The books you're supposed to have read.
The originals. The author's own words, just neatly squashed down to read in an hour or so (more... )
READ THE GREAT UNREADABLES...
Moby-Dick ● Ulysses ● Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ● The Remembrance of Times Past ● Crime and Punishment ● Don Quixote
The Epic of Gilgamesh ● The Egyptian Book of The Dead ● The Hindu Bhagavad-Gita ● The Jewish Torah ● The Dhammapada of the Buddha ● The Gospels of Jesus Christ ● The Quran and The Confessions of Saint Augustine ● The Divine Comedy
THE ESSENTIAL HUNDRED BOOKS
There's a set of books you're just supposed to know about if you live in 'the West' and fancy calling yourself 'educated' Read the lot in a tenth of the time...
Start here ➜ 2100BC The Epic of Gilgamesh ● 1300BC The Book of The Dead ● 1000BC The Bhagavad-Gita ● 650BC The Torah ● 600BC The Odyssey Homer ● 500BC The Fables Aesop ● 450BC The Analects Confucius ● 450BC The Histories Herodotus of Halicarnassos ● 411BC Lysistrata Aristophanes of Athens ● 355BC The Republic Plato of Athens ● 320BC The Ethics Aristotle of Stagira ● 300BC Sovran Maxims Epicurus of Samos ● 48BC Commentaries on the Gallic Wars Julius Caesar ● 70 The Gospels of Jesus Christ Matthew, Mark, Luke, John ● 120 Elements of Geometry Euclid of Alexandria ● 140 On Old Age Marcus Tullius Cicero ● 180 Meditations Marcus Aurelius Antoninus ● 200 Béowulf ● 390 The Confessions Saint Augustine of Hippo ● 632 The Quran The Companions of the Prophet ● 1120 The Rubáiyát Omar Khayyám ● 1215 The Magna Carta King John et al ● 1298 The Travels of Marco Polo Rustichello of Pisa ● 1320 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri ● 1350 The Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio ● 1388 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer ● 1460 Le Morte D'Arthur Sir Thomas Mallory ● 1490 Notebooks Leonardo Da Vinci ● 1515 Utopia Sir Thomas More ● 1532 The Prince Niccolò Machiavelli ● 1543 The Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs Nicolaus Copernicus ● 1595 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare ● 1599 Hamlet William Shakespeare ● 1604 Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes ● 1605 The Advancement of Learning Sir Francis Bacon ● 1628 The Motion of the Heart and Blood William Harvey ● 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy René Descartes ● 1647 A Voyage to the Moon Cyrano de Bergerac ● 1660 Diary Samuel Pepys ● 1664 Micrographia Robert Hooke ● 1667 Paradise Lost John Milton ● 1678 The Pilgrims Progress John Bunyan ● 1687 Principles of Natural Philosophy Isaac Newton ● 1704 The Arabian Nights Antoine Galland ● 1710 Principles of Human Knowledge George Berkeley ● 1719 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe ● 1726 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift ● 1749 History of Tom Jones Henry Fielding ● 1751 Of Miracles David Hume ● 1757 Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne ● 1762 On The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau ● 1776 The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith ● 1784 Voyages of Discovery Capt. James Cook, et al ● 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals Immanuel Kant ● 1786 Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect Robert Burns ● 1787 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon ● 1788 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell ● 1789 Principles of Morals and Legislation Jeremy Bentham ● 1791 The Rights of Man Thomas Paine ● 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft ● 1794 Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake ● 1795 Philosophy in The Boudoir Le Marquis de Sade ● 1797 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen ● 1798 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge ● 1804 I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud William Wordsworth ● 1808 A New System of Chemical Philosophy John Dalton ● 1818 Frankenstein Mary Shelley ● 1819 Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott ● 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Thomas de Quincey ● 1832 On War Carl Von Clausewitz ● 1835 Father Goriot Honoré de Balzac ● 1835 Fairy Tales Hans Christian Andersen ● 1838 The Adventures of Oliver Twist Charles Dickens ● 1843 A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens ● 1846 The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx ● 1847 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë ● 1847 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë ● 1851 Moby-Dick Herman Melville ● 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe ● 1854 Walden Henry D. Thoreau ● 1857 Tom Brown's Schooldays Thomas Hughes ● 1859 On Liberty John Stuart Mill ● 1859 On The Origin of Species Charles Darwin ● 1862 Les Misérables Victor Hugo ● 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll ● 1866 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky ● 1873 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne ● 1877 Anna Karenina Count Leo Tolstoy ● 1886 Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzsche ● 1886 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson ● 1887 A Study in Scarlet Arthur Conan Doyle ● 1891 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy ● 1892 My Confession Count Leo Tolstoy ● 1895 If - Rudyard Kipling ● 1897 The Ballad of Reading Gaol Oscar Wilde ● 1899 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad ● 1908 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame ● 1910 Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud ● 1913 Antarctic Journals Robert Falcon Scott ● 1914 Le Répertoire de La Cuisine Louis Saulnier ● 1915 Metamorphosis Franz Kafka ● 1916 Albert Einstein's Relativity Albert Einstein ● 1918 Dulce et Decorum Est Wilfred Owen ● 1920 Ulysses James Joyce ● 1925 The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald ● 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover DH Lawrence ● 1931 The Remembrance of Times Past Marcel Proust
Aristotle - Politics ● Augustine - Confessions ● Ayer - Language, Truth and Logic ● Bacon - Advancement of Learning ● Bentham - Morals and Legislation ● Berkeley - Principles of Human Knowledge ● Boethius - Consolations of Philosophy ● Burke - Revolution in France ● Cicero - Friendship and Old Age ● Clausewitz - On War ● Comte - Positive Philosophy ● Confucius - The Analects ● Copernicus - The Revolutions ● Darwin - The Origin of Species ● Descartes - Discourse on Method ● Descartes - Meditations ● Einstein's Relativity ● Emerson - Nature ● Epicurus - Sovran Maxims ● Erasmus - Praise of Folly ● Euclid - Elements ● Freud - Psychoanalysis ● Galileo - Two World Systems ● Hegel - Philosophy of History ● Hegel - Philosophy of Religion ● Hitler - Mein Kampf ● Hobbes - Leviathan ● Hume - Human Understanding ● James - Varieties of Religious Experience ● Kant - Critiques of Reason ● Kant - Metaphysics of Morals ● Kierkegaard - Either Or ● Leibniz - Monadology ● Locke - Human Understanding ● Machiavelli - The Prince ● Marcus Aurelius - Meditations ● Marx - The Communist Manifesto ● Marx and Engels - German Ideology ● Mill - On Liberty ● Mill - System of Logic ● More - Utopia ● Newton - Principia ● Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil ● Paine - Rights of Man ● Pascal - Thoughts ● Plato - The Apology ● Plato - The Republic ● Plato - The Symposium ● Popper - Scientific Discovery ● Rand - Selfishness ● Rousseau - Confessions ● Rousseau - Social Contract ● Sade - Philosophy in the Boudoir ● Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism ● Schopenhauer - World as Will and Idea ● Smith - Wealth of Nations ● Spinoza - Ethics ● The Ancient Greeks ● The Bhagavad-Gita ● The Gospels of Jesus Christ ● Tocqueville - America ● Turing - Computing Machinery ● Wittgenstein - Tractatus ● Wollstonecraft - Rights of Woman
All the English Poetry you're supposed to know...
