Lifetime Reading Plan

I received a gift from a member of the Vincennes Community United Methodist Church, Mark Shields, in 1997. He and I had a similar interest in reading some of the great works of human history. The following is a list of the works the book, with a few added by me. The words in italics are books that I have. I have read each of the books on the list through Part Four. Where I list only an author, anything written by the person is well worth reading. Several of these books, especially in Parts 1-3, I have in a PDF file. If you would like to have one, just email me and I will be happy to send it to you.

Part One (2000 BC - 300 AD)

Epic of Gilgamesh

Homer - the illiad, the odyssey

The Bible

Confucius - the analetics

Aeschylus - The Orestia

Sophocles - Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

Euripides - Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Electra, The Bacche

Herodotus - the histories

Thucydides - The History of the Peloponnesian War

Sun-tzu - The Art of War

Aristophanes - Lysistrata, the Clouds, the Birds

Plato

Aristotle

Mencius - The Book of Mencius

The Ramayana (attributed to Valmiki)

The Mahabharata (attribted to Vyasa)

The Bhagavad Gita

Ssu-ma Ch'en - Records of the Grand Historian - Only some of this text is available in English, but I have some of it.

Lucretius - Of the Nature of Things

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

Part Two (300 - 1600)

Augustine

Kalidasa - (Hindu) The Cloud Messenger, Sakuntala,

Koran

Hui-neng - (Zen Buddhism) The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

Firdausi - (Islam) Shah Nameh

Sei Shonagon - (Buddhist) The Pillow Book

Lady Murasaki - The Tale of Gengi

Omar Kayyam - The Rubaiyat

Dante - Divine Comedy

Luo Kuan-Chung - The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Geoffery Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales

One Thousand and one Nights

Machiavelli - The Prince

Rabelius - Garantua and Pantagruel

Wu Ch'eng-en - Journey to the West

Montaigne - Essays

Cervantes - Don Quixote

Luther

Calvin

Part Three- 1600 - 1790

Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV (Parts 1, 2), Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Tempest

John Donne - Songs and Sonnets, Elegies, First and Second Anniversaries, Holy Sonnets, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Sermons

The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P'ing Mei) [Do not have]

Galileo - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Hobbes - Leviathan

Descartes - Discourse on Method

Milton - Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica

Moliere - The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The Would-be Gentleman, The Miser, Don Juan, The Imaginary Invalid, The Learned Ladies

Pascal - Penesee

Bunyan - Pilgrims Progress

Locke

Matsu Basho - The Narrow Road to the Deep North

DeFoe - Robinson Cruso

Swift - Gulliver's Travels

Voltaire

Hume

Henry Fielding - Tom Jones

Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in - The Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone)

Rousseau

Sterne - Tristram Shandy

Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson

Jefferson

The Federalist Papers

Part Four (1800’s)

Goethe – Faust

William Blake – Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Everlasting Gospel, Preface to Milton, The Marriage of heaven and Hell, All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses

Wordsworth – The Prelude, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), Selected Poems

Hegel

Kierkegaard

Schleiermacher

Coleridge – The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice, Emma

Stendhal – The Red and the Black

Honore de Balzac – Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Cousin Bette

Emerson – Nature, essays

Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales (Young Goodman Brown, The Minister’s Black Veil, The Birthmark, Rappaccini’s Daughter

Tocqueville – Democracy in America

John Stuart Mill – On Liberty, The Subjection of Women

Darwin – The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species

Gogol – Dead Souls

Edgar Allan Poe – The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, The Gold Bug, William Wilson

William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair

Dickens – Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit

Anthony Trollope – The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

Thoreau – Walden, Civil Disobedience

Ivan Turgenev – Father’s and Sons

Karl Marx

Herman Melville – Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener

George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass, Democratic Vistas, A Backward Glance O’er Traveled Roads

Flaubert – Madame Bovary

Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov

Tolstoy – War and Peace, Ana Kerenina

Ibsen

Emily Dickinson – selected poems

Lewis Caroll – Alice

Mart Twain – Huckleberry Finn

Henry Adams – The Education of Henry Adams

Thomas Hardy – The Mayor Casterbridge, Tess of D’uberville, Jude the Obscure, Poems

William James – The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Henry James – The Ambassadors, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw

Nietzsche

Part Five - (1900’s)

Freud – Interpretation of dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Vivilization and its Discontents

George Bernard Shaw – Arms and the Man, Candida, The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Androcles and the Lion, Pygmalion, Heartbreak house, Back to Methusela, Saint Joan

Joseph Conrad – Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, Youth

Anton Checkhov – Uncle Vonya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories

Edith Wharton – The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth

William Butler Yeats – Poems, Plays, Autobiography

Natsume Soseki – Kokoro

Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Things Past

Robert Frost

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Mario and the Magician

E. M. Forster – A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Howards End

Lu Hsun – Short stories, such as Diary of a Madman, The True Story of Ah Q

James Joyce – Ulysses

Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves

Franz Kafka – The Trial, The Castle, selected short stories (The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony)

D. H. Lawrence – Sons and Lovers, Women in Love

Tanizaki Junichiro – The Makioka Sisters

Eugene O’Neill – Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into the Night

T. S. Eliot – collected poems and plays

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying

Ernest Hemingway

Kawabata Yasunari – Beauty and Sadness

Jorge Luis Borges – Layrinths, Dreamtigers

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak, Memory

George Orwell – Animal Farm, 1984, Burmese Days

Karl Barth

Paul Tillich

Wolfhart Pannenberg

R. K. Narayan – The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets

Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape

W. H. Auden – collected poems

Albert Camus – The Plague, The Stranger

Saul Bellow – The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift

Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle, Cancer Ward

Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Mishima Yukio – Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chinua Acheba – Things Fall Apart