will take you to a page where you can download a digital study guide in Adobe
format.I got tired of wasting my time reading mediocre books. I decided I wanted to read books that would have a life-changing effect on me. But first I had to figure out which books would do that. So, I accumulated about thirteen lists of the greatest or most influential books ever written and counted which books appeared on the most lists, and then I ranked them. The names of the lists can be found at the bottom of this page.
The logic behind this method is that by using many lists I can reduce the bias of individual critics or lists, and come up with a more objective and comprehensive list. The lists are divided into two categories: Novels/Epics and Non-Fiction. The books are alphabetized by title within each section. Books in bold are titles I have read since I compiled this list in January of 2003. Any suggestions or feedback about this list would be most welcome at mrsenger@hotmail.com.
If you find this list interesting you might also like my compilation of great movies.
And if you have teenagers in your life, take a look at my Junior High Reading Lists.
Click on the titles to order them from Amazon.com; and for instant help with the
books below, clicking on the
will take you to a page where you can download a digital study guide in Adobe
format.
Novels/Epics:
12 Lists
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Iliad - Homer
Aeneid
- Virgil
11 Lists
Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais
10 Lists
Odyssey - Homer
Gulliver's Travels
- Jonathan Swift
9 Lists
War
and Peace
- Leo Tolstoy
Candide - Voltaire
8 Lists
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevski
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
7 Lists
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
Mahabharata - Vyasa
6 Lists
Emma - Jane Austen
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevski
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
The Ramayana - Valmiki
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Story of the Stone - Cao Xeugin
5 Lists
Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
4 Lists
Gilgamesh - Anonymous
The Thousand and One Nights - Anonymous
Père Goriot - Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet - Honoré de Balzac
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
The Plague - Albert Camus
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis
Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis
Carroll
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García-Márquez
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Ambassadors - Henry James
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Stories and Poems - Edgar Allen Poe
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
3 Lists
Njal's Saga (Saga of Burnt Njal) - Anonymous
The Song of Roland - Anonymous
The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P'ing Mei ) - Anonymous
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Golden Ass - Apuleius
Conference of Birds - Farid Ud-Din
Attar
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul
Bellow
Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow
The Decameron - Boccaccio
Dreamtigers - Jorge Luis Borges
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
David Copperfield - Charles
Dickens
Hard Times
- Charles Dickens
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Rameau's Nephew - Denis Diderot
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevski
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
A Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas
Hardy
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James
Joyce
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
Man's Fate - André Malraux
Billy Budd - Herman Melville
Kokoro - Soseki Natsume
Dr. Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Satyricon - Petronius
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
Nausea - Jean Paul Sartre
The First Circle - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
Non-Fiction
13 Lists
History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
12 Lists
Ethics - Aristotle
The Histories - Herodotus
Essays - Michael Eyquem de Montaigne
Republic - Plato
11 Lists
Poetics - Aristotle
Of the Nature of Things - Lucretius
10 Lists
Confessions - St. Augustine
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
Apology -
Plato
9 Lists
Discourse on Method - Rene Descartes
8 Lists
Poetics - Aristotle
Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
Pensees - Blaise Pascal
Phaedo - Plato
7 Lists
Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire - Edward Gibbon
Symposium -
Plato
Parallel Lives - Plutarch
6 Lists
The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Pragmatism - William James
Second Treatise on Government - John Locke
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Crito - Plato
Confessions - Jean Jacques Rousseau
The Pillow Book - Sei Shonagon
Ethics - Baruch Spinoza
5 Lists
The Analects - Confucius
In Praise of Folly - Desiderius Erasmus
Elements - Euclid
The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
Tao te Ching (Daodejing) - Lao-Tzu (Laozi)
The Book of Mencius - Mencius
Areopagitica - John Milton
Beyond Good and Evil -
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Meno -
Plato
Enneads - Plotinus
Records of the Grand Historian - Sima Qian
Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
Annals - Tacitus
Summa Theologica - St. Thomas Aquinas
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
4 Lists
The Education of Henry Adams - Henry Adams
Novum Organum - Sir Francis Bacon
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Matsuo Basho
The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir
Principles of Human Knowledge - George Berkeley
Institutes of the Christian Religion - John Calvin
On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres - Copernicus
Meditations on the First Philosophy - René Descartes
Discourses - Epictetus
Civilization and is Discontents - Sigmund Freud
Phenomenology of Spirit - Georg Hegel
Philosophy of History - Georg
Hegel
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume
The Principles of Psychology - William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James
Capital - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Utopia - St. Thomas More
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy - Sir Isaac Newton
Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Ion, Gorgias, Theatetus, Sophist, Phaedrus, Protagoras - Plato
On the Origin of Inequality - Jean Jacques Rousseau
Social Contract - Jean Jacques Rousseau
Histories - Tacitus
Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau
3 Lists
On Conic Sections - Apollonius of Perga
Works - Archimedes
City of God - St. Augustine
Advancement of Learning - Sir Francis Bacon
New Atlantis - Sir Francis Bacon
Essays - Sir Francis Bacon
An Account of My Hut (essay) - Kamo no Chomei
Biographia Literaria - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rules for the Direction of the Mind - René Descartes
Geometry - René Descartes
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - Galilei Galileo
Autobiography: The Story of My Experiements with Truth - Mohandas K. Gandhi
Deliverer from Error - Imam Habu al-Ghazali
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals - William Harvey
Philosophy of Right - Georg Hegel
Medical Writings - Hippocrates
Treatise of Human Nature - David Hume
Treatise on Light - Christaan Huygens
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals - Immanuel Kant
Critique of Judgment - Immanuel Kant
Essays in Idleness - Yoshida Kenko
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy - Johannes Kepler
Concerning the Harmonies of the World - Johannes Kepler
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - Maynard Keynes
Muqaddimah (Prolegomena) - Ibn Khaldun
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
Elements of Chemistry - Antoine Lavoisier
Notebooks - Leonardo DaVinci
Essay Concerning Human Understanding - John Locke
Utilitarianism - John Stuart Mill
Representative Government - John Stuart Mill
Autobiography - John Stuart Mill
Spirit of the Laws - Montesquieu
Basic Writings - Mozi (Mo Tzu)
Introduction to Arithmetic - Nicomachus of Gerasa
Provincial Letters - Blaise Pascal
Yogasutra - Patañjali
Eurythro, Parmenides, Timaeus, Seventh Letter - Plato
Almagest - Ptolemy
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
New Science of Giambattista Vico - Giovanni Battista Vico
Instructions for Practical Living - Yangming Wang
Science and the Modern World - Alfred North Whitehead
An Introduction to Mathematics - Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophical Investigations - Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Lists
Mortimer Adler - from How to Read a Book
Thomas Aquinas College
Harold Bloom - The Western Canon
Columbia Reading List
Cilfton Fadiman - The Lifetime Reading Plan
Martin Seymour-Smith - 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
St. John's College Reading List
De Bary and Bloom - Approaches to the Asian Classics
Barbara Stoler Miller - Masterworks of Asian Literature
Kenneth Rexroth - Classics Revisited
Philip Ward - A Lifetime's Reading: The World's 500 Greatest Books
Anthony Burgess - 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939
Kenneth Funsten - 100 Books for the Modern Person