CHARLES DICKENS
A Christmas Carol ● A Tale of Two Cities ● Barnaby Rudge ● Bleak House ● David Copperfield ● Dombey and Son ● Great Expectations ● Hard Times ● Little Dorrit ● Martin Chuzzlewit ● Nicholas Nickleby ● Oliver Twist ● Our Mutual Friend ● The Old Curiosity Shop ● The Pickwick Papers
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Marguerite de Valois ● Three Musketeers ● The Count of Monte Cristo ● The Corsican Brothers ● Twenty Years After ● The Black Tulip
JANE AUSTEN
Persuasion ● Pride and Prejudice ● Sense and Sensibility ● Northanger Abbey ● Mansfield Park ● Emma
CHARLES DARWIN
The Voyage of the Beagle ● The Origin of Species
THE BRONTËS
Jane Eyre ● Wuthering Heights ● Shirley ● Villette
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede ● Felix Holt, the Radical ● Romola ● Silas Marner ● The Mill on the Floss
GEORGE BORROW
Lavengro ● The Bible in Spain ● The Romany Rye ● Wild Wales
30-MINUTE PLAYS
Dr Faustus ● Hamlet ● Lysistrata ● Romeo and Juliet
DANEL DEFOE
Journal of the Plague Year ● Robinson Crusoe ● Captain Singleton
Mrs. GASKELL
Cranford ● Mary Barton
St. AUGUSTINE
The Confessions ● City of God
KARL MARX
Das Capital ● The Communist Manifesto ● The German Ideology
Sir WALTER SCOTT
Ivanhoe ● Guy Mannering ● The Antiquary ● Old Mortality ● Rob Roy ● The Heart of Midlothian ● Kenilworth ● Peveril of the Peak ● Quentin Durward ● The Talisman
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Coningsby ● Sybil ● Tancred
THE ANCIENT ROMANS
Horace ● Martial's Odes ● Caesar's Commentaries ● Cicero on Old Age ● Pliny the Younger
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Scarlet Letter ● Our Old Home ● The House of the Seven Gables
HG WELLS
The Time Machine ● War of the Worlds
VICTOR HUGO
Deeds and Words ● Les Miserables ● The Hunchback of Notre Dame ● The Man Who Laughs ● The Toilers of the Sea
CHARLES KINGSLEY
Hereward the Wake ● Water-Babies ● Westward Ho!
CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN
Melmoth the Wanderer
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
Eugene Aram ● The Last Days of Pompeii ● The Last of the Barons
GEORGE SAND
Consuelo ● Mauprat
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Clarissa Harlowe ● Pamela ● Sir Charles Grandison
RABELAIS
Gargantua and Pantagruel
EMILE ZOLA
L'Assommoir
HORACE WALPOLE
The Castle of Otranto
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Barchester Towers ● The Warden
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Newcomes ● The Virginians ● Vanity Fair
THOMAS HARDY
Tess of the d'Urbervilles ● The Return of the Native
MICHEL De MONTAIGNE
The Essays
JOHN CALVIN
The Institution of the Christian Religion
MARK TWAIN
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
ADOLPH HITLER
Mein Kampf
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Jekyll and Mr Hyde ● Treasure Island
OSCAR WILDE
Lysistrata ● The Ballad of Reading Gaol ● The Picture of Dorian Gray
JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Vicar of Wakefield
Sir RICHARD BURTON
Travels to Mecca
BERNARD MANDEVILLE
The Fable of the Bees
ROBERT BURTON ("Democritus Junior")
The Anatomy of Melancholy
FA HAYECK
The Road to Serfdom
JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ● Diary of a Nobody ● Dr. Faustus ● Three Men in a Boat ● The Dhammapada of the Buddha ● London Labour and the London Poor ● Lorna Doone ● Oroonoko, the Royal Slave ● The Compleat Angler ● Plutarch's Lives ● Leaves of Grass ● The Travels of Sir John Mandeville ● Abelard and Heloise ● Sun Tzu's Art of War ● Parkinson's Law ● The Mabinogion ● The Fable of the Bees ● The Shahname of Ferdowsi ● Piers Plowman