I am working on a self-directed reading project of the Great Books. I started the project in 2020. I don’t know when I will finish.
I was first inspired to do this decades ago when I stumbled on The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman. Fadiman (1904-1999) was a Columbia-educated book editor and radio and TV personality.
When I got ready to start the project for real, I developed a list of authors. I drew on Fadiman’s list, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s list in How to Read a Book, and Martin Seymour-Smith’s list in The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written.
I made some changes to make the list my own.
Out: Most scientists (Galen, Harvey, Huygens, Lavoisier, Claude Bernard, Max Planck…). Also out: Writers I had barely heard of (Auguste Comte, Jacques Maritain…). Also out: Philosophers I didn’t consider important enough (Jeremy Bentham, Henri Bergson, George Santayana…) Also out: Writers I’d already read a lot of. (Nabokov).
Added: More women (Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Hannah Arendt).
Added: An African-American (Ralph Ellison).
Added: 20th-century philosophers (Foucault, Derrida).
Added: Authors I just considered important, and/or wanted to read, that weren’t on any of those lists. The Decameron — that choice was surely influenced by the pandemic. (Adler had Boccaccio on an earlier list but took him off.) Pushkin, Baudelaire, Kipling, Thomas Mann, Jung, Ezra Pound (one of my favorites).
So here’s the list I ended up with. This is the order in which I’m reading them, chronological by date of birth.
- The I Ching
- Homer
- The Old Testament
- Lao Tsu
- The Avesta
- Confucius
- The Upanishads
- Aeschylus
- Sophocles
- Herodotus
- Euripides
- Thucydides
- Hippocrates
- Aristophanes
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Epicurus
- Euclid
- The Dhammapada
- Archimedes
- Apollonius of Perga
- Cicero
- Lucretius
- Virgil
- Horace
- Livy
- Ovid
- Philo of Alexandria
- Plutarch
- Tacitus
- Epictetus
- Nicomachus of Gerasa
- Ptolemy
- Lucian of Samosata
- Marcus Aurelius
- The New Testament
- Plotinus
- St. Augustine
- The Koran
- The Song of Roland
- Maimonides
- St. Thomas Aquinas
- The Nibelungenlied
- The Saga of Burnt Njal
- Dante
- The Kabbalah
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Desiderius Erasmus
- Niccolo Machiavelli
- Nicolaus Copernicus
- Thomas More
- Martin Luther
- Francois Rabelais
- John Calvin
- Michel de Montaigne
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Edmund Spenser
- Francis Bacon
- Galileo Galilei
- William Shakespeare
- John Donne
- Thomas Hobbes
- Rene Descartes
- John Milton
- Moliere
- Blaise Pascal
- John Bunyan
- John Locke
- Baruch de Spinoza
- Jean Baptiste Racine
- Isaac Newton
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Daniel Defoe
- Jonathan Swift
- George Berkeley
- Alexander Pope
- Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu
- Voltaire
- Henry Fielding
- Samuel Johnson
- David Hume
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Denis Diderot
- Laurence Sterne
- Adam Smith
- Immanuel Kant
- Edmund Burke
- Thomas Paine
- Edward Gibbon
- James Boswell
- The Federalist Papers
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- William Blake
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
- William Wordsworth
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Jane Austen
- Carl von Clausewitz
- Stendhal
- George Gordon, Lord Byron
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- Honore de Balzac
- Alexander Pushkin
- Victor Hugo
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- John Stuart Mill
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Charles Darwin
- Nikolai Gogol
- William Makepeace Thackeray
- Charles Dickens
- Soren Kierkegaard
- Henry David Thoreau
- Karl Marx
- Walt Whitman
- Herman Melville
- George Eliot
- Charles Baudelaire
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Gustave Flaubert
- Gregor Mendel
- Henrik Ibsen
- Leo Tolstoy
- Emily Dickinson
- Mark Twain
- Henry Adams
- William James
- Henry James
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
- Sigmund Freud
- George Bernard Shaw
- Joseph Conrad
- Anton Chekhov
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Edith Wharton
- William Butler Yeats
- Rudyard Kipling
- Vladimir Lenin
- Marcel Proust
- Bertrand Russell
- Thomas Mann
- Carl Jung
- Martin Buber
- E.M. Forster
- Albert Einstein
- Virginia Woolf
- James Joyce
- John Maynard Keynes
- Franz Kafka
- Ezra Pound
- T.S. Eliot
- Arnold J. Toynbee
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- William Faulkner
- Friedrich von Hayek
- Ernest Hemingway
- George Orwell
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Hannah Arendt
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Ralph Ellison
- Saul Bellow
- Roland Barthes
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Thomas Kuhn
- Michel Foucault
- Jacques Derrida
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