Liberal Arts

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Description

I intend to put together my own reading list and list it here. I will be drawing from reading lists from multiple universities, see resources.

For those with an axe to grind about the Western Canon my list will probably feature a majority of western literature. I make no apologies for this. If I get time I may create another list that lists the books I read for fun, mostly Science Fiction etc.

The lists here only includes what I would like to read not necessarily what I will read. Where I have read the text I will highlight it. The act of creating the lists is giving me some insight into why some of the works are considered great, why some of the list creators are considered mad and why creating such a list is a stupid idea. For this reason I strongly suggest creating your own list. While it probably pays to stand on the shoulders of people who have trod this path I'd still pay careful attention to where they put their feet.

Eventually I would like to put together short reading lists in particular areas. For instance:

  • Economics
  • Computer Science
  • Science Fiction
  • History
  • Mathematics

My reading to date has been very broad so I could probably list a few titles in several areas now but these lists would reflect interest rather than the ideal list in that subject. They would not go particularly deep either ie a reading list for mathematics would be very difficult if taken too literally because you could never hope to cover all of mathematics, it's just too broad a topic to come under one heading.

Choices

While I have used the Great Books to get the majority of the list below it doesn't mean I believe the great books are all we should be reading nor do I intend to read all of these books, my own interest will dictate what I read. The books I have a strong intention of reading will be highlighted in the notes with a reason. If I have not highlighted something it's doesn't mean I have no intention of reading it, I just don't intend in reading it soon or haven't got around to forming an opinion on it yet.

The following table is a legend for the list. Basically if its green it can be found on the list, red it cannot and yellow, I have not checked yet or formed an opinion. The two columns relating to what I am doing are: "HJ" and "Fin" ie HJ=I recommend this, Fin=I have finished it.

Legend
Desc In List Not In List Not Checked
WCB = Western Canon (Bloom)
GBs = Great Books
YDs = Yale Directed Studies
HCs = Harvard Classics
SJs = St Johns College
LRP = New Lifetime Reading Plan


The HJ column details my own progress. These are purely my own views. I think I will struggle with a lot of the books in this list on a first passing.


Legend
Desc Finished Intend to read Have not read
HJ = Harry Jackson


Reading List

Reading List
Link Author Date Work Notes WCB GBs YDs HCs SJs NLR HJ
1 Anonymous 2000 BCE The Epic of Gilgamesh I am not sure why most of the lists do not include this? I am not sure why most of the lists do not include this? I really liked this. The parallels with the bible are fantastic. There are also parallels to be had with the Iliad if you put Gilgamesh as Achilles.
2 Homer 800 BCE The Iliad This is a much better story than the Odyssey. It just feels more complete. I think the Odyssey because of its fracturedheritage has suffered a bit.
3 Homer 800 BCE The Odyssey Not as good as the Iliad.
4 Confucius 551-479 BCE The Analects
5 Aeschylus 525-456/5 BCE The Oresteia
6 Sophocles 496-406 BCE Aias
7 Sophocles 496-406 BCE Oedipus Rex
8 Sophocles 496-406 BCE Oedipus at Colonus
9 Sophocles 496-406 BCE Electra
10 Sophocles 496-406 BCE Antigone
11 Euripides 484-406 BCE Alcestis
12 Euripides 484-406 BCE Medea
13 Euripides 484-406 BCE Hippolytus
14 Euripides 484-406 BCE Trojan Women
15 Euripides 484-406 BCE Electra
16 Euripides 484-406 BCE Bacchae
17 Herodotus 484-425 BCE The Histories
18 Thucydides 470/460-400 BCE The History of the Peloponnesian War
19 Sun-tzu 450-380 BCE The Art of War
20 Aristophanes 448-388 BCE The Frogs
21 Aristophanes 448-388 BCE The Acharnians
22 Aristophanes 448-388 BCE Lysistrata
23 Aristophanes 448-388 BCE The Clouds
24 Aristophanes 448-388 BCE The Birds
25 Plato 428-348 BCE The Republic
26 Plato 429-348 BCE The Apology
27 Plato 430-348 BCE The Meno
28 Plato 431-348 BCE Gorgias
29 Plato 432-348 BCE Crito
30 Plato 433-348 BCE Phaedo
31 Plato 434-348 BCE Symposium
32 Plato 435-348 BCE Parmenides
33 Plato 436-348 BCE Theaetetus
34 Plato 437-348 BCE Sophist
35 Plato 438-348 BCE Timaeus
36 Plato 439-348 BCE Phaedrus
37 Aristotle 384-322 BCE The Politics
38 Aristotle 385-322 BCE Poetics
39 Aristotle 386-322 BCE Physics
40 Aristotle 387-322 BCE Nicomachean Ethics
41 Aristotle 388-322 BCE Metaphysics
42 Aristotle 389-322 BCE On Generation and Corruption
43 Aristotle 390-322 BCE Politics
44 Aristotle 391-322 BCE De Anima
45 Aristotle 392-322 BCE Parts of Animals
46 Aristotle 393-322 BCE Generation of Animals
47 Mencius 400-320 BCE The Book of Mencius
48 Valmiki 300 BCE The Book of Ramayana
49 Vyasa 200 BCE The Mahabharata
50 Anonymous 200 BCE The Bhagavad Gita
51 Ssu-ma Ch'ien 145-86 BCE Records of the Grand Historian
52 Lucretius 100-50 BCE Of the Nature of Things
53 Virgil 70-19 BCE The Aeneid
54 Ovid 43 BCE – 17/18 Metamorphoses
55 Marcus Aurelius 121-180 Meditations
56 Saint Augustine 354-430 The Confessions
57 Kalidasa 400 The Cloud Messenger
58 Kalidasa 400 Sakuntala
59 Revealed to Muhammad 650 The Koran
60 Hui-neng 638-713 The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
61 Firdausi 940-1020 Shah Nameh
62 Sei Shonagon 965-1035 The Pillow Book
63 Lady Murasaki 976-1015 Tale of Genji
64 Omar Khayyam 1048-? The Rubaiyat
65 Dante Alighieri 1265-1321 The Divine Comedy
66 Luo Kuan-chung 1330-1400 The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
67 Geoffrey Chaucer 1342-1400 The Canterbury Tales
68 Anonymous 1500 The Thousand and One Nights
69 Niccolò Macchiavelli 1469-1527 The Prince
70 François Rabelais 1483-1553 Gargantua and Pantagruel
71 Wu Cheng-en 1500-1582 Journey to the West
72 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne 1533-1592 Selected Essays
73 Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra 1547-1616 Don Quixote Superb. Funny. There are passages in this book that had me in stitches. I am sure someone based Blackadders baldric on Sancho. I am still reading this though and have a bit to go on it.
74 William Shakespeare 1564-1616 Complete Works
75 John Donne 1573-1631 Selected Works
76 Anonymous 1618 The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P'ing Mei)
77 Galileo Galilei 1574-1642 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
78 Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679 Leviathan
79 René Descartes 1596-1650 Discourse on Method
80 John Milton 1608-1674 Paradise Lost
81 John Milton 1608-1674 Lycidas
82 John Milton 1608-1674 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
83 John Milton 1608-1674 Sonnets
84 John Milton 1608-1674 Areopagitica
85 Molière 1622-1673 Selected Plays
86 Blaise Pascal 1623-1662 Thoughts (Pensées)
87 John Bunyan 1628-1688 Pilgrim's Progress
88 John Locke 1632-1688 Second Treatise of Government
89 Matsuo Basho 1644-1694 The Narrow Road to the Deep North
90 Daniel Defoe 1660-1731 Robinson Crusoe Classic adventure story. Higly recommended
91 Jonathan Swift 1667-1745 Gulliver's Travels
92 Voltaire 1694-1778 Candide and Other Works
93 David Hume 1711-1776 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
