Classics for Boys
Classics for Girls
Agatha Christie Reading Lists
Charles Dickens Reading List
Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge
Shakespeare Reading List
English Lit Student Book Challenge
Banned and Challenged Books
The Well-Educated Mind Reading List (see below)
The Well-Educated Mind:
A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
by Susan Wise Bauer
The book suggests reading each book 3 times and making copious margin notes for maximum benefit. (Or at the very least, reviewing your notes and marked passages a couple times after the first reading.) I’ve found that rereading, while time-consuming, really does help enormously with understanding, and on a second or third read, new connections and revelations often present themselves that went unnoticed the first time through. My personal goal is to read once, then read the introduction or other academic criticism/explanation, then read the full text a second time, only attempting a third read on a case-by-case basis. The asterisks below denote how many times I’ve read each. I aim to read them all, at least once, eventually.
For more information on margin notes and reading techniques consult:
The Well-Educated Mind Text
and/or
How to Read a Book
by Mortimer J. Adler
(bit academic and dry, but invaluable)
Fiction:
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes **
The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ***
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë ****
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne *
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain *
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe *
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Native Son - Richard Wright
The Stranger - Albert Camus
1984 - George Orwell
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
White Noise - Don DeLillo
Possession - A.S. Byatt
The Confessions - Augustine *
The Book of Margery Kempe - Margery Kempe
Essays - Michele De Montaigne
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself - Teresa Of Avila
Meditations - Rene Descartes
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners - John Bunyan
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration - Mary Rowlandson
Confessions - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself - Harriet Jacobs
Life and Times of Frederick Douglas - Frederick Douglas
Up from Slavery - Booker T. Washington
Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche
Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth - Mohandas Gandhi
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - Gertrude Stein
The Seven Storey Mountain - Thomas Merton
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life - C.S. Lewis
The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X
Journal of a Solitude - May Sarton
The Gulag Archipelago - Aleskandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Born Again - Charles W. Colson
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriquez - Richard Rodriquez
The Road from Coorain - Jill Ker Conway
All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs - Elie Wiesel
History/Politics:
The Histories - Herodotus
The Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
The Republic - Plato
Lives - Plutarch
The City of God - Augustine
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People - Bede
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavell
Utopia - Sir Thomas More
The True End of Civil Government - John Locke
The History of England, Volume V - David Hume
The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Common Sense - Thomas Paine
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
Democracy in America - Alexis De Tocqueville
Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy - Jacob Burckhardt
The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber
Queen Victoria - Lytton Strachey
The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell
The New England Mind - Perry Miller
The Great Crash - John Kenneth Galbraith
The Longest Day - Cornelius Ryan
The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made - Eugene D. Genovese
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century - Barbara Tuchman
All the President's Men - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era - James McPherson
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The End of History and the Last Man - Francis Fukuyama
Agamemnon - Aeschylus
Oedipus the King - Sophocles
Medea - Euripides
The Birds - Aristophanes
Poetics - Aristotle
Everyman (14th Century)
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Richard III - William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare *
Hamlet - William Shakespeare *
Tartuffe - Moliere
The Way of the World - William Congreve
She Stoops to Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith
The School for Scandal - Richard Brinsley Sheridan
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen *
The Importance of Being Ernest - Oscar Wilde
The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov
Saint Joan - George Bernard Shaw
Murder in the Cathedral - T.S. Eliot
Our Town - Thornton Wilder
Long Day's Journey into Night - Eugene O'Neill
No Exit - Jean Paul Sartre
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
A Man for All Seasons - Robert Bolt
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard
Equus - Peter Shaffer
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Iliad and the Odyssey - Homer *
Greek Lyricists
The Odes - Horace
Beowulf ***
Inferno - Dante Alighieri
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer *
Sonnets - William Shakespeare *
John Donne
Psalms - King James Bible *
Paradise Lost - John Milton *
Songs of Innocence and of Experience - William Blake
Williams Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alfred, Lord Tennyson *
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rossetti
Gerald Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pounds
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
W.H. Auden
Philip Larkin
Allen Ginsberg *
Sylvia Plath
Mark Strand
Adrienne Rich
Seamus Heaney
Robert Pinsky
Jane Kenyon
Rita Dove
