Great Books
List 2004-2005
Great Books
List 2004-2005
"Read the best
books first, or you may not
have a
chance to read them at all" -- Thoreau
| Biblical Authors | (c.900 b.c.– c.100 a.d.) | The Bible |
| Homer | (8th century b.c.) |
The Iliad (Lattimore trans., U. of Chicago) |
| Homer | (8th century b.c.) |
The Odyssey (Fitzgerald trans., Vintage) |
| Lao Tzu | (6th century b.c.) |
Tao Te Ching |
| Aeschylus | (c.525-456 b.c.) |
Greek Tragedies (3 vols, U. of Chicago ed.) |
| Sophocles | (c.496-406 b.c.) |
(see Aeschulus) |
| Euripides | (c.485-406 b.c.) |
(see Aeschulus) |
| Thucydides | (c.460-c.400) |
The Peloponnesian War |
| Plato | (c.429-347 b.c.) |
The Republic (Larson trans., Harlan Davidson) |
| Aristotle | (384-322 b.c.) |
Nicomachean Ethics |
| Virgil | (70-19 b.c.) |
The Aeneid (Mandelbaum trans., Bantam) |
| Ovid | (43 b.c.-17 a.d.) |
Metamorphoses (Mandelbaum tr., Harcourt Brace) |
| Augustine | (354-430) |
Confessions |
| (anonymous) | (13th cent.) |
Njal’s Saga |
| Jelaluddin Rumi | (1207- 1273) |
The Essential Rumi |
| Dante | (1265-1321) |
The Divine Comedy (3 vols., Bantam) |
| Giovanni Boccaccio | (1313-1375) |
The Decameron |
| Geoffrey Chaucer | (c.1343-1400) |
The Canterbury Tales (Wash. Square Press ed.) |
| Niccolò Machiavelli | (1469-1527) |
The Prince |
| Thomas More | (1478-1535) |
Utopia |
| François Rabelais | (c.1495-1553) |
Gargantua and Pantagruel |
| Michel de Montaigne | (1533-1592) |
Essays |
| Miguel de Cervantes | (1547-1616) |
Don Quixote |
| William Shakespeare | (1564-1616) |
The Riverside Shakespeare |
| René Descartes | (1596-1650) |
Meditations on First Philosophy |
| John Milton | (1608-1674) |
Paradise Lost |
| Jonathan Swift | (1667-1745) |
Gulliver’s Travels |
| Voltaire | (1694-1778) |
Candide |
| Henry Fielding | (1707-1754) |
Tom Jones |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | (1712-1778) |
The Social Contract |
| Laurence Sterne | (1713-1768) |
Tristram Shandy |
| Johann von Goethe | (1749-1832) |
Faust (Part I) (Oxford World's Classic) |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | (1759-1797) |
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman |
| Stendhal | (1783-1842) |
The Red and the Black |
| Mary Shelley | (1797-1851) |
Frankenstein |
| John Stuart Mill | (1806-1873) |
On Liberty |
| Charles Dickens | (1812-1870) |
David Copperfield |
| Charles Dickens | (1812-1870) |
Bleak House |
| Charlotte Brontë | (1816-1855) |
Jane Eyre |
| Henry David Thoreau | (1817-1862) |
Walden |
| Emily Brontë | (1818-1848) |
Wuthering Heights |
| Ivan Turgenev | (1818-1883) |
Fathers and Sons |
| Karl Marx | (1818-1883) |
The Communist Manifesto |
| Friedrich Engels | (1820-1895) |
(see Marx) |
| George Eliot | (1819-1880) |
Middlemarch |
| Herman Melville | (1819-1891) |
Moby Dick |
| Walt Whitman | (1819-1892) |
Leaves of Grass |
| Gustave Flaubert | (1821-1880) |
Madame Bovary |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | (1821-1881) |
Crime and Punishment |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | (1821-1881) |
The Brothers Karamazov (Norton ed.) |
| Henrik Ibsen | (1828-1906) |
Four Major Plays (Vol. 1, Signet) |
| Leo Tolstoy | (1828-1910) |
War and Peace |
| Leo Tolstoy | (1828-1910) |
Anna Karenina (Norton ed.) |
| Mark Twain | (1835-1910) |
Huckleberry Finn |
| Thomas Hardy | (1840-1928) |
Tess of the D’Urbervilles |
| Henry James | (1843-1916) |
The Portrait of a Lady |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | (1844-1900) |
Thus Spoke Zarathustra |
| Sigmund Freud | (1856-1939) |
Civilization and Its Discontents |
| Joseph Conrad | (1857-1924) |
Lord Jim |
| Knut Hamsun | (1859-1952) |
Hunger |
| Anton Chekhov | (1860-1904) |
Plays |
| André Gide | (1869-1951) |
The Immoralist |
| Marcel Proust | (1871-1922) |
Swann’s Way |
| Rainer Maria Rilke | (1875-1926) |
Letters to a Young Poet |
| Thomas Mann | (1875-1955) |
Death in Venice |
| Thomas Mann | (1875-1955) |
The Magic Mountain |
| E.M. Forster | (1879-1970) |
A Passage to India |
| James Joyce | (1882-1941) |
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
| James Joyce | (1882-1941) |
Ulysses |
| Virginia Woolf | (1882-1941) |
To the Lighthouse |
| Franz Kafka | (1883-1924) |
The Metamorphosis (Bantam Classics ed.) |
| Isak Dinesen | (1885-1962) |
Seven Gothic Tales |
| D.H. Lawrence | (1885-1930) |
Women in Love |
| Mikhail Bulgakov | (1891-1940) |
The Master and Margarita |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald | (1896-1940) |
The Great Gatsby |
| William Faulkner | (1897-1962) |
The Sound and the Fury |
| Ernest Hemingway | (1899-1961) |
For Whom the Bell Tolls |
| Vladimir Nabokov | (1899-1977) |
Lolita |
| Jorge Luis Borges | (1899-1986) |
Labyrinths |
| Samuel Beckett | (1906-1989) |
Endgame |
| Albert Camus | (1913-1960) |
The Plague |
| Robertson Davies | (1913-1995) |
What’s Bred in the Bone |
| Ralph Ellison | (1914-1994) |
Invisible Man |
| Roland Barthes |
(1915-1980 |
S/Z |
| Iris Murdoch | (1919-1999) |
The Sea, the Sea |
| Italo Calvino | (1923-1985) |
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler |
| Nadine Gordimer | (1923- ) |
Jump (Short Stories) |
| Flannery O’Connor | (1925-1964) |
The Complete Stories |
| John Fowles | (1926- ) |
The French Lieutenant’s Woman |
| Gabriel García Márquez | (1928- ) |
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
| Milan Kundera | (1929- ) |
The Unbearable Lightness of Being |
| Chinua Achebe | (1930- ) |
Anthills of the Savannah |
| Toni Morrison | (1931- ) |
The Bluest Eye |
| Tom Stoppard | (1937- ) |
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead |
| Salman Rushdie | (1947- ) |
Midnight’s Children |
| Louise Erdrich | (1954- ) |
Love Medicine |
| Kazuo Ishiguro | (1954- ) |
The Remains of the Day |
| Jeffery Paine, ed. | (1944- ) |
The Poetry of Our World (100+ World Poets) |
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the importance of Great Books in university education. |