this is literally a canon of western canons. compiled from these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon#Examples) will add ebook/pdf links when I can find them

From the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade

• Honoré de Balzac
• Émile Zola
• Victor Hugo
• Marcel Proust
• Stendhal
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Paul Éluard
• Saint-Simon
• Guillaume Apollinaire
• Gustave Flaubert
• George Sand
• Charles Baudelaire
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Blaise Pascal
• Henry de Montherlant
• Jean Giono
• Paul Verlaine
• Albert Camus
• Voltaire
• Colette
• André Gide
• André Malraux
• Guy de Maupassant
• François-René de Chateaubriand
• the writers of the French Revolution (Montesquieu, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Marivaux, Beaumarchais)
• Lewis Carroll
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Jacques Prévert
• Gérard de Nerval
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• William Faulkner
• Oscar Wilde
• Louis Aragon
• Julien Green
• Jorge Luis Borges
• the works found in La Nouvelle Revue Française
• Marcel Aymé
• Raymond Queneau
• Georges Simenon
• Denis Diderot
• The Book of One Thousand and One Nights
• Jean Cocteau
• Montaigne
• André Breton
• the Holy Grail works (Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Rober de Boron, the Vulgate Cycle, Thomas Malory)
• Molière
• Paul Claudel
• Jules Verne
• Blaise Cendrars

Directed Studies at Yale University Literature

• Homer
• Greek Lyric Poets (probably Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Pindar, Sappho, Simonides, Stesichorus)
• Catullus
• Horace
• Sophocles
• Aeschylus
• Euripides
• Virgil
• selections from the Bible (probably Genesis, Exodus, Job, the Gospels, Romans)
• Dante
• Troubador poetry (probably Bernart de Ventadorn, Giraut de Bornelh, Bertran de Born)
• Petrarch
• Cervantes
• Shakespeare
• Milton
• Wordsworth
• Goethe
• Flaubert
• Tolstoy
• Proust
• Eliot
• Stevens

Philosophy

• Plato
• Aristotle
• Lucretius
• Sextus Empiricus
• Augustine
• Anselm
• Thomas Aquinas
• Descartes
• Leibniz
• George Berkeley
• David Hume
• Kant
• John Stuart Mill
• Kierkegaard
• Nietzsche
• Nelson Goodman

"Great Books" according to Wikipedia and the novel How to Read a Book

• 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 – Conics
• Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
• Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
• Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
• Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
• Livy – History of Rome
• Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
• Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
• Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
• Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
• Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
• Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
• Ptolemy – Almagest
• Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds; Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead)
• 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 Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
• The Song of Roland
• The Saga of Burnt Njál
• Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
• St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
• Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; Divine Comedy
• Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
• Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
• Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
• Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
• Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
• Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
• Thomas More – Utopia
• Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
• François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
• John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
• Michel de Montaigne – Essays
• William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
• Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
• Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
• Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
• William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
• Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
• Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
• William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
• Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
• Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philsophy
• René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
• Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
• John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes)
• Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
• Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
• Boyle – The Sceptical Chemist
• Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
• Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
• John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah))
• Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
• Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
• Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
• William Congreve – The Way of the World
• George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
• Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
• Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
• Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
• Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
• Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
• David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile; The Social Contract; Confessions
• Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
• Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
• William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
• Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
• Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
• James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
• Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
• Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
• Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
• Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
• John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
• Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
• William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ); Biographia Literaria
• David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
• Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
• Carl von Clausewitz – On War
• Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
• François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
• Lord Byron – Don Juan
• Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
• Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
• Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
• Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
• Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
• Honoré de Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
• 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; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
• Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
• William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis)
• Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
• Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
• George Boole – The Laws of Thought
• Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
• George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
• Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
• Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
• Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
• Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
• Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
• Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder)
• Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; "What Is Art?"; Twenty-Three Tales
• Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
• Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
• Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Mysterious Stranger
• Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
• Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
• William Sumner – Folkways
• Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
• William James – Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
• Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
• Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
• Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
• Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays to the Theory of Sex; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; 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; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
• Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
• George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places
• Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
• Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past)
• Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; 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 Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; 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; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; 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; Cancer Ward

from Great Books of the Western World

• Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)

The Iliad The Odyssey

• Aeschylus (translated into English verse by G.M. Cookson)

The Suppliant Maidens The Persians Seven Against Thebes Prometheus Bound The Oresteia Agamemnon Choephoroe The Eumenides

• Sophocles (translated into English prose by Sir Richard C. Jebb)

The Oedipus Cycle Oedipus the King Oedipus at Colonus Antigone Ajax Electra The Trachiniae Philoctetes

