Great books  

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Great Books refers to a curriculum and a book list. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:

• the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
• the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit;
• the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.

--(Adler, "Second Look", pg 142)

Sample list

Any recommended set of great books is expected to change with the times, as reflected in the following statement by Robert Hutchins:

"In the course of history... new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation."

The following is an example list from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. (1940, 1972)

1. Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus: Tragedies
4. Sophocles: Tragedies
5. Herodotus: Histories
6. Euripides: Tragedies
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedies
10. Plato: Dialogues
11. Aristotle: Works
12. Epicurus: "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoecus"
13. Euclid: The Elements
14. Archimedes: Works
15. Apollonius: The Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Works
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Works
19. Horace: Works
20. Livy: The History of Rome
21. Ovid: Works
22. Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Works
28. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus: The Enneads
32. St. Augustine: "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; "On Christian Doctrine"
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; The Divine Comedy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
48. William Gilbert: On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser: "Prothalamion"; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; The New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler: The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Molière: Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
63. John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; "Monadology"
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift: "A Tale of a Tub"; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; "A Modest Proposal"
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: "Essay on Criticism"; "The Rape of the Lock"; "Essay on Man"
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English Nation, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", Dictionary, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets
76. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, On Political Economy, Emile, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
80. 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
81. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
87. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
88. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
89. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit; The Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
90. William Wordsworth: Poems
91. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
92. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
93. Carl von Clausewitz: On War
94. Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; Stendhal
95. Lord Byron: Don Juan
96. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
97. Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
98. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
99. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
100. Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
101. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Essays, Journal
102. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
103. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
104. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; "Utilitarianism"; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
105. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
106. Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
107. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
108. Henry David Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience"; Walden
109. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Capital; The Communist Manifesto
110. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
111. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
112. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
113. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
114. Henrik Ibsen: Plays
115. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
116. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
117. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
118. Henry James: The American (novel); The Ambassadors
119. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
120. Jules Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
121. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
122. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
123. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
124. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
125. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; The Theory of Inquiry
126. Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
127. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
128. Lenin: The State and Revolution
129. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (the revised translation is In Search of Lost Time; the original French title is À la recherche du temps perdu)
130. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
131. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
132. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
133. James Joyce: "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
134. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
135. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
136. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
137. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
138. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; Cancer Ward

See also

Classic book