How to Read a Book
Reading list (1972 edition)
- 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 of Perga: Conic Sections
 - Cicero: Works
 - Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
 - Virgil: Works
 - Horace: Works
 - Livy: History of Rome
 - Ovid: Works
 - Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
 - Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
 - Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
 - Epictetus: Discourses; Encheiridion
 - Ptolemy: Almagest
 - Lucian: Works
 - 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
 - The Song of Roland
 - The Nibelungenlied
 - The Saga of Burnt Njál
 - St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
 - Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
 - Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
 - Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
 - Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
 - Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
 - 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 Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
 - Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
 - Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
 - Francis Bacon: Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
 - William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
 - Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
 - Johannes Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
 - William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
 - Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
 - René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
 - John Milton: Works
 - Molière: Comedies
 - Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
 - Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
 - Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
 - John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
 - Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
 - Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
 - Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
 - Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
 - Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
 - William Congreve: The Way of the World
 - George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
 - Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
 - Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
 - Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
 - Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
 - Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
 - David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract
 - Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
 - Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
 - Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
 - Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
 - James Boswell: Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
 - Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
 - Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers
 - Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
 - Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
 - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
 - William Wordsworth: Poems
 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
 - Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
 - Carl von Clausewitz: On War
 - Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
 - Lord Byron: Don Juan
 - Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
 - Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
 - Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
 - Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
 - Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
 - Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal
 - Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
 - Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
 - John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
 - Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
 - Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
 - Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
 - Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden
 - Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto
 - George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
 - Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
 - Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
 - Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
 - Henrik Ibsen: Plays
 - Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
 - Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
 - William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
 - Henry James: The American; 'The Ambassadors
 - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
 - Jules Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
 - Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; 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; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
 - Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
 - George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
 - Lenin: The State and Revolution
 - Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
 - Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; 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 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; 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; The Cancer Ward