94 Henry Fielding 1707-1754 Tom Jones
95 Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in 1715-1763 The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone)
96 Jean Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778 Confessions
97 Laurence Sterne 1713-1768 Tristram Shandy
98 James Boswell 1740-1795 The Life of Samuel Johnson
99 Thomas Jefferson and others  ? Basic Documents in Ameri History - edited by Richard B. Morris
100 Hamilton - Madison and Jay  ? The Federalist Papers - edited by Clinton Rossiter
101 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832 Faust
102 William Blake 1757-1827 Selected Works
103 William Wordsworth 1770-1850 The Prelude
104 William Wordsworth 1770-1850 Selected Shorter Poems
105 William Wordsworth 1770-1850 Preface to the Lyri Ballads (1800)
106 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 The Ancient Mariner
107 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 Christabel
108 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 Kubla Khan
109 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 Biographia Literaria
110 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 Writings on Shakespeare
111 Jane Austen 1775-1817 Pride and Prejudice
112 Jane Austen 1775-1817 Emma
113 Stendhal 1783-1842 The Red and the Black
114 Honoré de Balzac 1799-1850 Père Goriot
115 Honoré de Balzac 1799-1850 Eugénie Grandet
116 Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882 Selected Works
117 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 The Scarlet Letter
118 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 Selected Tales
119 Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859 Democracy in America
120 John Stuart Mill 1806-1873 On Liberty I found this book tough to read. Very wordy etc but well worth the work. Mills makes some very strong arguments for liberalism and warns us of the “tyranny of the majority”. Very important book for me.
121 John Stuart Mill 1806-1873 The Subjection of Women
122 Charles Darwin 1809-1882 The Voyage of the Beagle
123 Charles Darwin 1809-1882 The Origin of Species
124 Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol 1809-1852 Dead Souls
125 Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 Short Stories and Other Works
126 William Makepeace Thackeray 1811-1863 Vanity Fair
127 Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Pickwick Papers
128 Charles Dickens 1812-1870 David Copperfield
129 Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Great Expectations
130 Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Hard Times
131 Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Our Mutual Friend
132 Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Little Dorrit
133 Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 The Warden
134 Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 The Last Chronicle of Barset
135 Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 The Eustace Diamonds
136 Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 The Way We Live Now
137 Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 Autobiography
138 Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855 Jane Eyre
139 Emily Brontë 1818-1848 Wuthering Heights
140 Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862 Walden
141 Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862 Civil Disobedience
142 Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev 1818-1883 Fathers and Sons
143 Karl Marx 1818-1883 and Friedrich Engels 1820-1895  ? The Communist Manifesto
144 Herman Melville 1819-1891 Moby Dick
145 Herman Melville 1819-1891 Bartleby the Scrivener
146 George Eliot 1819-1880 The Mill on the Floss
147 George Eliot 1819-1880 Middlemarch
148 Walt Whitman 1819-1892 Selected Poems
149 Walt Whitman 1819-1892 Democratic Vistas
150 Walt Whitman 1819-1892 Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855)
151 Walt Whitman 1819-1892 A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads
152 Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880 Madame Bovary
153 Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky 1821-1881 Crime and Punishment
154 Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky 1821-1881 The Brothers Karamazov
155 Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy 1828-1910 War and Peace It took me a long time to read this book. Its very long and I found it tough. The detail is fantastic though and the characters are very vivid considering how many of them there are.
156 Henrik Ibsen 1828-1906 Selected Plays
157 Emily Dickinson 1830-1886 Collected Poems
158 Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
159 Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 Through the Looking-Glass
160 Mark Twain 1835-1910 Huckleberry Finn
161 Henry Adams 1838-1918 The Education of Henry Adams
