This is an interesting list of great works that I pulled from the sources at the bottom. Guess I'll dip into it over a long period, but not as diligently as I've read the other lists. It's kind of like the life list a birder would have, but for books instead. I've checked off the ones I've already read. Books that I am in the process of reading are marked with an open book.
| Author | Works | Read |
| Anonymous | The Epic of Gilgamesh |
|
| King James Version | The Holy Bible |
|
| Homer | The Iliad |
|
| The Odyssey |
|
|
| Aeschylus | The Oresteia |
|
| Sophocles | Oedipus Rex |
|
| Oedipus at Colonus |
|
|
| Antigone |
|
|
| Euripides | Alcestis |
|
| Medea |
|
|
| Hipploytus |
|
|
| Trojan Women |
|
|
| Electra |
|
|
| Bacchae |
|
|
| Herodotus | The Histories |
|
| Thucydides | The History of the Peloponnesian War |
|
| Aristophanes | Lysistrata |
|
| The Clouds |
|
|
| The Birds |
|
|
| Plato | Selected Works (Dialogues) | |
| Aristotle | Ethics | |
| Poetics | ||
| Valmiki | The Book of Ramayana |
|
| Vyasa | The Mahabharata |
|
| Anonymous | The Bhagavad Gita |
|
| Lucretius | Of the Nature of Things |
|
| Virgil | The Aeneid |
|
| Saint Augustine | The Confessions |
|
| Revealed to Muhammad | The Koran |
|
| Omar Khayyam | The Rubaiyat |
|
| Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy |
|
| Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales |
|
| Niccolò Macchiavelli | The Prince |
|
| François Rabelais | Gargantua and Pantagruel |
|
| Michel Eyquem de Montaigne | Selected Essays |
|
| Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra | Don Quixote |
|
| William Shakespeare | Complete Works |
|
| John Donne | Selected Works (Poems, Sermons) | |
| Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan | |
| John Milton | Paradise Lost |
|
| Lycidas |
|
|
| On the Morning of Christ's Nativity |
|
|
| Sonnets | ||
| Areopagitica | ||
| Molière | Selected Plays |
|
| Blaise Pascal | Thoughts (Pensées) |
|
| John Bunyan. | Pilgrim's Progress |
|
| Daniel Defoe | Robinson Crusoe |
|
| Jonathan Swift | Gulliver's Travels |
|
| Voltaire | Candide |
|
| Other Works | ||
| Henry Fielding | Tom Jones |
|
| Jean Jacques Rousseau | Confessions | |
| Laurence Sterne | Tristram Shandy |
|
| James Boswell | The Life of Samuel Johnson |
|
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Faust |
|
| William Blake | Selected Works |
|
| William Wordsworth | The Prelude |
|
| Selected Shorter Poems |
|
|
| Preface to the Lyrical Ballads | ||
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | The Ancient Mariner |
|
| Christabel | ||
| Kubla Khan |
|
|
| Biographia Literaria | ||
| Writings on Shakespeare | ||
| Jane Austen | Pride and Prejudice |
|
| Emma |
|
|
| Stendhal | The Red and the Black |
|
| Honoré de Balzac | Père Goriot |
|
| Eugénie Grandet |
|
|
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Selected Works | |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | The Scarlet Letter |
|
| Selected Tales | ||
| John Stuart Mill | On Liberty | |
| Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol | Dead Souls |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe | Short Stories and Other Works |
|
| William Makepeace Thackeray | Vanity Fair |
|
| Charles Dickens | Pickwick Papers |
|
| David Copperfield |
|
|
| Great Expectations |
|
|
| Hard Times |
|
|
| Our Mutual Friend |
|
|
| Little Dorrit |
|
|
| Anthony Trollope | The Warden |
|
| The Last Chronicle of Barset |
|
|
| The Eustace Diamonds |
|
|
| The Way We Live Now |
|
|
| Charlotte Brontë | Jane Eyre |
|
| Emily Brontë | Wuthering Heights |
|
| Henry David Thoreau | Walden |
|
| Civil Disobedience |
|
|
| Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev | Fathers and Sons |
|
| Herman Melville | Moby Dick |
|
| Bartleby the Scrivener |
|
|
| George Eliot | The Mill on the Floss |
|
| Middlemarch |
|
|
| Walt Whitman | Selected Poems |
|
| Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855) |
|
|
| Gustave Flaubert | Madame Bovary |
|
| Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky | Crime and Punishment |
|
| The Brothers Karamazov |
|
|
| Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy | War and Peace |
|
| Henrik Ibsen | Selected Plays |
|
| Emily Dickinson | Collected Poems |
|
| Lewis Carroll | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland |
|
| Through the Looking-Glass |
|
|
| Mark Twain | Huckleberry Finn |
|
| Henry Adams | The Education of Henry Adams | |
| Thomas Hardy | The Mayor of Casterbridge |
|
| William James | Pragmatism | |
| The Varieties of Religious Experience | ||
| Henry James | The Ambassadors |
|
| Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche | The Genealogy of Morals | |
| Beyond Good and Evil |
|
|
| Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams |
|
| Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality | ||
| Civilization and Its Discontents | ||
| George Bernard Shaw | Selected Plays and Prefaces | |
| Joseph Conrad | Nostromo |
|
| Anton Chekhov | Uncle Vanya |
|
| Three Sisters |
|
|
| The Cherry Orchard |
|
|
| Selected Short Stories |
|
|
| Edith Wharton | The Custom of the Country |
|
| The Age of Innocence |
|
|
| The House of Mirth |
|
|
| William Butler Yeats | Collected Poems |
|
| Collected Plays | ||
| Marcel Proust | Remembrance of Things Past |
|
| Robert Frost | Collected Poems |
|
| Thomas Mann | The Magic Mountain |
|
| E. M. Forster | A Passage to India |
|
| James Joyce | Ulysses |
|
| Virginia Woolf | Mrs. Dalloway |
|
| To the Lighthouse |
|
|
| Orlando |
|
|
| The Waves |
|
|
| Franz Kafka | The Trial |
|
| The Castle |
|
|
| Selected Short Stories |
|
|
| D. H. Lawrence | Sons and Lovers |
|
| Women in Love |
|
|
| Eugene O'Neill | The Iceman Cometh | |
| Long Day's Journey into Night | ||
| T. S. Eliot | Collected Poems | |
| Collected Plays | ||
| Aldous Huxley | Brave New World |
|
| William Faulkner | The Sound and the Fury |
|
| As I Lay Dying |
|
|
| Ernest Hemingway | Short Stories | |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Labyrinths |
|
| Dreamtigers |
|
|
| Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita |
|
| Pale Fire | ||
| George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four |
|
| R. K. Narayan | The English Teacher |
|
| The Vendor of Sweets [or The Guide] |
|
|
| Samuel Beckett | Waiting for Godot |
|
| Endgame |
|
|
| Krapp's Last Tape |
|
|
| W. H. Auden | Collected Poems |
|
| Albert Camus | The Plague |
|
| The Stranger |
|
|
| Saul Bellow | The Adventures of Augie March |
|
| Herzog |
|
|
| Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn | Cancer Ward | |
| Gabriel Garcia Marquez | One Hundred Years of Solitude |
|
| Chinua Achebe | Things Fall Apart |
|
I used two sources to pull this list together:
Dave's Books
Dave's Page
Home