Since I mentioned this list in an earlier post, I figured I might as well share the list so you, too, can realize that you’ve been reading the wrong books! Here’s what I’m working on reading (taken from Arm the Children by Arthur Henry King)
Reading List for a Lifetime:
The Standard Works
Homer, The Iliad (translator Richmond A. Lattimore), The Odyssey (translator Emile V. Rieu)
The Bhagavad-Gita (The Song of God) (translator Christopher Isherwood)
Aeschylus, Aeschylus I — Oresteia (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle (translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald)
Plato, Phaedo, The Republic
Euripides, Euripides One (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
Herodotus, The Persian Wars (translator George Rawlinson)
Virgil, The Aeneid (translator John Dryden or Robert Fitzgerald)
Livy, The Early History of Rome
Josephus, The Jewish War
Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans and Lives of the Noble Romans (editor Edmund Fuller)
Eusebius, The Essential Eusebius
Augustine, The City of God
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Dante, The Divine Comedy (translators John D. Sinclair or Dorothy L. Sayers)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (translator Nevill Coghill)
Niccole Machiavelli, The Prince
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (translator Walter Starkie)
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (translator Wollaston)
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
George Fox, Journal (editor Rufus M. Jones)
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Jean Baptiste Racine, Athaliah, Phaedra
Moliere, Tartuffe, The Would-Be Gentleman, The Precious Damsels, The Misanthrope (translators Morris Bishop or Kenneth Muir)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Antoine Prevost, Manon Lescaut
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Part I), Clarissa
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (translator Thomas Nugent)
Voltaire, Candide
James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
John Woolman, Journal
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, II (translators Walter Kaufmann or Charles E. Passage), Wilhelm Meister
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (Books I and II)
John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, The Federalist Papers (editor A. Hacker)
John Keats, Letters (editor Robert Gittings)
Jane Austen, Persuasion, Emma
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death (translator Walter Lowrie)
Honore de Balzac, Eugenie Grandet
Karl Marx, Early Writings
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience
Parley P. Pratt, Autobiography
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations
George Eliot, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda
Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (translator Robert Baldick)
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (translator Rosemary Edmonds), Anna Karenina
Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (translator Walter, Kaufmann)
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt (translator Michael Meyer), Rosmersholm, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Henry James, The Ambassadors, What Maisie Knew
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters (translator David Magarshack)
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (translator James Strachey)
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game (Chapter 7)
George Santayana, The Last Puritan
Montaigne, Essays (translator John Florio)
When I first saw the list, I had read only two. I’m now up to twelve. Follow how I’m doing over on the right!