162 Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 The Mayor of Casterbridge
163 William James 1842-1910 The Principles of Psychology
164 William James 1842-1910 Pragmatism
165 William James 1842-1910 Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth
166 William James 1842-1910 The Varieties of Religious Experience
167 Henry James 1843-1916 The Ambassadors
168 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900 Thus Spake Zarathustra
169 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900 The Genealogy of Morals
170 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900 Beyond Good and Evil
171 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900 and other works
172 Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 The Interpretation of Dreams
173 Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
174 Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 Civilization and Its Discontents
175 George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950 Selcted Plays and Prefaces
176 Joseph Conrad 1857-1924 Nostromo
177 Anton Chekhov 1860-1904 Uncle Vanya
178 Anton Chekhov 1860-1904 Three Sisters
179 Anton Chekhov 1860-1904 The Cherry Orchard
180 Anton Chekhov 1860-1904 Selected Short Stories
181 Edith Wharton 1862-1937 The Custom of the Country
182 Edith Wharton 1862-1937 The Age of Innocence
183 Edith Wharton 1862-1937 The House of Mirth
184 William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 Collected Poems
185 William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 Collected Plays
186 William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 The Autobiography
187 Natsume Soseki 18676-1916 Kokoro
188 Marcel Proust 1871-1922 Remembrance of Things Past
189 Robert Frost 1874-1963 Collected Poems
190 Thomas Mann 1875-1955 The Magic Mountain
191 E. M. Forster 1879-1970 A Passage to India
192 Lu Hsün 1881-1936 Collected Short Stories
193 James Joyce 1882-1941 Ulysses
194 Virginia Woolf 1882-1941 Mrs. Dalloway
195 Virginia Woolf 1882-1941 To the Lighthouse
196 Virginia Woolf 1882-1941 Orlando
197 Virginia Woolf 1882-1941 The Waves
198 Franz Kafka 1883-1924 The Trial
199 Franz Kafka 1883-1924 The Castle
200 Franz Kafka 1883-1924 Selected Short Stories
201 D. H. Lawrence 1885-1930 Sons and Lovers
202 D. H. Lawrence 1885-1930 Women in Love
203 Tanizaki Junichiro 1886-1965 The Makioka Sisters
204 Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953 Mourning Becomes Electra
205 Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953 The Iceman Cometh
206 Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953 Long Day's Journey into Night
207 T. S. Eliot 1888-1965 Collected Poems
208 T. S. Eliot 1888-1965 Collected Plays
209 Aldous Huxley 1894-1963 Brave New World Fantastic book. Scary material when we think what we seen during the second world war. There are people dumb enough to try some of this stuff “for our greater good”.
210 William Faulkner 1897-1962 The Sound and the Fury
211 William Faulkner 1897-1962 As I Lay Dying
212 Ernest Hemingway 1899-1962 Short Stories
213 Kawabata Yasunari 1899-1972 Beauty and Sadness
214 Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986 Labyrinths Dreamtigers
215 Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977 Lolita
216 Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977 Pale Fire
217 Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977 Speak
218 Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977 Memory
219 George Orwell 1903-1950 Animal Farm I read this over 20 years ago and some of the characters still stand out to me. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
220 George Orwell 1903-1950 Nineteen Eighty-Four
221 George Orwell 1903-1950 Burmese Days
222 R. K. Narayan -1906 The English Teacher
223 R. K. Narayan -1906 The Vendor of Sweets
224 Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 Waiting for Godot
225 Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 Endgame
226 Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 Krapp's Last Tape
227 W. H. Auden 1907-1973 Collected Poems
228 Albert Camus 1913-1960 The Plague
229 Albert Camus 1913-1960 The Stranger
230 Saul Bellow -1915 The Adventures of Augie March
231 Saul Bellow -1915 Herzog
232 Saul Bellow -1915 Humboldt's Gift
233 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn -1918 The First Circle
234 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn -1918 Cancer Ward
235 Thomas Kuhn 1922-1996 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
236 Mishima Yukio 1925-1970 Confessions of a Mask
237 Mishima Yukio 1925-1970 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
238 Gabriel Garcia Marquez -1928
239 Chinua Achebe -1930 Things Fall Apart




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