Reading the Classics

Welcome! The classics club invites you to read along with us through the classic writers and thinkers of the world. For more information, see "Our Mission" on the left side of this blog. This project uses in part the book The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. We will be adding a few authors, maybe taking a few out, but we hope we will cover anything worthy of attention. It should be noted that we may not agree with everything listed as reading material, but we feel it is important to know the information that has shaped the world we live in. I hope you will leave comments and enjoy learning with us!

Part One

1. Anonymous, 2000 B.C., The Epic of Gilgamesh.
2. Homer, 800 B.C., The Iliad.
3. Homer, 800 B.C., The Odessy.
   
4. Confucius, 551-479 B.C., The Analects.
   
5. Aeschylus, 525-456 B.C., The Oresteia.
6. Sophocles, 496-406 B.C., Oedupus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone.
   
7. Euripedes, 484-406 B.C., Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Electra, The Bacchae.
   
8. Herodotus, 484-425 B.C., The Histories.
   
9. Thucydides, 470/460-400 B.C., The History of the Peloponnesian War.
   
10. Sun-tzu, 450-380 B.C., The Art of War.
    
11. Aristphanes, 448-388 B.C., Lysistrata, The Clouds, The Birds.
    
12. Plato, 428-348 B.C. Selected Works.
13. Aristotle, 384-322 B.C., Ethics, Politics, Poetics.
    
14. Mencius, 400-320 B.C., The Book of Mencius.
    
15. Attributed to Valmiki, 300 B.C., The Ramayana.
    
16. Attributed to Vyasa, 200 B.C., The Mahabharata.
    
17. Anonymous, 200 B.C., The Bhagavad Gita.
    
18. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 145-86 B.C., Records of the Grand Historian.
19. Lucretius, 100 B.C., Of the Nature of Things.
20. Virgil, 70-19 B.C., The Aeneid.
    
21. Marcus Aurelius, 121-180, Meditations.
    

Part Two

1. Saint Augustine, 354-430, The Confessions.
2. Kalidasa, 400, The Cloud Messenger and Sakuntala.
   
3. Revealed to Muhummad, 650, The Koran.
4. Hui-neng, 638-713, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
5. Firdausi, 940-1020, Shah Nameh.
   
6. Sei Shonagon, 965-1035, The Pillow-Book.
   
7. Lady Murasaki, 976-1015, The Tale of Genji.
   
8. Omar Khayyam, 1048-?, The Rubaiyat.
   
9. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321, The Divine Comedy.
   
10. Luo Kuan-chung, 1330-1400, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
    
11. Geoffrey Chaucer, 1342-1400, The Canterbury Tales.
    
12. Anonymous, 1500, The Thousand and One Nights.
    
13. Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527, The Prince.
    
14. Francois Rabelais, 1483-1553, Gargantua and Pantagruel.
    
15. Attributed to Wu Ch'eng-en, 1500-1582, Journey to the West.
    
16. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592, Selected Essays.
17. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 1547-1616, Don Quixote.
    

Part Three

1. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, Complete Works.
2. John Donne, 1573-1631, Selected Works.
3. Anonymous, published 1618, The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P'ing Mei).
   
4. Galileo Galilei, 1574-1642, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
   
5. Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, Levianthan.
   
6. Rene Descartes, 1596-1650, Discourse on Method.
   
7. John Milton, 1608-1674, Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica.
   
8. Moliere, 1622-1673, Selected Plays.
9. Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, Thoughts (Pensees).
   
10. John Bunyan, 1628-1688, Pilgrim's Progress.
    
11. John Locke, 1632-1704, Second Treatise of Government.
    
12. Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
    
13. Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731, Robinson Crusoe.
    
14. Jonathon Swift, 1667-1745, Gulliver's Travels.
    
15. Voltaire, 1694-1778, Candide and other works.
16. David Hume, 1711-1776, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
    
17. Henry Fielding, 1707-1754, Tom Jones.
    
18. Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in, 1715-1763, The Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone).
    
19. Jean-Jacque Rousseau, 1712-1778, Confessions.
    
20. Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768, Tristram Shandy.
    
21. James Boswell, 1740-1795, The Life of Samuel Johnson.
    
22. Thomas Jefferson and others, Basic Documents in American History.
23. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, 1787.

Part Four

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832, Faust.
   
2. William Blake, 1757-1827, Selected Works.
3. William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
   
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia LIteraria, Writings on Shakespeare.
   
5. Jane Austen, 1775-1817, Pride and Prejudice, Emma.
   
6. Stenddhal, 1783-1842, The Red and the Black.
   
7. Honore de Balzac, 1799-1850, Pere Goriot, Eugenie, Grandet, Cousin Bette.
   
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, Selected Works.
   
9. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864, The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales.
   
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859, Democracy in America.
    
11. John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women.
    
12. Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of the Species.
    
13. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, 1809-1852, Dead Souls.
    
14. Edgar Allen Poe, 1809-1849, Short Stories and Other Works.
15. William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863, Vanity Fair.
    
16. Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit.
    
17. Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882, The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography.
    
18. Charlotte Bronte, 1816-1855, Jane Eyre.
    
19. Emily Bronte, 1818-1848, Wuthering Heights.
    
20. Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862, Walden, Civil Disobedience.
    
21. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, 1818-1883, Fathers and Sons.
    
22. Karl Marx, 1818-1883, and Freidrick Engels, 1820-1895, The Communist Manifesto.
    
23. Herman Melville, 1819-1891, Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener.
    
24. George Eliot, 1819-1880, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch.
    
25. Walt Whitman, 1819-1892, Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass, A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads.
    
26. Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880, Madame Bovary.
    
27. Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, 1821-1881, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov.
    
28. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910, War and Peace.
    
29. Henrick Ibsen, 1828-1886, Selected Plays.
    
30. Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886, Collected Poems.
    
31. Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass.
    
32. Mark Twain, 1835-1910, Huckleberry Finn.
    
33. Henry Adams, 1838-1918, The Education of Henry Adams.
    
34. Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928, The Mayor of Casterbridge.
    
35. William James, 1842-1910, The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
    
36. Henry James, 1843-1916, The Ambassadors.
    
37. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844-1900, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works.
    

Part Five

1. Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, Selected Works, including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Civilization and Its Discontents.
   
2. George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1939, Selected Plays and Prefaces.
3. Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, Nostromo.
   
4. Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories.
5. Edith Wharton, 1862-1937, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth.
   
6. William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography.
   
7. Natsume Soseki, 1867-1916, Kokoro.
   
8. Marcel Proust, 1871-1922, Remembrance of Things Past.
   
9. Robert Frost, 1874-1963, Collected Poems.
   
10. Thomas Mann, 1875-1955, The Magic Mountain.
    
11. E.M. Forster, 1879-1970, A Passage to India.
    
12. Lu Hsun, 1881-1936, Collected Short Stories.
13. James Joyce, 1882-1941, Ulysses.
    
14. Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves.
    
15. Franz Kafka, 1883-1924, The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories.
16. D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love.
    
17. Tanizaki Junichiro, 1886-1965, The Makioka Sisters.
    
18. Eugene O'Neill, 1888-1953, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night.
19. T.S. Eliot, 1888-1965, Collected Poems, Collected Plays.
    
20. Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, Brave New World.
    
21. William Faulkner, 1897-1962, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying.
    
22. Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, Short Stories.
    
23. Kawabata Yasunari, 1899-1972, Beauty and Sadness.
    
24. Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986, Labyrinths, Dreamtigers.
    
25. Vladimir Nabokov, 1899-1977, Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory.
    
26. George Orwell, 1903-1950, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burmese Days.
    
27. R.K. Narayan, 1906- , The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets.
    
28. Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape.
    
29. W.H. Auden, 1907-1973, Collected Poems.
    
30. Albert Camus, 1913-1960, The Plague, The Stranger.
    
31. Saul Bellow, 1915- , The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift.
    
32. Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918- , The First Circle, Cancer Ward.
    
33. Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
    
34. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1928- , One Hundred Years of Solitude.
    
35. Chinua Achebe, 1930- , Things Fall Apart.
    

Further Reading

100 other authors suggested for further reading :

1. Richard Adams
2. Kingsley Amis
3. Sherwood Anderson
4. Margaret Atwood
5. Louis Auchincloss
6. James Baldwin
7. John Barth
8. Simone de Beauvoir
9. Paul Bowles
10. Fernand Braudel
11. Berthold Brecht
12. Joseph Brodsky
13. Pearl Buck
14. Mikhail Bulgakov
15. Anthony Burgess
16. Italo Calvino
17. Truman Capote
18. Rachel Carson
19. Willa Cather
20. John Cheever
21. Robertson Davies
22. E.L. Doctorow
23. Theodore Dreiser
24. Albert Einstein
25. Ralph Ellison
26. F. Scott Fitzerald
27. Ford Madox Ford
28. William Gaddis
29. Federico Garcia Lorca
30. William Golding
31. Robert Graves
32. Graham Greene
33. Jaroslav Hasek
34. Joseph Heller
35. John Hersey
36. Lanston Hughes
37. John Irving
38. Christopher Isherwood
39. James Jones
40. Nikos Kazantzakis
41. Jack Kerouac
42. Lau Shaw (Lao She)
43. Philip Larkin
44. John LeCarre
45. Claude Levi-Strauss
46. Sinclair Lewis
47. David Lodge
48. Norman Mailer
49. Andre Malraux
50. Mary McCarthy
51. Carson MuCullers
52. Margaret Mead
53. Arthur Miller
54. Toni Morrison
55. Iris Murdoch
56. Robert Musil
57. Flannery O'Conner
58. John O'Hara
59. Jose Ortega Y Gasset
60. Boris Pasternak
61. Georges Perec
62. Harold Pinter
63. Robert Pirsig
64. Ezra Pound
65. Anthony Powell
66. Pramoedya Ananta Toer
67. V.S. Pritchett
68. Barbara Pym
69. Thomas Pynchon
70. Erich Maria Remarque
71. Rainer Maria Rilke
72. Ole Edvart Rolvaag
73. Philip Roth
74. Anatoli Rybakov
75. J.D. Salinger
76. Jean-Paul Sartre
77. Simon Schama
78. Leopold Sedar Senghor
79. Upton Sinclair
80. Isaac Bashevis Singer
81. Wole Soyinka
82. Wallace Stengner
    
83. John Steinbeck
84. Wallace Stevens
85. Lytton Strachey
86. James Thurber
87. J.R.R. Tolkien
88. William Trevor
89. John Updike
90. Gore Vidal
91. Derek Walcott
92. James D. Watson
93. Evelyn Waugh
94. Eudora Welty
95. Rebecca West
96. Patrick White
97. Thornton Wilder
98. Tennessee Williams
99. William Carlos Williams
100. Richard Wright

I add:

C.S. Lewis
Victor Hugo
Mary Shelley
Betty Smith
Leif Enger