Mortimer Adler's Reading List
A list of recommended books for challenging yourself, becoming a better reader, and reading analytically from "How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading" by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren.
About This List
I read How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading because I had been reading a lot of textbooks, and I also planned on reading some history, expository works, research papers, and fiction in the future. I wanted to see how to best read all of these different genres. The book is a great guide, and I discovered a lot about my own reading habits from the book. The reading list below is a suggested reading list offered in Appendix A of the book.
Reading List
- Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
- The Old Testament
- Aeschylus: Tragedies
- Sophocles: Tragedies
- Herodotus: Histories
- Euripides: Tragedies
- Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
- Hippocrates: Medical Writings
- Aristophanes: Comedies
- Plato: Dialogues
- Aristotle: Works
- Epicurus: Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
- Euclid: Elements
- Archimedes: Works
- Apollonius of Perga: Conic Sections
- Cicero: Works
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- Virgil: Works
- Horace: Works
- Livy: History of Rome
- Ovid: Works
- Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
- Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
- Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
- Epictetus: Discourses; Encheiridion
- Ptolemy: Almagest
- Lucian: Works
- Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
- Galen: On the Natural Faculties
- The New Testament
- Plotinus: The Enneads
- St. Augustine: On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
- The Song of Roland
- The Nibelungenlied
- The Saga of Burnt Njál
- St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
- Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
- Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
- Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
- Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
- Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
- Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
- Thomas More: Utopia
- Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
- Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
- John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Michel de Montaigne: Essays
- William Gilbert: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
- Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
- Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
- Francis Bacon: Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, The New Atlantis
- William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
- Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
- Johannes Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
- William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
- Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
- René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
- John Milton: Works
- Molière: Comedies
- Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
- Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
- Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
- John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
- Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
- Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
- Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
- Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
- Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal
- William Congreve: The Way of the World
- George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
- Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
- Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
- Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
- Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
- Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
- David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract
- Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
- Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
- 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
- Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
- James Boswell: Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
- Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers
- Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
- William Wordsworth: Poems
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
- Carl von Clausewitz: On War
- Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
- Lord Byron: Don Juan
- Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
- Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
- Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
- Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
- Honore de Balzac: Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
- John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
- Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
- Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
- Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
- Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden
- Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto
- George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
- Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
- Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
- Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
- Henrik Ibsen: Plays
- Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
- Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
- William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
- Henry James: The American; ‘The Ambassadors
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
- Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
- Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
- Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
- Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
- John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
- Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
- George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
- Lenin: The State and Revolution
- Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
- Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
- Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
- Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
- James Joyce: ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
- Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
- Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
- Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
- Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward
Additions
- Bertrand Russell: A New History of Western Philosophy
- It goes against Adler's recommendation about reading compendiums of philosophy, but I already have it
- Martin Heidegger: Being and Time, What Is Called Thinking?
- Some claim Heidegger to have a great influence on American society today
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