Great Books from How to Read a Book

Appendix A (Pg. 350-362)

Adler, M. J., & Van Doren, C. (1972). How to read a book. New York: Simon and Schuster.

  1. Homer

    • Iliad
    • Odyssey

  2. The Bible

    • The Old Testament
    • The New Testament

  3. Aeschylus

    • Tragedies

  4. Sophocles

    • Tragedies

  5. Herodotus

    • Histories

  6. Euripides

    • Tragedies (esp. Medea, Hippolytus, the Bacchae)

  7. Thucydides

    • History of the Peloponnesian War

  8. Hippocrates

    • Medical Writings

  9. Aristophanes

    • Comedies (esp. The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs)

  10. Plato

    • Dialogues (esp. The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus)

  11. Aristotle

    • Works (esp. Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Nichomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics)

  12. Epicurus

    • Letter to Herodotus
    • Letter to Menoecus

  13. Euclid

    • Elements (of Geometry)

  14. Archimedes

    • Works (esp. On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Sand Reckoner)

  15. Apollonius of Perga

    • On Conic Sections

  16. Cicero

    • Works (esp. Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age)

  17. Lucretius

    • On the Nature of Things

  18. Virgil

    • Works

  19. Horace

    • Works (esp. Odes and Epodes, The Art of Poetry)

  20. Livy

    • History of Rome

  21. Ovid

    • Works (esp. Metamorphoses)

  22. Plutarch

    • Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
    • Moralia

  23. Tacitus

    • Histories
    • Annals
    • Agricola
    • Germania

  24. Nicomachus of Gerasa

    • Introduction to Arithmetic

  25. Epictetus

    • Discourses
    • Encheiridion

  26. Ptolemy

    • Almagest

  27. Lucian

    • Works (esp. The Way to Rite History, The True History, The Sale of Creeds)

  28. Marcus Aurelius

    • Meditations

  29. Galen

    • On the Natural Faculties

  30. Plotinus

    • The Enneads

  31. St. Augustine

    • Works (esp. On the Teacher, Confessions, City of God, On Christian Doctrine)

  32. The Song of Roland

  33. The Nibelungenlied

  34. The Saga of Burnt Njál

  35. St. Thomas Aquinas

    • Summa Theologica
    • Summa Gentiles

  36. Dante Alighieri

    • The New Life
    • On Monarchy
    • The Divine Comedy

  37. Geoffrey Chaucer

    • Troilus and Criseyde
    • The Canterbury Tales

  38. Leonardo da Vinci

    • Notebooks

  39. Niccolò Machiavelli

    • The Prince
    • Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy

  40. Desiderius Erasmus

    • The Praise of Folly

  41. Nicolaus Copernicus

    • On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

  42. Thomas More

    • Utopia

  43. Martin Luther

    • Three Treatises
    • Table Talk

  44. François Rabelais

    • Gargantua and Pantagruel

  45. John Calvin

    • Institutes of the Christian Religion

  46. Michel de Montaigne

    • Essays

  47. William Gilbert

    • On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies

  48. Miguel de Cervantes

    • Don Quixote

  49. Edmund Spenser

    • Prothalamion
    • The Faerie Queene

  50. Francis Bacon

    • Essays
    • Advancement of Learning
    • Novum Organum, New Atlantis

  51. William Shakespeare

    • All works

  52. Galileo Galilei

    • Starry Messenger
    • Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

  53. Johannes Kepler

    • Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
    • Concerning the Harmonies of the World

  54. William Harvey

    • On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
    • On the Circulation of the Blood
    • On the Generation of Animals

  55. Thomas Hobbes

    • Leviathan

  56. René Descartes

    • Rules for the Direction of the Mind
    • Discourse on the Method
    • Geometry
    • Meditations on First Philosophy

  57. John Milton

    • Works (esp. The minor poems, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes)

  58. Molière

    • Comedies (esp. The Miser, The School for Wives, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, Tartuffe)

  59. Blaise Pascal

    • The Provincial Letters
    • Pensees
    • Scientific Treatises

  60. Christiaan Huygens

    • Treatise on Light

  61. Benedict de Spinoza

    • Ethics

  62. John Locke

    • Letter Concerning Toleration of Civil Government
    • Essay Concerning Human Understanding
    • Thoughts Concerning Education

  63. Jean Baptiste Racine

    • Tragedies (esp. Andromache, Phaedra)

  64. Isaac Newton

    • Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
    • Optics

  65. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

    • Discourse on Metaphysics
    • New Essays Concerning Human Understanding
    • Monadology

  66. Daniel Defoe

    • Robinson Crusoe

  67. Jonathan Swift

    • A Tale of a Tub
    • Journal to Stella
    • Gulliver's Travels
    • A Modest Proposal

  68. William Congreve

    • The Way of the World

  69. George Berkeley

    • Principles of Human Knowledge

  70. Alexander Pope

    • Essay on Criticism
    • Rape of the Lock
    • Essay on Man

  71. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu

    • Persian Letters
    • Spirit of Laws

  72. Voltaire

    • Letters on the English
    • Candide
    • Philosophical Dictionary

  73. Henry Fielding

    • Joseph Andrews
    • Tom Jones

  74. Samuel Johnson

    • The Vanity of Human Wishes
    • Dictionary
    • Rasselas
    • The Lives of the Poets

  75. David Hume

    • Treatise on Human Nature
    • Essays Moral and Political
    • An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

  76. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    • On the Origin of Inequality
    • On the Political Economy
    • Emile – or, On Education
    • The Social Contract

  77. Laurence Sterne

    • Tristram Shandy
    • A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

  78. Adam Smith

    • The Theory of Moral Sentiments
    • The Wealth of Nations

  79. Immanuel Kant

    • Critique of Pure Reason
    • Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
    • Critique of Practical Reason
    • The Science of Right
    • Critique of Judgment
    • Perpetual Peace

  80. Edward Gibbon

    • The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
    • Autobiography

  81. James Boswell

    • Journal (esp. London Journal)
    • Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.

  82. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier

    • Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)

  83. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison –

    • Federalist Papers
    • Articles of Confederation
    • The Constitution of the United States
    • The Declaration of Independence

  84. Jeremy Bentham

    • Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
    • Theory of Fictions

  85. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    • Faust
    • Poetry and Truth

  86. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier

    • Analytical Theory of Heat

  87. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

    • Phenomenology of Spirit
    • Philosophy of Right
    • Lectures on the Philosophy of History

  88. William Wordsworth

    • Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads, Lucy poems, sonnets, The Prelude)

  89. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    • Poems (esp. Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
    • Biographia Literaria

  90. Jane Austen

    • Pride and Prejudice
    • Emma

  91. Carl von Clausewitz

    • On War

  92. Stendhal

    • The Red and the Black
    • The Charterhouse of Parma
    • On Love

  93. George Gordon, Lord Byron

    • Don Juan

  94. Arthur Schopenhauer

    • Studies in Pessimism

  95. Michael Faraday

    • Chemical History of a Candle
    • Experimental Researches in Electricity

  96. Charles Lyell

    • Principles of Geology

  97. Auguste Comte

    • The Positive Philosophy

  98. Honore de Balzac

    • Pere Goriot
    • Eugenie Grandet

  99. Ralph Waldo Emerson

    • Representative Men
    • Essays
    • Journal

  100. Nathaniel Hawthorne

    • The Scarlet Letter

  101. Alexis de Tocqueville

    • Democracy in America

  102. John Stuart Mill

    • A System of Logic
    • On Liberty
    • Representative Government
    • Utilitarianism
    • The Subjection of Women
    • Autobiography

  103. Charles Darwin

    • The Origin of Species
    • The Descent of Man
    • Autobiography

  104. Charles Dickens

    • Works (esp. Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Hard Times)

  105. Claude Bernard

    • Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

  106. Henry David Thoreau

    • Civil Disobedience
    • Walden

  107. Karl Marx

    • Capital
    • Communist Manifesto

  108. George Eliot

    • Adam Bede
    • Middlemarch

  109. Herman Melville

    • Moby-Dick
    • Billy Budd

  110. Fyodor Dostoevsky

    • Crime and Punishment
    • The Idiot
    • The Brothers Karamazov

  111. Gustave Flaubert

    • Madame Bovary
    • Three Stories

  112. Henrik Ibsen

    • Plays (esp. Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, the Wild Duck)

  113. Leo Tolstoy

    • War and Peace
    • Anna Karenina
    • What is Art?
    • Twenty-Three Tales

  114. Mark Twain

    • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    • The Mysterious Stranger

  115. William James

    • The Principles of Psychology
    • The Varieties of Religious Experience
    • Pragmatism
    • Essays in Radical Empiricism

  116. Henry James

    • The American
    • The Ambassadors

  117. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

    • Thus, Spoke Zarathustra
    • Beyond Good and Evil
    • The Genealogy of Morals
    • The Will to Power

  118. Jules Henri Poincaré

    • Science and Hypothesis
    • Science and Method

  119. Sigmund Freud

    • The Interpretation of Dreams
    • Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
    • Civilization and Its Discontents
    • New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

  120. George Bernard Shaw

    • Plays with Prefaces (esp. Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan)

  121. Max Planck

    • Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
    • Where Is Science Going?
    • Scientific Autobiography

  122. Henri Bergson

    • Time and Free Will
    • Matter and Memory
    • Creative Evolution
    • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

  123. John Dewey

    • How We Think
    • Democracy and Education
    • Experience and Nature
    • Logic: The Theory of Inquiry

  124. Alfred North Whitehead

    • An Introduction to Mathematics
    • Science and the Modern World
    • The Aims of Education and Other Essays
    • Adventures of Ideas

  125. George Santayana

    • The Life of Reason
    • Skepticism and Animal Faith
    • Persons and Places

  126. Vladimir Lenin

    • The State and Revolution

  127. Marcel Proust

    • Remembrance of Things Past

  128. Bertrand Russell

    • The Problems of Philosophy
    • The Analysis of Mind
    • An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
    • Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits

  129. Thomas Mann

    • The Magic Mountain
    • Joseph and His Brothers

  130. Albert Einstein

    • The Meaning of Relativity
    • On the Method of Theoretical Physics
    • The Evolution of Physics

  131. James Joyce

    • 'The Dead' in Dubliners
    • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    • Ulysses

  132. Jacques Maritain

    • Art and Scholasticism
    • The Degrees of Knowledge
    • The Rights of Man and Natural Law
    • True Humanism

  133. Franz Kafka

    • The Trial
    • The Castle
    • The Metamorphosis

  134. Arnold J. Toynbee

    • A Study of History
    • Civilization on Trial

  135. Jean-Paul Sartre

    • Nausea
    • No Exit
    • Being and Nothingness

  136. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

    • The First Circle
    • The Cancer Ward