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