I added the The New Lifetime Reading Plan into The Well-Educated Mind. I found her list a bit eurocentic and using two lists ensures a more well rounded reading plan. My goal will be to read at least thirty of these a year which will mean this project will take me at least ten years.

Italics are The New Lifetime Reading Plan, Bold is where they agree, between brackets are my own additions.


1 Epic of Gilgamesh
2 & 3Homer, Iliad; Odyssey
4 Greek Lyrics
5 Confucius, the Analects
6-8 Agamemnon, Aeschylus; the Oresteia; Aeschylus
9-11 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
12 Herodotus, Histories
13-18 Euripedes, Medea; Alcestis; Hippolytus; The Trojan Women; Electra; The Baccae
19 Sun-tzu, The Art of War
20-22 Aristophanes, The Birds; The Couds; Lystrata;
23 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War
24 Plato, Republic (and selected works)
25 Mencius, The Book of Mencius
26 Aristotle, Poetics, Ethics, Politics
27 The Ramayana, attr. Valmiki
28 The Mabharata, attr. Vyasa
29 The Bhagavad Gita, Anon
30 Ssu-Ma Ch'ien, Records of the Grand Historian
31 Lucretius, Of the Nature of Things
32 Virgil, The Aeneid
33 Horace Odes
34 Plutarch, Lives
35 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
36 & 37 Augustine, Confessions; City of God
38 Kalidasa, The Cloud Messenger; Sakuntala,
39 The Koran, Revealed to Muhammad
40 Hui-Neng, The Platform Sutra for the Sixth Patriarch
41 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
42 Firdausi, Shah Nameh,
43 Beowulf
44 Sei Shonagon, The Pillow-Book
45 Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji,
46 Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat
47 Dante Inferno
48 Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
49 Luo Kuan-Chung, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
50 Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

51 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

52 The Thousand and One Nights, Anon
53 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
54 Sir Thomas More, Utopia

55 Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

56 Attr. Wu Ch'eng-en, Journey to the West
57 Essays Montaigne
58 Life of Teresa of Avila
59 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
60 William Shakespeare, Richard III; Midsummer's Nights Dream; Hamlet; Sonnets

-LRP suggests reading Shakespeare's Complete Works
61 Poems of John Donne
62 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

63 The Plum in the Golden Vase, anon

64 Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
65 & 66 Rene Descartes, Meditations; Discourse on Method

67 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

68 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (pensees)
69 & 70 John Bunyon, Grace Abounding; Pilgrim's Progress

71-75 John Milton, Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica,
76-78 Moliere, Tartuffe; (LRP suggests several others)
79 Mary Rowlandson, Narrative of Captivity & Restoration
80 & 81 John Locke, True End Civil Government; Second Treatise of Government

82 Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
83 Congreve, Way of the World

84 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
85 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
86 & 87 David Hume, History of England; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

88 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

89 Voltaire, Candide and other works

90 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
91 Rousseau, Social Contract; Confessions
92 Paine, Common Sense
93 Gibbon, Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire
94 Sheridan, School of Scandal

95 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

96 Thomas Jefferson and others, basic documents in American history ( The Constitution, Declaration of Independence, etc), ed. Richard B. Morris

97 Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Federalist Papers, ed. By Clinton Rossiter

98 Ts'ao Hsueh-Ch'in, The Dream of the Red Chamber
99 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
100 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women
101 Poems of Wordsworth

102 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust

103 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience

104 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
105 & 108 Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice; Emma [Sense & Sensibility; Persuasion]
109 Keats, Odes & Poems
110 Longfellow
111 Tennyson

112 Edgar Allen Poe

113 Stendhal, The Red and the Black

114 Honore De Balzac, Pere Goriot; Eugenie Grandet; Cousin Bette
115 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
116-123 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Great Expectations; Hard Times; Our Mutual Friend; The Old Curiosity Shop; Little Dorrit

124 Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls,

125 Ralph Waldo Emerson
126 Bronte, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, [Agnes Grey by Anne]

127 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
128 Marx & Engel, The Communist Manifesto
129 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
130 Emily Dickinson
131 Christina Rosetti
132 Herman Melville, Moby Dick; Bartleby the Scrivener
133 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
134 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and Civil Disobedience

