Great Books

A great book is a masterwork whose depth and significance direct us toward fundamental realities of the world and the human condition. Such books speak to us everywhere and always, challenging us from their various perspectives to reflect intelligently on our own situation. The following list is by no means a complete list of great books, much less a list of every book worth reading. Neither is it the complete reading list for all Honors Program courses. It is a list of books that have been included in the Honors Program; some we read completely, others in part.

  • The Bible
  • Buddhist Dhammapada (Path to Virtue)
  • The Koran
  • Epic of Gilgamesh
  • Achebe: Things Fall Apart
  • Aeschylus: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
  • Al-Ghazali: Deliverance from Error
  • Aquinas: Summa Theologica
  • Aristophanes: Clouds
  • Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, Poetics, Rhetoric
  • Augustine: Confessions
  • Austen: Pride and Prejudice
  • Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy
  • Baldwin: selected stories Blues for Mr. Charley
  • Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
  • Chuang Tzu: Inner Chapters
  • Confucius: Analects
  • Dante: Divine Comedy
  • Darwin, On the Origin of Species
  • Descartes: Discourse on Method, Meditations
  • Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground
  • Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  • DuBois: Souls of Black Folk
  • Einstein, The Special and General Theory of Relativity
  • Eliot: Four Quartets
  • Ellison: Invisible Man
  • Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
  • Euclid: Elements
  • Euripides: Medea, The Bacchae
  • Hamilton, Madison, Jay: The Federalist Papers
  • Freud: Leonardo Da Vinci, Future of an Illusion
  • Galileo: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Two New Sciences
  • Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
  • Herodotus: History
  • Hobbes: Leviathan
  • Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
  1. Hughes: selected poems
  • Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
  • Joyce: Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Kant: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
  • Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments
  • King: Letter from Birmingham Jail
  • Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching
  • Leopold: Sand County Almanac
  • Locke: Second Treatise of Government
  • Lucretius: De Rerum Natura
  • Luther: On Christian Liberty
  • Machiavelli: The Prince
  • Malcolm X: Autobiography of Malcolm X
  • Marx & Engels: Communist Manifesto
  • Milton: Paradise Lost
  • Melville: Billy Budd
  • Morrison: Beloved
  • Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil
  • Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
  • Pascal: Pensees
  • Plato: Meno, Euthyphro, Symposium, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Ion, Sophist, Gorgias
  • Polybius: Histories
  • Plutarch: Parallel Lives
  • Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
  • Rumi: selected poems
  • Shakespeare: Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, Tempest, Merchant of Venice
  • Shelley: Frankenstein
  • Smith: Wealth of Nations, Theory of Moral Sentiments
  • Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus
  • Thoreau: Walden
  • Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
  • Tolstoy: Death of Ivan Ilych, War and Peace
  • Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Democracy in America
  • Twain: Huckleberry Finn
  • Vasari: Lives of the Artists
  • Virgil: Aeneid
  • Voltaire: Candide
  • Vyasa: Bhagavad-Gita
  • Whitehead: Science and the Modern World
  • Woolf: A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse