Table of contents

I’ve been meaning to read these books for some time now. Most of them are books I feel that I should read, and it is a daunting enough list that I have been successfully avoiding it for years while consuming vast stacks of popular fiction. But a man reaches a certain age when his mortality is no longer an abstraction, and he begins to wonder if he actually has time to read all these books. At some point it becomes simple math.

So I am now in the process of reading everything on my list, in no particular order, and I will post reviews on a highly irregular schedule. I’ve cancelled my New Yorker subscription in an effort to make room in my life, and I’m praying I don’t have to swear off of mysteries as well.

CLASSICS

DRAMA

  • Lysistrata, by Aristophanes
  • The Bacchae, by Euripides
  • Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
  • Everyman, by Anonymous
  • The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Checkov
  • Endgame, by Beckett
  • A Doll’s House, by Ibsen
  • The Masque of Blackness, by Jonsonc
  • The Misanthrope, by Molière
  • Desire Under the elms, by O’Neill
  • Six Characters in search of an author, by Pirandello
  • Menaechmi, by Plautus

PHILOSOPHY

  • The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
  • Discourse, by Descartes
  • The Story of Philosophy, by Durant
  • Novum Organum, by Francis Bacon
  • Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
  • An enquiry concerning human understanding, by Hume
  • On Human Understanding, by John Locke
  • Critique of Pure Reason, by Kant
  • Works, by Plato
  • The Republic, by Plato

POETRY

  • Poetics, by Aristotle
  • Flowers of evil, by Beaudilare
  • Collected Poems, by Emily Dickinson
  • Poems, by John Donne
  • Collected Poems, by John Keats
  • Poesies, by Rimbaud
  • Collected Poems, by Robert Frost
  • Sonnets, by Shakespeare
  • Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

POLITICS & ECONOMICS

  • The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
  • The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, by James Madison and John Jay
  • Politics, by Aristotle
  • Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
  • The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen
  • Narrative of the Life, by Frederick Douglass
  • The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith
  • U.S. Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, & Constitution
  • The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine
  • Common Sense, by Thomas Paine
  • Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
  • The decline and fall of the roman empire, by Gibbon
  • On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
  • Second Treatise on Government, by John Locke
  • On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
  • Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
  • The Prince, by Machiavelli
  • Non-Violent Resistance, by Mahatma Gandhi
  • Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, by Mao Zedong
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft
  • The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
  • Basic Writings of Thomas Aquinas, by Thomas Aquinas
  • Utopia, by Thomas More
  • State and Revolution, by Vladimir Lenin
  • Magna Carta

RELIGION

  • Four books and five classics, by Confucious
  • 90 theses, by martin luther
  • The Confessions, by St. Augustine
  • The Upanishads
  • Old and New Testaments
  • Koran
  • The Bhagavad-Gita
  • Torah
  • The Book Of Mormon
  • Some Buddhist Thing (TBD, suggestions welcome)

SCIENCE

  • Origin of species, by Darwin
  • An Outline of Psychoanalysis, by Sigmund Freud
  • The Elements, by Euclid
  • The Meaning of Relativity, by Albert Einstein
  • Treatise on Chemistry, by Antoine Lavoisier
  • The Principles of Scientific Management, by Frederick Winslow Taylor
  • Dialogues Two Sciences, by Galileo Galilei
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
  • The General Theory, by John Maynard Keynes
  • Man and his Symbols, by Karl Jung
  • Eight Lectures on Theoretical Physics, by Max Planck
  • Principia, by Newton
  • Revolutionibus, by Nicolaus Copernicus
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
  • An Essay on the Principle of Population, by Thomas Malthus

MODERN LITERATURE

  • Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
  • The Count Of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
  • Crime And Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
  • Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
  • Ubik, Philip K. Dick
  • The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
  • Gulliver’s Travels, by Johnathan Swift
  • Dracula, by Bram Stoker
  • War And Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
  • Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
  • Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
  • A Tale Of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
  • Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
  • The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
  • Tales of Mystery And Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe
  • Cyrano De Bergerac, by Edmund Rostand
  • The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
  • Fathers And Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
  • The Sea Wolf, by Jack London
  • Grimm’s Fairy Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
  • The Last Of The Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper
  • Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan
  • Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
  • Alice’s Adventure In Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
  • Paradise Lost, by Milton
  • The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling
  • Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Red And The Black, by Stendhal
  • Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
  • The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
  • Candide, by Voltaire
  • Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott