A Reading List
This reading list is for my husband who wants to be a more well-rounded reader. His own inclinations are to read almost exclusively books of adventure – true stories like Shakelton’s Endurance - and to read modern books of history about battles and wars like Strong Men Armed and Black Hawk Down. He asked me to develop a list heavy in history, ancient to modern, with a good dose of philosophy and religion and a dash of literature just for good measure. The “dash” of literature turned into a lot more… This is intended to be a long-term reading plan and Jared plans to use it over the course of the next several decades. He asked me to divide it out into sections so he can read one work from each section before moving on to the next. This will prevent him from focusing exclusively on one area and keep his goal of “roundedness†front and center.
History
The Federalist Papers
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Belbenoit, Rene – Dry Guillotine
De Tocqueville, Alexis – Democracy in America
Franklin, Benjamin – The Autobiography
Geoffrey of Monmouth – The History of the Kings of Britain
Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Herodotus – The Histories
Livy – The History of Rome
Plutarch – Lives
Roosevelt, Theodore – The Rough Riders
Tacitus – Histories, Annals, Agricola, Germania
Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
Philosophy and World Religions
Aristotle – The Complete Works
Aurelius, Marcus – The Meditations
Bacon, Francis – The Essays
Boswell, James – The Life of Samuel Johnson
Descartes, Rene – Meditations on First Philosophy
Epictetus – Discourses
Epicurus – Works
Erasmus – The Praise of Folly, The Handbook of the Christian Knight
Hobbes, Thomas – Leviathan
Lao Tzu – The Tao Te Ching
Locke, John – Of Civil Government
Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
Machiavelli – The Prince
Marx and Engels – The Communist Manifesto
Montaigne, Michel de – The Essays
More, Sir Thomas – Utopia
Nietzsche, Frederich – Beyond Good and Evil
Plato – The Republic
Plotinus – The Enneads
Pope, Alexander – Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man
Smith, Adam – The Wealth of Nations
Sun Tzu – The Art of War
Thoreau – Walden
Christian Works
The Bible
A’Kempis, Thomas – The Imitation of Christ
Aquinas, St. Thomas – The Summa Theologica
Augustine, St. – The Confessions
Calvin, John – The Institutes
Chesterton, G.K. – The Everlasting Man
Francis, St – The Little Flowers of Saint Francis
Laurence, Brother – The Practice of the Presence of God
Lewis, C.S. – Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters
Luther, Martin – Table Talk, Three Treatises
Pascal, Blaise – Pensees
Schaeffer, Francis – How Should We Then Live
Tertullian – Testimony of the Christian Soul
Literature and Poetry
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Atwood, Margaret – The Handmaid’s Tale
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bulgakov, Mikhail – The Master and Margarita
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Capote, Truman – In Cold Blood
Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey – Prologue, The Knight’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale
Chekov, Anton – “The Black Monkâ€
Chesterton, G.K. – The Man Who Was Thursday
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dahl, Roald – The BFG
Dante, Aligheri – The Divine Comedy
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – David Copperfield
Dostoevsky, Fyoder – Crime and Punishment
Doyle, Arthur Conan – Complete Sherlock Holmes
Dumas, Alexandre – The Count of Monte Cristo
Eco, Umberto – The Name of the Rose
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – This Side of Paradise
Goethe – The Sorrows of Young Werther
Grahame, Kenneth – The Wind in the Willows
Haggard, Rider – King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heaney, Seamus – Beowulf
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
Henry. O. – Selected Short Stories
Homer – The Iliad, The Odyssey
Joyce, James – Dubliners
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, C.S. – Till We Have Faces, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength
McCarthy, Cormac – The Road
McMurtry, Larry – Lonesome Dove
Malory, Sir Thomas – Le Morte D’Arthur
Maugham, W. Somerset – The Razor’s Edge
Melville, Herman – Typee and Omoo
Milton, John – Paradise Lost
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
Poe, Edgar Allen – Complete Short Stories and Poems
Service, Robert – Selected Poems
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Sonnets
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Spenser, Edmund – The Faerie Queene
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stoker, Bram – Dracula
Swift, Jonathan – A Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels
Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina
Twain, Mark – Huckleberry Finn
Tolkien, JRR – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
Virgil – The Aeneid
Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse Five
Waugh, Evelyn – Brideshead Revisited, “The Man Who Loved Dickensâ€
Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine
Wister, Owen – The Virginian
Wollenstonecraft, Mary – A Vindication of the Rights of Women