Road to Wigan Pier | George Orwell | HISTORY |
| 215 | 1937 | Their Eyes Were Watching God* | Zora Neale Hurston | NOVEL |
| 216 | 1937 | Of Mice and Men* | John Steinbeck | NOVEL |
| 217 | 1938 | Our Town | Thornton Wilder | DRAMA |
| 218 | 1939 | Opened Ground: Selected Poems | Seamus Heaney | POETRY |
| 219 | 1939 | The New England Mind | Perry Miller | HISTORY |
| 220 | 1940 | The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems | Robert Pinsky | POETRY |
| 221 | 1940 | Long Day’s Journey Into Night | Eugene O’Neill | DRAMA |
| 222 | 1940 | Native Son | Richard Wright | NOVEL |
| 223 | 1941 | The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems | Robert Hass | POETRY |
| 224 | 1942 | The Stranger | Albert Camus | NOVEL |
| 225 | 1942 | Evolution: The Modern Synthesis | Julian Huxley | SCIENCE |
| 226 | 1942 | Systematics and The Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist* | Ernst W. Mayr | SCIENCE |
| 228 | 1944 | What Is Life? | Erwin Schrödinger | SCIENCE |
| 229 | 1945 | Animal Farm | George Orwell | NOVEL |
| 230 | 1945 | Our Inner Conflicts* | Karen Horney | SCIENCE |
| 231 | 1946 | Man’s Search for Meaning* | Viktor E. Frankl | HISTORY |
| 232 | 1946 | Autobiography of a Yogi* | Paramahansa Yogananda | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 233 | 1947 | Otherwise | Jane Kenyon | POETRY |
| 234 | 1947 | A Streetcar Named Desire | Tennessee Williams | DRAMA |
| 235 | 1947 | The Diary of a Young Girl* | Anne Frank | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 237 | 1948 | The Seven Storey Mountain | Thomas Merton | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 238 | 1949 | Death of a Salesan | Arthur Miller | DRAMA |
| 239 | 1949 | 1984 | George Orwell | NOVEL |
| 240 | 1949 | The Second Sex* | Simone de Beauvoir | PHILOSOPHY |
| 241 | 1951 | Fires on the Plain* | Shōhei Ōoka | NOVEL |
| 242 | 1952 | Selected Poems | Rita Dove | POETRY |
| 243 | 1952 | Waiting for Godot | Samuel Beckett | DRAMA |
| 244 | 1952 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | NOVEL |
| 245 | 1952 | The Old Man & The Sea* | Ernest Hemingway | NOVEL |
| 246 | 1952 | Thousand Cranes* | Yasunari Kawabata | NOVEL |
| 247 | 1953 | Philosophical Investigations* | Ludwig Wittgenstein | PHILOSOPHY |
| 248 | 1955 | The Great Crash of 1929 | John Kenneth Galbraith | HISTORY |
| 249 | 1955 | Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life | C.S. Lewis | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 250 | 1956 | Seize the Day | Saul Bellow | NOVEL |
| 251 | 1958 | Physics and Philosophy* | Heisenberg | PHILOSOPHY |
| 252 | 1958 | The Human Condition* | Hannah Arendt | PHILOSOPHY |
| 253 | 1959 | The Longest Day | Cornelius Ryan | HISTORY |
| 254 | 1960 | A Man for All Seasons | Robert Bolt | DRAMA |
| 255 | 1960 | To Kill a Mockingbird* | Harper Lee | NOVEL |
| 256 | 1961 | The Wretched of the Earth* | Frantz Fanon | PHILOSOPHY |
| 258 | 1962 | A Dark Night’s Passing* | Naoya Shiga | NOVEL |
| 259 | 1963 | The Feminine Mystique | Betty Friedan | HISTORY |
| 260 | 1965 | The Autobiography of Malcolm X | Malcolm X | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 261 | 1967 | Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead | Tom Stoppard | DRAMA |
| 262 | 1967 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | NOVEL |
| 263 | 1967 | The Naked Ape | Desmond Morris | SCIENCE |
| 264 | 1968 | The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA | James D. Watson | SCIENCE |
| 266 | 1969 | Slaughterhouse-Five* | Kurt Vonnegut | NOVEL |
| 268 | 1972 | If on A Winter’s Night a Traveler | Italo Calvino | NOVEL |
| 269 | 1973 | Journal of Solitude | May Sarton | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 270 | 1973 | The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 271 | 1974 | Equus | Peter Shaffer | DRAMA |
| 272 | 1974 | Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made | Eugene D. Genovese | HISTORY |
| 273 | 1975 | Animal Liberation* | Peter Singer | PHILOSOPHY |
| 274 | 1976 | The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins | SCIENCE |
| 275 | 1977 | Born Again | Charles W. Colson | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 276 | 1977 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | NOVEL |
| 277 | 1977 | The Fire and the Sun* | Iris Murdoch | PHILOSOPHY |
