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

1. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes) - Download
2. Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift) - Download
3. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) - Download
4. Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) - Download
5. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) - Download
6. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville) - Download
7. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) - Download
8. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Download
9. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) - Download
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) - Download
11. The Trial (Franz Kafka) - Download

Autobiography and Memoir

1. The Confessions (Augustine) - Download
2. The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne) - Download
3. Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)
4. Walden (Henry David Thoreau) - Download

History

1. The Histories (Herodotus) - Download vol 1 - vol 2
2. The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) - Download
3. The Republic (Plato) - Download
4. Lives (Plutarch) - Download vol 1 - vol 2 - vol 3
5. City of God (Augustine)
6. The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli) - Download
7. Utopia (Sir Thomas More) - Download
8. The Social Contract (Jean Jaques Rousseau)
9. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon) - Download vol 1 - vol 2 - vol 3 -vol 4 - vol 5 - vol 6
10. Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville) - Download vol 1 - vol 2
11. The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx) - Download

Drama

1. Agamemnon (Aeschylus) - Download
2. Oedipus the King (Sophocles) - Download
3. Medea (Euripides)
4. The Birds (Aristophanes) - Download 
5. Poetics (Aristotle) - Download
6. Richard III (William Shakespeare) - Download
7. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare) - Download
8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare) - Download
9. Tartuffe (Moliere) - Download
10. The Way of the World (William Congreve) - Download
11. A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen) - Download
12. Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw)
13. No Exit (Jean Paul Sartre)

Poet

1. The Iliad (Homer) - Download
2. The Odyssey (Homer) - Download
3. Odes (Horace) - Download
4. Inferno (Dante Alighieri) - Download
5. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) - Download
6. Sonnets (William Shakespeare) - Download
7. Paradise Lost (John Milton) - Download
8. Selected Poetry  (William Wordsworth) - Download vol 1 - vol 2 - vol 3
9. 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.