Nick’s Catholic Classics Reading List

Around the year 2003 I got fed up with wasting my time reading mediocre books. As the Michael Card song goes, “So many books, so little time.” I became determined to only read books that would have a life-changing effect on me. But first I had to find a way to know which books those were. 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 logic behind this method is that by using many lists I can reduce the bias of individual critics or organizations, and come up with a more objective and comprehensive list. This process would have been a lot more time consuming without Robert Teeter’s fantastic great books page.

Not long after that, I found Fr. Hardon’s The Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan and I decided to put together a list of great Catholic literature, based on the same logic. I found two more lists of Catholic/Christian classics and added them to my initial thirteen. Here, then, are my sources for my Catholic Classics Reading List:

Catholic/Christian Reading Lists:

• Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. – The Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan
• Fr. John McCloskey – A Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan
• Eugene Peterson – Take and Read: Spiritual Reading: An Annotated List

My Original Thirteen Lists:

• Mortimer Adler – from How to Read a Book
• Thomas Aquinas College Reading List
• Harold Bloom – The Western Canon
• Columbia Reading List
• Cilfton Fadiman – The New 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

Without further ado, here is the list:

Books that showed up on 14 of 16 lists:
St. Augustine — Confessions
Dante — Divine Comedy
Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote

Books that showed up on 9 of 16 lists
Geoffrey Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales
Fyodor Dostoyevski — The Brothers Karamazov

Books that showed up on 7 of 16 lists
George Eliot — Middlemarch
Herman Melville — Moby Dick

Books that showed up on 6 of 16 lists
St. Augustine — City of God
James Joyce — Ulysses
St. Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologiae

Books that showed up on 5 of 16 lists:
St. Thomas More — Utopia

Books that showed up on 4 of 16 lists:
Gerard Manley Hopkins — Hopkins: Poetry and Prose
Alessandro Manzoni — The Betrothed
John Henry Cardinal Newman — Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Flannery O’Connor — Flannery O’Connor: Complete Stories
Sigrid Undset — Kristin Lavransdatter

Books that showed up on 3 of 16 lists:
St. Francis de Sales — Introduction to Devout Life
Graham Greene — The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene — The Heart of the Matter
Romano Guardini — The Lord
St. John of the Cross — Dark Night of the Soul
Thomas a Kempis — The Imitation of Christ
Ronald Knox — Enthusiasm
John Henry Cardinal Newman — Idea of a University
St. Teresa of Avila — Interior Castle
St. Teresa of Avila — Way of Perfection
St. Teresa of Avila — The Life of St. Teresa (Autobiography)
St. Therese of Lisieux — Story of a Soul
Francis Thompson — Poems
Francis Trochu — Cure of Ars
Evelyn Waugh — Brideshead Revisited

Books that showed up on 2 of 16 lists:
Catechism of the Catholic Church
Karl Adam — The Spirit of Catholicism
St. Anselm — Proslogium
St. Athanasius — The Life of Saint Anthony
Hilaire Belloc — The Great Heresies
Hilaire Belloc — How The Reformation Happened
Hilaire Belloc — Survivals and New Arrivals
St. Benedict — The Rule of St. Benedict
Robert Hugh Benson — Lord of the World
Georges Bernanos — The Diary of a Country Priest
Boethius — The Consolation of Philosophy
M. Eugene Boylan — This Tremendous Lover
M. Eugene Boylan — Difficulties in Mental Prayer
St. Catherine of Siena — Little Talks with God (modernized version of The Dialogues)
Jean-Baptiste Chautard — The Soul of the Apostolate
G.K. Chesterton — The Man Who Was Thursday
G.K. Chesterton — The Father Brown Mysteries
G.K. Chesterton — Everlasting Man
G.K. Chesterton — Orthodoxy
G.K. Chesterton — St. Thomas Aquinas
G.K. Chesterton — St. Francis of Assisi
Richard Crashaw — Poems
Christopher Dawson — Christianity and European Culture
Dorothy Day — The Long Loneliness
St. Francis de Sales — Treatise on the Love of God
Frederick William Faber — All for Jesus
St. Francis of Assisi — The Little Flowers of St. Francis
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange — The Three Ages of Interior Life, I and II
Graham Greene — Brighton Rock
Romano Guardini — End of the Modern World
St. Ignatius of Loyola – Spiritual Exercises
Bl. Jacobus de Voragine — The Golden Legend
C. S. Lewis — Screwtape Letters
St. Alphonsus Liguori — 12 Steps to Holiness and Salvation
St. Alphonsus Liguori — Uniformity with God’s Will
St. Louis Grignion de Montfort — True Devotion to Mary
Jacques Maritain — The Degrees of Knowledge
Jacques Maritain — Art and Scholasticism
Jacques Maritain — The Rights of Man and the Natural Law
Jacques Maritain — True Humanism
Francois Mauriac — The Woman of the Pharisees
Francois Mauriac — Therese
Francois Mauriac — The Desert of Love
Francois Mauriac — Life of Jesus
Thomas Merton — Seven Storey Mountain
Thomas More — Sadness of Christ
John Henry Cardinal Newman — Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Cardinal Newman — Parochial and Plain Sermons
Coventry Patmore — Poems
Walker Percy — Lost in the Cosmos
Francis Joseph Sheed — Theology and Sanity
Francis Joseph Sheed — Theology for Beginners
Francis Joseph Sheed — To Know Christ Jesus
Fulton Sheen — Life of Christ
Fulton Sheen — Three to Get Married
Henryk Sienkiewicz — Quo Vadis?
Edith Stein — Essays on Woman
Alophe Alfred Tanqueray — Spiritual Life
St. Thomas Aquinas — My Way of Life
J. R. R. Tolkien — The Lord of the Rings
Dietrich Von Hildebrand — Transformation in Christ
William Thomas Walsh — Our Lady of Fatima
Evelyn Waugh — A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh — Scoop
Evelyn Waugh — Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh — Put Out More Flags
Evelyn Waugh — Sword of Honor Trilogy