135-139 Anthony Trollope, The Warden; The Last Chronicle of Barset; The Eustace Diamonds; The Way We Live Now; Autobiography

140 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
141 Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary,

142 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; The Subjection of Women

143 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle; The Origin of Species

144 George Eliot, Middlemarch; Mill on the Floss; [Adam Bede]
145 Burckhardt, Civilization of Renaissance
146 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

147 Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
148-151 Dostoyevsky, Crime & Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov [The Idiot, and selected short stories]

152 Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass
153 Paul Laurence Dunbar
154 & 155 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, War and Peace
156-158 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, [Jude the Obscure]
159 Carl Sandburg
160 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
161 Life & Times of Frederick Douglas
162-164 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; The Ambassadors, [The Turn of the Screw]
165 William Carlos Williams

166-169 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra; The Genealogy of Morals; Beyond Good and Evil; Ecce Homo
170 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
171-174 William James, The Principles of Psychology; Pragmatism; Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth; The Varieties of Religious Experience

175 George Bernard Shaw, Selected Plays and Prefaces; St. Joan

176 Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
177 Oscar Wilde, Importance of Being Earnest

178-180 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Civilization and Its Discontents
181 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
182 & 183 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Nostromo
184 Langston Hughes
185 DuBois, Souls of Black Folk
186-189 Anton Chekhov, Cherry Orchard; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; Selected Short Stories
190 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism
191 Edith Wharton, House of Mirth; The Custom of the Country; The Age of Innocence
192 Poetry of W. H. Auden

193-195 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, [Howard's End, A Room With a View]
196 Poems of Robert Frost

197-203 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, [all of In Search of Lost Time]

204-206 D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love [Lady Chatterly's Lover]

207 Natsume Soseki, Kokoro,

208 Collected Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, Murder in Cathedral

209 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
210 Lu Hsun, Collected Short Stories

211 Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria
212 Phillip Larkin

213-215 James Joyce, Ulysses [A Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist & The Dubliners]

216 William Butler Yeats, Poetry and Autobiography

217 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

218 Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories
219 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
220-224 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando; The Waves; [A Room of One's Own]
225 & 226 Franz Kafka, The Trial; Selected Short Stories [The Metamorphosis]
227 Allen Ginsberg
228 Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

229 & 230 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying,

231-233 Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day's Journey into Night
234 Sylvia Plath

235 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
236 Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
237 Mark Strand

238-241 George Orwell, Animal Farm; 1984; Burmese Days; Wigan Pier
242 Adrienne Rich
243 Thornton Wilder, Our Town
244 Seamus Heany
245 & 246 Perry Miller, The New England Mind
247 Richard Wright, Native Son
248 Robert Pinsky
249 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
250 Albert Camus, The Stranger; The Plague

251 Tanizaki Junichiro, The Makioka Sisters
252 Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit

253 R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher; The Vendor of Sweets
254 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
255 Jane Kenyon
256 Thomas Merton, Seven Story Mountain

257 & 258 Mishima Yukio, Confessions of a Mask; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
259 Henry Miller, Death of a Salesman
260 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
261-263 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Krapp's Last Tape
264 Rita Dove
265 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash

266-268 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory
270-273 Saul Bellow, Seize the Day; The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog; Humboldt's Gift

274 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
275 Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day
276 Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

277 & 278 Jorge Luis Borge, Labyrinths; Dreamtigers,

279 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
280 Betty Frieden, The Feminine Mystique

281 Kawabata Yasunari, Beauty and Sadness
282 The Autobiography of Malcolm X
283 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

284 & 285 Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle; Cancer Ward
286 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildentern are Dead
287 Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
288 May Sarton, Journal of Solitude
289-290 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
291 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll
292 Charles Colson, Born Again
293 Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
294 Barbara W. Tuchman, Distant Mirror
295 Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
296 Don Delillo, White Noise
297 Woodward & Bernstein, All the President's Men
298 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
299 Jill Kathryn Conway, Road from Coorain
300 A.S. Byatt, Possession
301 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History & the Last Man
302 Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea