Elle's Classics List

[Elle]

Books to Read:

Classical

Aesop, Fables
Aeschylus, Oresteia
Aristophanes, Clouds
Aristotle, Nichomachean; Politics SS
[Cicero], Ad Herennium
Cicero, On Friendship; On Duties; De Oratore
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Epictetus, Manual; Discourses
Euripides, Medea, Baccahe, Alcestis
Hesiod, Theogony; Works and Days
Herodotus, The Histories* SS
Homer, Iliad; Odyssey
Horace, Odes
Isocrates, Antidosis
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews
Livy, History of Rome* SS
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Petronius, Satyricon
Plato, Republic SS; Apology and Crito; Gorgias and Phaedrus
Plotinus, Enneads
Plutarch, Lives* (at least two)
Quintilian, Institiuto Oratoria
Sappho W, Poems
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Antigone; Oedipus at Colonus
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars
Tacitus, Annals
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War SS
Virgil, Aeneid
Xenophon, Hellenica; Anabasis SS

Early Christian and Medieval

Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion; Why God Became Man
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae*
Augustine, Confessions; City of God*; On Free Choice of the Will
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Beowulf
Boccaccio, Decameron*
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
Chanson de Roland
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales*, Troilus and Criseyde
Chretien de Troyes, Yvain; Erec and Enide
Christine de Pisan W, Book of the City of the Ladies
Anna Comnena W, Alexiad
Dante, Divine Comedy*
Eusebius, History of the Church from Christ to Constantine
Gottfied von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde
Guillaume de Lorris/Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose
Heloise W, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Julian of Norwich W, Showings
William Langland, Piers Plowman
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur*
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince SS
Mabinogian
Marie de France W, Lais
Moses Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed
Nibelungenlied
Nicolas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance; Poema del Cid
Sagas of the Old Norse, Njal’s Saga; Laxdoela Saga
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda; Egil’s Saga
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings

Renaissance and Reformation

Ariosto, Orlando Furioso*
Jean Calvin, Institutes
Castiglione, The Courtier*
Cellini, Autobiography
Marguerite de Naveree W, Heptameron
Erasmus, In Praise of Folly; Enchiridion; On the Free Will; De Copia;
Guicciardini, The History of Italy
George Herbert, The Temple
The Holy Bible (King James version)
Martin Luther, Three Treatises; The Bondage of the Will
Machiavelli, The Prince; Discourses on Livy; The Art of War
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
John Milton, Paradise Regained
Montaigne, Essays*
Sir Thomas More, Utopia
Petrarca, Canzoniere*; My Secret; selected letters including “Ascent of Mt. Ventoux"
Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
Rabelais, Gargantua; Pantagruel
Shakespeare, Sonnets; Hamlet; King Lear
Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet
Shakespeare; The Tempest
Mary Sidney W, The Psalms
Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella; The Defense of Poesy
Spenser, The Faerie Queene*
Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered
William Tyndale, The New Testament in English
Lady Mary Wroth W, The Countess of Montgomerys Urania

17th and 18th Centuries

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning; Essays
Aphra Behn W, Oroonoko
Jeremy Bentham, “Utilitarianism" and two other essays
George Berkeley, Three Dialogues; Querist; Analyst
James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
Anne Bradstreet, Works
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Works
Lope de Vega, The Widow from Valencia
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
Oaludah Equiano, Narrative
John Donne; Songs and Sonnets; Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Dryden, any two poems
Jonathan Edwards, Works
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones; Joseph Andrews
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Essays
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
Samuel Johnson, Preface to Dictionary, three periodical essays, and The Vanity of Human Wishes (all listed works)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Mme. de La Fayette W, The Princess of Cleves
John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding
James Madison, et. al., The Federalist Papers; U.S. Constitution
John Milton, Paradise Lost; Areopagitica
Moliere, The Misanthrope, The Imaginary Invalid
Charles Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Crisis
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
Alexander Pope, Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
Joshua Reynolds, Discourses
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions; Social Contract
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Voltaire, Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
George Washington, "Farewell Address"
Mary Wollstonecraft W, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Romanticism and 19th Century

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
Jane Austen , Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, Emma
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Baudelaire, Fleur du Mal
William Blake; Songs of Innocence/Songs of Experience
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Robert Browning, three dramatic monologues
Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Lord Byron, Don Juan; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Anna Julia Cooper W, A Voice From the South
Mary Chestnut W, Mary Chestnut’s Civil War
Kate Chopin W, The Awakening
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner; “Kubla Khan" and two other poems
Honore de Balzac, La Comedie humaine*
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Emily Dickinson, Poems
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Emile Durkheim, Suicide
George Eliot W, Middlemarch; Adam Bede
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar"; Nature
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Elizabeth Gaskell W, North and South
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, Faust II
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne, any two stories
G.F.W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind; Philosophy of History SS
Friedrich Holderlin, any three poems
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House; Hedda Gabler; Wild Duck
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, “The Beast in the Jungle"
Sarah Orne Jewett W, Country of the Pointed Firs
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn" and two other poems
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Sickness Unto Death
Thomas B. Macaulay, History of England
T.R. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics
Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto; Capital
Guy de Maupassant, short stories
Herman Melville, Moby Dick; Billy Budd, “The Confidence Man"
J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism SS; Principles of Political Economy
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Birth of Tragedy
Edgar Allen Poe, complete poems or short stories
David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
Christina Rossetti, Works
Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Walter Scott, Waverly, Ivanhoe
Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Percy Bysshe Shelley, three poems; Defense of Poetry
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses and two other poems; In Memoriam
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Civil Disobedience
Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna Karenina
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Invisible Man
Oscar Wilde, any play
William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality" and two other poems; The Prelude*
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass*; Song of Myself

[Elle]

20th and 21st Centuries

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Isabel Allende W, House of Spirits
Rudolph Anaya, Bless Me Ultima
W.H. Auden, Collected Works
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones; Labyrinths
Vera Brittain W, Testament of Youth
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Pearl Buck W, The Good Earth
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Albert Camus, The Stranger; The Plague
Willa Cather W, My Antonia; Death Comes for the Archbishop
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim
Julio Cortazar, Blow Up and Other Stories; Hopscotch
Annie Dillard W, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy
Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Four Quartets
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom, “The Bear" and two other stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Robert Frost, Collected Works
Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum; Dog Years
Rayna Greed, ed., That’s What She Said
Alex Haley, Roots
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics; Being and Time
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; The Glass Bead Game
Langston Hughes, selected poems
Zora Neale Hurston W, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
William James, Pluralism; The Will to Believe
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Franz Kafka, The Castle
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail"
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
C.S. Lewis, any one of the following: Till We Have Faces; The Great Divorce; The Screwtape Letters; Surprised by Joy; Mere Christianity; Miracles
Primo Levi, If this is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz)
Mario Vargas Llosa, The War at the End of the World
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice; Magic Mountain
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses; The Road
Lydia Minatoya W, The Strangeness of Beauty
Toni Morrison W, Song of Solomon; Beloved
Fae Myenne Ng, Bone
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Flannery O’Connor, any two short stories
Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle; Silences
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Wilfred Owen, any four poems
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
Pablo Neruda, any collection
Marcel Pagnol, My Father’s Glory; My Mother’s Castle
Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country CC
Katherine Anne Porter W, Pale Horse; Pale Rider; Ship of Fools
Marcel Proust, Any novel from Remembrance of Things Past
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus; Duino Elegies
Marilynne Robinson W, Gilead; Home; Housekeeping
Jose Saramago, Memoir of the Convent; Blindness
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Wallace Stevens, Collected Works
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
Laurel Thather Ulrich W, A Midwife’s Tale; Good Wives
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Derek Walcott, Omeros; any three poems
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding; any two short stories
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; Age of Innocence
Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature
Tennessee Williams, any play
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; A Room of One’s Own
Richard Wright, Black Boy
Elie Wiesel, Night
William Butler Yeats, any four poems

Non-Western Traditions

Native American

John Bierhorst, ed. Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature
John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
James Welch, Fools Crow
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Louise Erdrich, Tracks
James Treat, Native and Christian
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit; Solar Storms

China

Lao Tzu, Tao-te Ching
Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Selections from the Grand Historian (Watson translation)
Li Po and Tu Fu, selected poems
Confucius, Analects
Ts’ao Hsueh-Chin (Cao Xueqin), Story of the Stone (Dream of Red Mansions)*
Shui hu chuan (All Men Are Brothers, Pearl Buck translation)
Cheng’en Wu, The Monkey*
Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Sun Tzu, Art of War

Japan

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji*
Donald L. Phillipi, Songs of God, Songs of Humans (Ainu epic)
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book
Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility*
Kamo-no-Chomei, Hojoki
Heike Monogatari
Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World; Kokoro
Endo Shusaki, Silence or Deep River
Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain
Kawabata Yasunari, Snow Country

Korea

Anthology of Korean Literature: From Early Times to the Nineteenth Century (Lee, ed.)
Richard Kim, Names
Kang Sok-Kyong, The Valley Nearby

Islam

Ghazzali, Al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: The Alchemy of Happiness
Nizami, The Story of Layla and Majnun
Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat
The Qur’an
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah
Naguib Mahfouz, Three Novels of Ancient Egypt
Rumi, Spiritual Couplets
Vyasa, Mahabharata
Asvaghosha, Buddha-karita (The Life of Buddha)
Jhumpa Lahiri W, Interpreter of Maladies

Africa

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Mongo Beti, The Poor Christ of Bomba
Buchi Emecheta, Head Above Water
Chiekh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross
Wole Soyinka, The Interpreters

India

Chandogya Upanished
Valmiki, Ramayana*
Dhammapada
Kalidasa, Shakuntala
The Rig Veda
Mahatma Gandhi, Autobiography
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

[Liz]

Woot! It's a great list isn't it? I was so happy to find it. Good luck making your way through it!