• Ancient
  • ✔ Beowulf, Anonymous
  • ✔ The Iliad, Homer
  • ✔ The Odyssey, Homer
  • The Republic, Plato
  • Oresteia, Aeschylus
  • Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
  • The Aeneid, Virgil
• Classics
  • ✔ 1984, George Orwell
  • ✔ Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
  • Candide, Voltaire
  • ✔ Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • ✔ Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
  • ✔ The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  • ✔ Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  • ✔ Catch 22, Joseph Heller
  • ✔ Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  • ✔ Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville
  • ✔ The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  • In the Penal Colony, Franz Kafka
  • ✔ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  • ✔ A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  • ✔ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • ✔ Lolita, Vladamir Nabokov
  • ✔ The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
• Fiction Based on History
  • ✔ The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • ✔ A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  • ✔ Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
  • All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
  • ✔ A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  • The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  • ✔ The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
• Beyond the Standards
  • Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
  • Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
  • Watership Down, Richard Adams
  • Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
  • I Served the King of England, Bohumil Hrabal
  • ✔ Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein
  • ✔ The Road, Cormac McCarthy
  • ✔ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
  • On Beauty, Zadie Smith
  • ✔ A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  • The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  • Nonwestern, Minority and Female Authors

 * Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Invisible Man, Ralph Elliso
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
• Native Son, Richard Wright
• My Antonia, Willa Cather
• ✔ Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
• ✔ Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Biography, History and Social Theory
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
  • ✔ The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
  • ✔ The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  • The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine
  • The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
• Philosophy and Religion
  • The Stranger, Albert Camus
  • ✔ The Bible
  • Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Edith Hamilton
  • Confessions, Saint Augustine
  • ✔ Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
  • Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
  • ✔ Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  • The Art of Happiness, The Dalai Lama:
  • The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
  • The Golden Bough, James George Frazer
• Drama and Poetry
  • Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
  • The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekov
  • ✔ The Divine Comedy, Dante
  • The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
  • ✔ Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  • Paradise Lost, John Milton
  • The Misanthrope, Moliere
  • Faust, Johann von Goethe
  • ✔ A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
  • Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht
• Science and Mathematics
  • Origin of Species, Charles Darwin:
  • A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond
  • Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
  • The Double Helix, James D. Watson
  • A River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins
  • The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
  • Principia Mathematica, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
• Art
  • Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
  • The Lives of the Artists, Vasari
  • On Painting, Alberti
  • Poetics, Aristotle
  • Art and Illusion, Ernest H. Gombrich
• Miscellaneous
  • ✔ Walden, Henry David Thoreau
  • The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell:
  • The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
  • ✔ The Art of War, Sun Tzu
  • Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud