It is impossible to fit the world’s wisdom and experience in just 101 books. However, these are indisputably among the finest works of humankind, and more importantly, among those that I have read and can heartily recommend. I may have left out someone’s favourite, but that may be because I haven’t read it yet, I don’t know the language, or there are no good translations.
To me, the idea of Great Books is a collection of books that are eternal in their message, books that go beyond the ordinary in teasing out fundamental principles, great ideas, powerful emotions and experiences, books that are transcendental. I have therefore left out many works of science and history as they are ultimately temporal. This does not in any way lessen Euclid’s Elements, Apollonius’ Conics, Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, or Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It does not take away from Gibbon’s magisterial The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. Ultimately, this list is subjective, and while I prioritise literature and philosophy over science and history in matters of spirit, you need not!
Another problem with compiling a list of the greatest books is that it privileges one form of literature over others, the long form over shorter poems. Thus, to our great loss, we leave out the works of Sappho, WB Yeats, WH Auden, Rainer Maria Rilke, Novalis, and Ezra Pound. Nonetheless, here are 101 great books one must read and then re-read.
- The Arabian Nights
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Nibelungenlied
- The Poem of the Cid
- The Poetic Edda
- The Prose Edda
- The Song of Roland
- Adigal, Ilango. Silappatikaram
- Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound
- Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy
- Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica
- Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso
- Aristotle. De Anima
- —. Metaphysics
- —. The Nicomachean Ethics
- —. Politics
- Aristophanes. Lysistrata
- —. The Birds
- —. The Clouds
- Attar, Farid-ud-din. The Conference of the Birds
- Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations
- Badarayana. Brahma Sutras
- Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote
- Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales
- Confucius. The Analects
- Descartes, René. Principles of Philosophy
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamzov
- —. Crime and Punishment
- —. The Idiot
- Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose
- Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly
- Espronceda, José de . El estudiante de Salamanca (Don Juan)
- Euripides. The Bacchae
- —. Medea
- Al Farabi. On the Perfect State
- Ferdowsi. Shahnameh
- Ganjavi, Nizami. Panj Ganj
- Gautama. Nyaya Sutras
- Goethe, JWG. Faust
- Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls
- Grotius, Hugo. The Law of War and Peace
- Hafez. Divan-e Hafez
- Herodotus. Histories
- Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan
- Homer. The Iliad
- —. The Odyssey
- Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature
- Ishvarakrishna. Samkhya Karika
- Jaimini. Purva Mimamsa Sutras
- Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis
- Kalidasa. Abhijñanashakuntalam
- —. Kumarasambhava
- Kanada. Vaisheshika Sutra
- Kautilya. The Arthashastra
- Ibn Khaldun. Al Muqaddimah
- Khayyam, Omar. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
- Khosrow, Amir. Khamsa-e Nizami
- —. Wast-ul Hayat
- Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government
- Luo Guanzhong. Romance of the Three Kingdoms
- Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince
- Mahfouz, Naguib. Khufu’s Wisdom
- —. Rhadopis of Nubia
- —. Thebes at War
- Maimon, Moshe ben. The Guide for the Perplexed
- Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur
- Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain
- Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi Sposi
- Marx, Karl. Das Kapital
- Milton, John. Paradise Lost
- Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty
- More, Thomas. Utopia
- al-Mulk, Nizam. Siyasatnama
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
- Ovid. Metamorphoses
- Petrarch. De vita solitaria (The Solitary Life)
- —. Il Canzoniere (Song Book)
- Plato. Apology
- —. Meno
- —. The Republic
- Plotinus. The Enneads
- Rumi, Jalaluddin. Masnavi-e Manavi
- Ibn Rushd. The Incoherence of the Incoherence
- Saadi. Gulistan
- Shakespeare, William. Hamlet
- —. King Lear
- —. Macbeth
- Ibn Sina. Danishnama-e ‘Alai
- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. The First Circle
- Sophocles. Oedipus Rex
- —. Oedipus at Colonus
- —. Antigone
- Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics
- Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations
- Tasso, Torquato. Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered)
- Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War
- Toynbee, Arnold. A Study of History
- Ibn Tufayl. Ḥayy ibn Yaqzan
- Valmiki. The Ramayana
- Virgil. The Aeneid
- Vyaasa. The Mahabharata
