How to Read a Book
Works
The reading list in the appendix of How to Read a Book is simply a numbered list of 132 authors (noting either specific works, general categories of works, or a combination) plus 5 works of unknown or composite authorship, ordered chronologically. I have subdivided this list into the groupings below for ease of display.
Listings in the reading list:
- Listings 1-7 - Homer, Old Testament, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides
- Listings 8-9 - Hippocrates, Aristophanes
- Listing 10 - Plato
- Listing 11 - Aristotle
- Listings 12-19 - Epicurus, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace
- Listings 20-27 - Livy, Ovid, Plutarch, Tacitus, Nicomachus of Gerasa, Epictetus, Ptolemy, Lucian
- Listings 28-39 - Marcus Aurelius, Galen, New Testament, Plotinus, St. Augustine of Hippo, The Song of Roland, The Nibelungenlied, The Saga of Burnt Njal, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Leonardo da Vinci
- Listings 40-51 - Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Nicolaus Copernicus, Sir Thomas More, Martin Luther, François Rabelais, John Calvin, Michel de Montaigne, William Gilbert, Miguel de Cervantes, Edmund Spenser, Francis Bacon
- Listing 52 - William Shakespeare
- Listings 53-59 - Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, John Milton, Molière
- Listings 60-70 - Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, Benedict de Spinoza, John Locke, Jean Baptiste Racine, Sir Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, William Congreve, George Berkeley
Listings in the reading list (cont.):
- Listings 71-79 - Alexander Pope, Charles de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu), Voltaire, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Laurence Sterne, Adam Smith
- Listings 80-87 - Immanuel Kant, Edward Gibbon, James Boswell, Antoine Lavoisier, John Jay, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, The Articles of Confederation, The Constitution of the United States, The Declaration of Independence, Jeremy Bentham, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier
- Listings 88-99 - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Karl von Clausewitz, Stendhal, Lord Byron, Arthur Schopenhauer, Michael Faraday, Charles Lyell, Auguste Comte, Honoré de Balzac
- Listings 100-105 - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens
- Listings 106-113 - Claude Bernard, Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, George Eliot, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Henrik Ibsen
- Listings 114-120 - Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, William James, Henry James, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Jules Henri Poincaré, Sigmund Freud
- Listing 121 - George Bernard Shaw
- Listings 122-130 - Max Planck, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, George Santayana, Nikolai Lenin, Marcel Proust, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Mann
- Listings 131-137 - Albert Einstein, James Joyce, Jacques Maritain, Franz Kafka, Arnold Toynbee, Jean Paul Sartre, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- (Holy Bible) (c. 1400? BC-AD 95?)
- Euclid (fl.c. 300 BC)
- Apollonius of Perga (fl.c. 240 BC)
- Cicero (106-43 BC)
- Julius Caesar (100-44 BC)
- Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99-55 BC)
- Virgil (70-19 BC)
- Horace (65-8 BC)
- Livy (59 BC-AD 17)
- Ovid (43 BC-AD 17)
- Tacitus (c. 55-117)
- Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100-178)
- Tertullian (c. 155?-230?)
- St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
- St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-540)
- (The Qur'an) (c. 632)
- Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)
- Martin Luther (1483-1546)
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
- William Harvey (1578-1657)
- René Descartes (1596-1650)