• Euripides (translated into English prose by Edward P. Coleridge)

Rhesus Medea Hippolytus Alcestis Heracleidae The Suppliants Trojan Women Ion Helen Andromache Electra Bacchantes Hecuba Heracles Mad Phoenician Women Orestes Iphigeneia in Tauris Iphigeneia at Aulis Cyclops

• Aristophanes (translated into English verse by Benjamin Bickley Rogers)

The Acharnians The Knights The Clouds The Wasps Peace The Birds The Frogs Lysistrata Thesmophoriazusae Ecclesiazousae Plutus

• Herodotus

The History (translated by George Rawlinson)

• Thucydides

History of the Peloponnesian War (translated by Richard Crawley and revised by R. Feetham)

• Plato

The Dialogues (translated by Benjamin Jowett) Charmides Lysis Laches Protagoras Euthydemus Cratylus Phaedrus Ion Symposium Meno Euthyphro Apology Crito Phaedo Gorgias The Republic Timaeus Critias Parmenides Theaetetus Sophist Statesman Philebus Laws The Seventh Letter (translated by J. Harward)

• Aristotle

Categories On Interpretation Prior Analytics Posterior Analytics Topics Sophistical Refutations Physics On the Heavens On Generation and Corruption Meteorology Metaphysics On the Soul Minor biological works

• Aristotle

History of Animals Parts of Animals On the Motion of Animals On the Gait of Animals On the Generation of Animals Nicomachean Ethics Politics The Athenian Constitution Rhetoric Poetics

• Hippocrates

Works

• Galen

On the Natural Faculties

• Euclid

The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements

• Archimedes

On the Sphere and Cylinder Measurement of a Circle On Conoids and Spheroids On Spirals On the Equilibrium of Planes The Sand Reckoner The Quadrature of the Parabola On Floating Bodies Book of Lemmas The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems

• Apollonius of Perga

On Conic Sections

• Nicomachus of Gerasa

Introduction to Arithmetic

• Lucretius

On the Nature of Things (translated by H.A.J. Munro)

• Epictetus

The Discourses (translated by George Long)

• Marcus Aurelius

The Meditations (translated by George Long)

• Virgil

Eclogues Georgics Aeneid

• Plutarch

The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

• P. Cornelius Tacitus (translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb)

The Annals The Histories

• Ptolemy

Almagest, part 1 (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)

• Nicolaus Copernicus

On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)

• Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)

Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V) The Harmonies of the World (Book V)

• Plotinus

The Six Enneads

• Augustine of Hippo

The Confessions The City of God On Christian Doctrine

• Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)

• Dante Alighieri

The Divine Comedy (Translated by Charles Eliot Norton)

• Geoffrey Chaucer

Troilus and Criseyde The Canterbury Tales

• Niccolò Machiavelli

The Prince

• Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan

• François Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel

• Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Essays

• William Shakespeare

The First Part of King Henry the Sixth The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth The Tragedy of Richard the Third The Comedy of Errors Titus Andronicus The Taming of the Shrew The Two Gentlemen of Verona Love's Labour's Lost Romeo and Juliet The Tragedy of King Richard the Second A Midsummer Night's Dream The Life and Death of King John The Merchant of Venice The First Part of King Henry the Fourth The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth Much Ado About Nothing The Life of King Henry the Fifth Julius Caesar As You Like It Twelfth Night; or, What You Will The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark The Merry Wives of Windsor Troilus and Cressida All's Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure Othello, the Moor of Venice King Lear Macbeth Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Timon of Athens Pericles, Prince of Tyre Cymbeline The Winter's Tale The Tempest The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth Sonnets

• William Gilbert

On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies

• Galileo Galilei

Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences

• William Harvey

On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals On the Circulation of Blood On the Generation of Animals

• Miguel de Cervantes

The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha

• Sir Francis Bacon

The Advancement of Learning Novum Organum New Atlantis

• René Descartes

Rules for the Direction of the Mind Discourse on the Method Meditations on First Philosophy Objections Against the Meditations and Replies The Geometry

• Benedict de Spinoza

Ethics

• John Milton

English Minor Poems Paradise Lost Samson Agonistes Areopagitica

• Blaise Pascal

The Provincial Letters Pensées Scientific and mathematical essays

• Sir Isaac Newton

Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy Optics

• Christian Huygens

Treatise on Light

• John Locke

A Letter Concerning Toleration Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

• George Berkeley

The Principles of Human Knowledge

• David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

• Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels

• Laurence Sterne

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

• Henry Fielding

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

• Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

The Spirit of the Laws

• Jean Jacques Rousseau

A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality A Discourse on Political Economy The Social Contract

• Adam Smith

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

• Edward Gibbon

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 1) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 2)

• Immanuel Kant

Critique of Pure Reason Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals Critique of Practical Reason Excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals The Science of Right The Critique of Judgement

• American State Papers

Declaration of Independence Articles of Confederation The Constitution of the United States of America

• Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

The Federalist

• John Stuart Mill

On Liberty Considerations on Representative Government Utilitarianism

• James Boswell

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

• Antoine Laurent Lavoisier

Elements of Chemistry

• Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier

Analytical Theory of Heat

• Michael Faraday

Experimental Researches in Electricity

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Philosophy of Right The Philosophy of History

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Faust

• Herman Melville

Moby Dick; or, The Whale

• Charles Darwin

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

• Karl Marx

Capital

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Manifesto of the Communist Party

• Count Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

• Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov

• William James

The Principles of Psychology

• Sigmund Freud

The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis Selected Papers on Hysteria The Sexual Enlightenment of Children The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy Observations on "Wild" Psycho-Analysis The Interpretation of Dreams On Narcissism Instincts and Their Vicissitudes Repression The Unconscious A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis Beyond the Pleasure Principle Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego The Ego and the Id Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety Thoughts for the Times on War and Death Civilization and Its Discontents New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis Second Edition The pre-20th century books added (volume numbering is not strictly compatible with the first edition due to rearrangement of some books):

• John Calvin

Institutes of the Christian Religion (Selections)

• Erasmus

The Praise of Folly

• Molière

The School for Wives The Critique of the School for Wives Tartuffe Don Juan The Miser The Would-Be Gentleman The Imaginary Invalid

• Jean Racine

Bérénice Phèdre

• Voltaire

Candide

• Denis Diderot

Rameau's Nephew

• Søren Kierkegaard

Fear and Trembling

• Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

• Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America

• Honoré de Balzac

Cousin Bette

• Jane Austen

Emma

• George Eliot

Middlemarch

• Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit

• Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn

• Henrik Ibsen

A Doll's House The Wild Duck Hedda Gabler The Master Builder The six volumes of 20th century material consisted of the following:

• William James

Pragmatism

• Henri Bergson

An Introduction to Metaphysics

• John Dewey

Experience and Education

• Alfred North Whitehead

Science and the Modern World

• Bertrand Russell

The Problems of Philosophy

• Martin Heidegger

What Is Metaphysics?

• Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophical Investigations

• Karl Barth

The Word of God and the Word of Man

• Henri Poincaré

Science and Hypothesis

• Max Planck

Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers

• Alfred North Whitehead

An Introduction to Mathematics

• Albert Einstein

Relativity: The Special and the General Theory

• Arthur Eddington

The Expanding Universe

• Niels Bohr

Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (selections) Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology

• G. H. Hardy

A Mathematician's Apology

• Werner Heisenberg

Physics and Philosophy

• Erwin Schrödinger

What Is Life?

• Theodosius Dobzhansky

Genetics and the Origin of Species

• C. H. Waddington

The Nature of Life

• Thorstein Veblen

The Theory of the Leisure Class

• R. H. Tawney

The Acquisitive Society

• John Maynard Keynes

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

• Sir James George Frazer

The Golden Bough (selections)

• Max Weber

Essays in Sociology (selections)

• Johan Huizinga

The Autumn of the Middle Ages

• Claude Lévi-Strauss

Structural Anthropology (selections)

• Henry James

The Beast in the Jungle

• George Bernard Shaw

Saint Joan

• Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

• Anton Chekhov

Uncle Vanya

• Luigi Pirandello

Six Characters in Search of an Author

• Marcel Proust

Remembrance of Things Past: "Swann in Love"

• Willa Cather

A Lost Lady

• Thomas Mann

Death in Venice

• James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

• Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse

• Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis

• D. H. Lawrence

The Prussian Officer

• T. S. Eliot

The Waste Land

• Eugene O'Neill

Mourning Becomes Electra

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

• William Faulkner

A Rose for Emily

• Bertolt Brecht

Mother Courage and Her Children

• Ernest Hemingway

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

• George Orwell

Animal Farm

• Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot

From the Harvard Classics (the order of this canon is pretty ratchet tbh)

• His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin
• The Journal of John Woolman, by John Woolman (1774 and subsequent editions)
• Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
• The Apology, Phaedo, and Crito, by Plato
• The Golden Sayings, by Epictetus
• The Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
• Essays, Civil and Moral, and New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon
• Areopagitica and Tractate of Education, by John Milton
• Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
• Complete poems written in English, by John Milton
• Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Poems and songs, by Robert Burns
• The Confessions, by Saint Augustine
• The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas á Kempis
• Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Furies, and Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus
• Oedipus the King and Antigone, by Sophocles
• Hippolytus and The Bacchae, by Euripides
• The Frogs, by Aristophanes
• On Friendship, On Old Age, and letters, by Cicero
• Letters, by Pliny the Younger
• The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
• The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
• Lives, by Plutarch
• Aeneid, by Virgil
• Don Quixote, part 1, by Cervantes
• The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan
• The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton
• Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
• Fables, by Aesop
• Children's and Household Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
• Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen
• All for Love, by John Dryden
• The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
• She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith
• The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, by Robert Browning
• Manfred, by Lord Byron
• Faust, part 1, Egmont, and Hermann and Dorothea, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Dr. Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
• The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
• I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni
• The Odyssey, by Homer
• Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
• On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, and A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke
• Autobiography and On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
• Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, and Sir Walter Scott, by Thomas Carlyle
• Life is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
• Polyeucte, by Pierre Corneille
• Phèdre, by Jean Racine
• Tartuffe, by Molière
• Minna von Barnhelm, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
• William Tell, by Friedrich von Schiller
• ENGLISH ESSAYS: SIDNEY TO MACAULAY (??)
• The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
• The Forces of Matter and The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday
• On the Conservation of Force and Ice and Glaciers, by Hermann von Helmholtz
• The Wave Theory of Light and The Tides, by Lord Kelvin
• The Extent of the Universe, by Simon Newcomb
• Geographical Evolution, by Sir Archibald Geikie
• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
• Essays, by Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
• Montaigne and What is a Classic?, by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
• The Poetry of the Celtic Races, by Ernest Renan
• The Education of the Human Race, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
• Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, by Friedrich von Schiller
• Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, by Immanuel Kant
• Byron and Goethe, by Giuseppe Mazzini
• An account of Egypt from The Histories, by Herodotus
• Germany, by Tacitus
• Sir Francis Drake Revived, by Philip Nichols
• Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World, by Francis Pretty
• Drake's Great Armada, by Captain Walter Bigges
• Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland, by Edward Haies
• The Discovery of Guiana, by Sir Walter Raleigh
• Discourse on Method, by René Descartes
• Letters on the English, by Voltaire
• On the Inequality among Mankind and Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, by Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
• Chronicles, by Jean Froissart
• The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory
• A Description of Elizabethan England, by William Harrison
• The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli
• The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper
• Utopia, by Sir Thomas More
• The Ninety-Five Theses, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and On the Freedom of a Christian, by Martin Luther
• Some Thoughts Concerning Education, by John Locke
• Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, by George Berkeley
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
• The Oath of Hippocrates
• Journeys in Diverse Places, by Ambroise Paré
• On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey
• The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox, by Edward Jenner
• The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
• On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, by Joseph Lister
• Scientific papers, by Louis Pasteur
• Scientific papers, by Charles Lyell
• ENGLISH POETRY 1: CHAUCER TO GRAY
• ENGLISH POETRY 2: COLLINS TO FITZGERALD
• ENGLISH POETRY 3: TENNYSON TO WHITMAN
• Confucian: The sayings of Confucius
• Hebrew: Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes
• Christian I: Luke and Acts
• Christian II: Corinthians I and II and hymns
• Buddhist: Writings (??)
• Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita
• Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran
• Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe
• Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
• The Shoemaker's Holiday, by Thomas Dekker
• The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson
• Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher
• The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster
• A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger
• Thoughts, letters, and minor works, by Blaise Pascal
• Beowulf
• The Song of Roland
• The Destruction of Dá Derga's Hostel
• The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