| 278 | 1977 | The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe | Steven Weinberg | SCIENCE |
| 279 | 1978 | A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century | Barbara Tuchman | HISTORY |
| 280 | 1978 | On Human Nature | E.O. Wilson | SCIENCE |
| 281 | 1979 | Gaia | James Lovelock | SCIENCE |
| 282 | 1979 | A Bend in the River* | V. S. Naipaul | NOVEL |
| 283 | 1979 | The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age* | Hans Jonas | PHILOSOPHY |
| 284 | 1981 | Women, Race, and Class* | Angela Davis | PHILOSOPHY |
| 285 | 1981 | Ain’t I a Woman* | Bell Hooks | PHILOSOPHY |
| 286 | 1981 | The Mismeasure of Man | Stephen Jay Gould | SCIENCE |
| 287 | 1981 | Symbiosis in Cell Evolution* | Lynn Margulis | SCIENCE |
| 288 | 1982 | Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez | Richard Rodriguez | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 289 | 1984 | Disclosing the Past* | Mary Leakey | SCIENCE |
| 290 | 1985 | White Noise | Don Delillo | NOVEL |
| 291 | 1987 | All the President’s Men | Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein | HISTORY |
| 292 | 1987 | Chaos: Making a New Science | James Gleick | SCIENCE |
| 293 | 1988 | Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era | James M. McPherson | HISTORY |
| 294 | 1988 | A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | SCIENCE |
| 295 | 1988 | Solitude: A Return to the Self* | Anthony Storr | SCIENCE |
| 296 | 1989 | The Road from Coorain | Jill Ker Conway | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 297 | 1990 | A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich | HISTORY |
| 298 | 1990 | Possession | A.S. Byatt | NOVEL |
| 299 | 1992 | The End of History and the Last Man | Francis Fukuyama | HISTORY |
| 300 | 1995 | All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs | Elie Wiesel | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 301 | 1996 | Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters* | Vera C. Rubin | SCIENCE |
| 302 | 1997 | T. rex and the Crater of Doom | Walter Alvarez | SCIENCE |
| 303 | 2002 | Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society* | David Sloan Wilson | SCIENCE |
| 304 | 2006 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | NOVEL |
| 305 | 2006 | Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development* | Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard | SCIENCE |
| 306 | 2007 | Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin* | John Hope Franklin | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 307 | 2007 | Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters* | Donald Prothero | SCIENCE |
| 308 | 2014 | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History* | Elizabeth Kolbert | SCIENCE |
| 309 | 2017 | A Crack in Creation* | Jennifer Doudna | SCIENCE |
Phew! That’s quite the list!
Between this and the SF&F sub-project list, it will take me ~20-30 years to read all of these books. In fact, my goal is to have read through my projects by 2050! That sounds like forever away, but it’s perfectly fine with me because the time will pass anyway. And let’s not forget: literature is to be relished, not rushed.
Bonus Reading List
I continue to learn about classic literature from various cultures, perspectives, and countries. While I am incredibly tempted to add these to the above list, I realize I cannot keep changing the goal post on myself. In order the remain realistic with my reading goals, I’ve decided the above list can no longer increase. Instead, I’ll maintain the below “bonus” list to capture new-to-me classics that I hear about and am interested in reading. In this way, I won’t forget them, and I can work them in over the years as I please.
| Year (From BCE to CE) |
Title (*denotes books not listed in TWEM) |
Author | Genre | |
| 1 | -400 | Tattva-Kaumudi/Samkhya* | Karika | PHILOSOPHY |
| 2 | -370 | The Essential Plato* | Plato | PHILOSOPHY |
| 3 | -300 | The Elements* | Euclid | SCIENCE |
| 4 | -250 | Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu* | Mo Tzu, Hsun Tzu, Han Fei Tzu | PHILOSOPHY |
| 5 | -212 | The Sand Reckoner* | Archimedes | SCIENCE |
| 6 | -100 | The First Emperor: Selections from the Historical Records* | Sima Qian | HISTORY |
| 7 | -100 | Early Buddhist Discourses (from the Pali Canon)* | various | PHILOSOPHY |
| 8 | -40 | collection* | Sulpicia | POETRY |
| 9 | 17 | The Early History of Rome* | Livy | HISTORY |
| 10 | 50 | The Lotus Sutra* | various | PHILOSOPHY |
| 11 | 100 | Vimalakirti Sutra* | various | PHILOSOPHY |
| 12 | 116 | The Annals of Imperial Rome* | Tacitus | HISTORY |
| 13 | 121 | The Twelve Caesars* | Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus | HISTORY |
| 14 | 265 | The Enneads* | Plotinus | PHILOSOPHY |
| 15 | 400 | The Origin of the Young God/Kumarasambhava* | Kalidasa | POETRY |
| 16 | 400 | The Loom of Time* | Kalidasa | POETRY |
| 17 | 400 | The Great Karika on the Mandukya Upanishad* | Gaudapada | PHILOSOPHY |
| 18 | 835 | The Meanings of Sound, Word, and Reality* | Kukai | PHILOSOPHY |
| 19 | 890 | The “Dhvanyaloka” of Anandavardhana with the “Locana” of Abhinavagupta* | Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta |
POETRY |
| 20 | 900 | The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch* | Hui-neng | PHILOSOPHY |
| 21 | 900 | Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life* | various | PHILOSOPHY |
| 22 | 1077 | Proslogium (and Gaunilon’s Reply and Anselm’s Response)* | Anselm | PHILOSOPHY |
| 23 | 1133 | The Letters of Abelard and Heloise* | Heloise and Abelard | PHILOSOPHY |
| 24 | 1190 | Guide of the Perplexed* | Maimonides | PHILOSOPHY |
| 25 | 1200 | Gita Govinda: Love Song of the Dark Lord* | Jayadeva | POETRY |
| 26 | 1240 | The Tale of the Heike* | anonymous | NOVEL |
| 27 | 1274 | Selected Writings* | Thomas Aquinas | PHILOSOPHY |
| 28 | 1332 | Essays in Idleness/Tsurezuregusa* | Yoshida Kenko | PHILOSOPHY |
| 29 | 1360 | Romance of the Three Kingdoms* | Luo Guanzhong | NOVEL |
| 30 | 1405 | The Book of the City of Ladies* | Christine de Pizan | PHILOSOPHY |
| 31 | 1519 | Notebooks* | Leonardo da Vinci | SCIENCE |
| 32 | 1580 | Journey to the West* | Wu Cheng’en | NOVEL |
| 33 | 1610 | The Plum in the Golden Vase* | Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng | NOVEL |
| 34 | 1669 | Pensées* | Pascal | PHILOSOPHY |
| 35 | 1689 | An Essay Concerning Human Understanding* | John Locke | PHILOSOPHY |
| 36 | 1694 | A Serious Proposal to the Ladies* | Mary Astell | PHILOSOPHY |
| 37 | 1705 | Insects of Surinam* | Maria Sibylla Merian | SCIENCE |
| 38 | 1787 | Don Giovanni* | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | DRAMA |
| 39 | 1794 | The Mysteries of Udolfo* | Ann Radcliffe | NOVEL |
| 40 | 1840 | The Theory of Parallels* | Nicholas Lobachevsky | SCIENCE |
| 42 | 1865 | Tristan and Isolde* | Richard Wagner | DRAMA |
| 43 | 1898 | Eighty Years and More* | Elizabeth Cady Stanton | BIOGRAPHY |
| 44 | 1900 | selections* | Sigmund Freud | SCIENCE |
| 45 | 1902 | The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sherlock Holmes)* | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | NOVEL |
| 46 | 1902 | Democracy and Social Ethics* | Jane Addams | PHILOSOPHY |
| 47 | 1903 | The Ambassadors* | Henry James | NOVEL |
| 48 | 1905 | I am a Cat* | Natsume Soseki | NOVEL |
| 49 | 1906 | Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony In Her Own Words* | Susan B Anthony, ed. Lynn Sherr | BIOGRAPHY |
| 50 | 1912 | Death in Venice* | Thomas Mann | NOVEL |
| 51 | 1912 | 1912 New York Lectures* | Carl Jung | SCIENCE |
| 52 | 1914 | Essential Muir: A Selection of John Muir’s Best Writings* | John Muir, ed. Fred D. White | SCIENCE |
| 53 | 1921 | American Indian Stories* | Zitkála-Šá | AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
| 54 | 1939 | The Iliad, or The Poem of Force* | Simone Weil | PHILOSOPHY |
| 55 | 1945 | The Catcher in the Rye* | J. D. Salinger | NOVEL |
| 56 | 1946 | Existentialism is a Humanism* | Jean Paul Sartre | PHILOSOPHY |
| 58 | 1960 | The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* | William L. Shirer | HISTORY |
| 59 | 1961 | Catch-22* | Joseph Heller | NOVEL |
| 60 | 1961 | Toward a Psychology of Being* | Abraham H. Maslow | SCIENCE |
| 61 | 1967 | Tres Tristes Tigres* | Guillermo Cabrera Infante | NOVEL |
| 62 | 1979 | Research Is a Passion With Me: The Autobiography of a Bird Lover* | Margaret Morse Nice | BIOGRAPHY |
| 63 | 1980 | A People’s History of the United States* | Howard Zinn | HISTORY |
| 64 | 1989 | The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love* | Oscar Hijuelos | NOVEL |
| 65 | 1997 | Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems* | Dulce María Loynaz, trans. James O’Connor |
POETRY |