Reading classic books can boost your learning experience. There are some reasons why classic books can do that: they have stood the test of time, they give you different “lenses” to look through, and they will most likely be relevant even to the far future. Reading the classics is an excellent intellectual exercise which will arm you with a lot of powerful intellectual tools.
While you can find good old books by looking at all-time best-seller list or Project Gutenberg Top 100, there may be problems with them. For all-time best-seller list, the problem is recent books enjoy advantage in term of printing technology and distribution, and because of that many good old books may not make the list. For Project Gutenberg Top 100, the list is limited to what people currently like, which may not include some really good books.
Fortunately, there are trusted recommendations that can help us. The recommendations are found in the books How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, and The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, both of which I believe are high-quality books. You can read the books for complete information about their recommendations (with suggestions on how to read them), but here I will directly give you the titles of the books which are recommended by both of them.
While I believe a book which is recommended by any of them is good, I think it’s safe to say that a book which is recommended by both of them is great.
So without further ado, here are the recommended classic books along with the Amazon and free download links (if any):
Novel
- Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes) - Download
- Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift) - Download
- Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) - Download
- Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) - Download
- The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) - Download
- Moby-Dick (Herman Melville) - Download
- Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) - Download
- Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Download
- Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) - Download
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) - Download
- The Trial (Franz Kafka) - Download
Autobiography and Memoir
- The Confessions (Augustine) - Download
- The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne) - Download
- Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)
- Walden (Henry David Thoreau) - Download
History
- The Histories (Herodotus) - Download vol 1 - vol 2
- The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) - Download
- The Republic (Plato) - Download
- Lives (Plutarch) - Download vol 1 - vol 2 - vol 3
- City of God (Augustine)
- The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli) - Download
- Utopia (Sir Thomas More) - Download
- The Social Contract (Jean Jaques Rousseau)
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon) - Download vol 1 - vol 2 - vol 3 -vol 4 - vol 5 - vol 6
- Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville) - Download vol 1 - vol 2
- The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx) - Download
Drama
- Agamemnon (Aeschylus) - Download
- Oedipus the King (Sophocles) - Download
- Medea (Euripides)
- The Birds (Aristophanes) - Download
- Poetics (Aristotle) - Download
- Richard III (William Shakespeare) - Download
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare) - Download
- Hamlet (William Shakespeare) - Download
- Tartuffe (Moliere) - Download
- The Way of the World (William Congreve) - Download
- A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen) - Download
- Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw)
- No Exit (Jean Paul Sartre)
Poet
- The Iliad (Homer) - Download
- The Odyssey (Homer) - Download
- Odes (Horace) - Download
- Inferno (Dante Alighieri) - Download
- The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) - Download
- Sonnets (William Shakespeare) - Download
- Paradise Lost (John Milton) - Download
- Selected Poetry (William Wordsworth) - Download vol 1 - vol 2 - vol 3
- The Complete Poems (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) - Download
It may take years to read all these books, but it undoubtedly will be a very rewarding intellectual journey; they are among the best books of human civilization.
Comment by Donald Latumahina
51 16. April 2008, 5:50 am o'clock |
Thanks, bringwedding :)
Comment by bringwedding
50 15. April 2008, 1:42 pm o'clock |
nice list, hopefully I don’t fall asleep when read one :)
Comment by uarelle
49 24. January 2008, 10:33 pm o'clock |
I am considering buying an electronic book reader. So far I have heard good things about the…grrr now i cant remember the name….
…
oh yea - kindle reader
I know that kindle has a lot of books and many are supported by this device. Does anyone here have one? Please post your comments on it.
I’m going to wait about a week to buy it if I dont hear any negative stuff about it.
–> ok I just checked and they’re all out of them, ok so it looks like its a really hot item —yeeepeee! back later…off doing more research.
cheers
:wave:
Comment by Donald Latumahina
48 28. November 2007, 9:05 pm o'clock |
Leo,
Thanks for the encouragement! I appreciate it.
Comment by Léo A. Mittaraquis
47 27. November 2007, 7:08 pm o'clock |
This site is wonderful.
Congratulations!
Comment by Christopher
46 7. November 2007, 9:08 pm o'clock |
I’ve only read about a third of these titles. When I was in my early 20’s I had a job as a college gardener in England. I spent so much time sitting out the rain and reading Penguin Classics (paperbacks).That was more than thirty years ago. More recently, I found the Teaching Company. They have some amazing lectures on the humanities which are given by what they call super-star lecturers. Some are better than others, but their products are well worth looking at.
Your reading list really is an investment of time, so you should be sure you really want to read these. I think the experience is more profound when you read in a group and can discuss ideas. Many of these books are written from a worldview so very different from the world we are thrown into. When I was studying my A level French (at night school in the UK) I very much appreciated the teacher being able to put the books we were reading in their socio-historical perspective.
I don’t think it is a matter of ‘getting through’ these books, but savoring them and taking your time to have an experience. The problem with education is it’s so goal-oriented and not about learning and experience. I am all for slow learning that makes a difference, rather than skimming across the surface and touching on many ideas only for them to be forgotten.
I love paper. A short blog post is OK to read on screen, but for a classic book I want the luxury of the printed page.
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