If you are interested in developing your literary repertoire, here is a healthy list of
recommended books to read:
Early through Restoration
Gilgamesh
Plato Republic
Plato Symposium
Plato Dialogues
Aristotle Ethics
Sophocles Oedipus Trilogy
Aeschylus Oresteia
Euripides Medea
Ovid Metamorphoses
Bullfinch’s Mythology
The Bible—Old Testament, New Testament and Revelations
Langland Piers Plowman
Everyman
Chanson de Roland
The Arabian Nights (trans. Haddawy)
Hildegaarde of Bingen Visions
Sir Thomas Mallory Le Morte d’Arthur
Chrétien de Troyes Arthurian Romances
Marie de France Lais
Dante Divine Comedy
Machiavelli The Prince
More Utopia
Spenser Faerie Queene
King James VI Daemonologie
Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear (in that order)
Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, Tempest (in that order)
Marlowe Doctor Faustus
Webster Duchess of Malfi
Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
Milton Tenure of Magistrate and Kings
Milton Areopagitica
Milton Paradise Lost
Swift Gulliver’s Travels
Pope Four Quartets, Essays on Man and other poems
Congreve Way of the World
18th-modern (including some American and World)
Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe Roxana
Edmund Burke On the Sublime
Thomas Paine Common Sense
John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason
Mary Shelley Frankenstein
Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth Prelude
Baudelaire Emma Bovary
Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
Jane Austin Pride and Prejudice
Alcott Little Women
Tolstoy War and Peace
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America Books I and II
Edgar Allan Poe Collected short works and poems
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays
Henry David Thoreau Walden
Nathaniel Hawthorne Blithedale Romance
Walt Whitman Song of Myself and other poems
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Grey
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest
HG Wells War of the Worlds
Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn
Herman Melville Moby Dick
Kate Chopin The Awakening
Robert Frost Collected Poems
Arthur C. Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey
Agatha Christie And then there were none . . .
Agatha Christie Death on the Nile
Agatha Christie Murder on the Orient Express
Kurt Vonnegut MotherNight
Albert Camus The Stranger
Jean-Paul Sartre The Flies and No Exit
Thomas Laqueur Making Sex
Nabokov Lolita
Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room
George Orwell 1984
Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange
William Golding Lord of the Flies
Foucault History of Sexuality
Herman Hesse Siddhartha
Herman Hesse The Glass Bead Game
Adams Watership Down
JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands
Ursula LeGuin Earthsea Series
Ursula LeGuin The Dispossessed
Toni Morrison Sula
Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale
Nora Zeale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God
Michael Moorcock The Swords Trilogy
Rudnick Jeffrey
Kushner Angels in America
Augustin Burroughs Running with Scissors