• Albert Camus- The Stranger, The Outsider
• Marcel Proust- In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past
• Franz Kafka- The Trial
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry- The Little Prince
• André Malraux- Man's Fate (1933)
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline- Journey to the End of Night (1932)
• John Steinbeck- The Grapes of Wrath
• Ernest Hemingway- For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Alain-Fournier- Le Grand Meaulnes
• Boris Vian- Froth on the Daydream
• Simone de Beauvoir- The Second Sex
• Samuel Beckett- Waiting for Godot
• Jean-Paul Sartre- Being and Nothingness
• Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- The Gulag Archipelago
• Jacques Prévert- Paroles
• Guillaume Apollinaire- Alcools
• Hergé- The Blue Lotus (can we just take a minute to appreciate the existence of this book on this list) (praise)
• Anne Frank- The Diary of a Young Girl
• Claude Lévi-Strauss- Tristes Tropiques
• Aldous Huxley- Brave New World
• George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-Four
• René Groscinny & Albert Uderzo- Asterix the Gaul (also this)
• Eugène Ionesco- The Bald Soprano
• Sigmund Freud- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
• Marguerite Yourcenar- The Abyss, Zeno of Bruges
• Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita
• James Joyce- Ulysses
• Dino Buzzati- The Tartar Steppe
• André Gide- The Counterfeiters
• Jean Giono- The Horseman on the Roof
• Albert Cohen- Belle du Seigneur
• Gabriel García Márquez- One Hundred Years of Solitude
• William Faulkner- The Sound and the Fury
• François Mauriac- Thérèse Desqueyroux
• Raymond Queneau- Zazie in the Metro
• Stefan Zweig- Confusion of Feelings
• Margaret Mitchell- Gone with the Wind
• D. H. Lawrence- Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Thomas Mann- The Magic Mountain
• Françoise Sagan- Bonjour Tristesse
• Vercors- Le Silence de la mer
• Georges Perec- Life: A User's Manual
• Arthur Conan Doyle- The Hound of the Baskervilles
• Georges Bernanos- Under the Sun of Satan
• F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
• Milan Kundera- The Joke
• Alberto Moravia- A Ghost at Noon, Contempt
• Agatha Christie- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
• André Breton- Nadja
• Louis Aragon- Aurelien
• Paul Claudel- The Satin Slipper
• Luigi Pirandello- Six Characters in Search of an Author
• Bertolt Brecht- The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
• Michel Tournier- Friday
• H.G. Wells- The War of the Worlds
• Primo Levi- If This Is a Man, Survival in Auschwitz
• J.R.R. Tolkien- The Lord of the Rings
• Colette- Les Vrilles de la Vigne
• Paul Ėluard- Capital of Pain
• Jack London- Martin Eden
• Hugo Pratt- Ballad of the Salt Sea
• Roland Barthes- Writing Degree Zero
• Heinrich Böll- The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
• Julien Gracq- The Opposing Shore
• Michel Foucault- The Order of Things
• Jack Kerouac- On the Road
• Selma Lagerlöf- The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
• Virginia Woolf- A Room of One's Own
• Ray Bradbury- The Martian Chronicles
• Marguerite Duras- The Ravishing of Lol Stein
• J.M.G. Le Clézio- The Interrogation
• Nathalie Sarraute- Tropisms
• Jules Renard- Journal, 1887-1910
• Jospeh Conrad- Lord Jim
• Jacques Lacan- Écrits
• Antonin Artaud- The Theatre and its Double
• John Dos Passos- Manhattan Transfer
• Jorge Luis Borges- Ficciones
• Blaise Cendrars- Moravagine
• Ismail Kadare- The General of the Dead Army
• William Styron- Sophie's Choice
• Federico García Lorca- Gypsy Ballads
• Georges Simenon- The Strange Case of Peter the Lett
• Jean Genet- Our Lady of the Flowers
• Robert Musil- The Man Without Qualities
• René Char- Furor and Mystery
• J.D. Salinger- The Catcher in the Rye
• James Hadley Chase- No Orchids For Miss Blandish
• Edgar P. Jacobs- Blake and Mortimer
• Rainer Maria Rilke- The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
• Michel Butor- Second Thoughts
• Hannah Arendt- The Burden of Our Time, The Origins of Totalitarianism
• Mikhail Bulgakov- The Master and Margarita
• Henry Miller- The Rosy Crucifixion
• Raymond Chandler- The Big Sleep
• Saint-John Perse- Amers
• André Franquin- Gaston, Gomer Goof
• Malcolm Lowry- Under the Volcano
• Salman Rushdie- Midnight's Children