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.

1. The Arabian Nights
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
3. The Nibelungenlied
4. Pirkei Avot
5. The Poem of the Cid
6. The Poetic Edda
7. The Prose Edda
8. The Song of Roland
9. Adigal, Ilango. Silappatikaram
10. Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound
11. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy
12. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica
13. Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso
14. Aristotle. De Anima
15. —. Metaphysics
16. —. The Nicomachean Ethics
17. —. Politics
18. Aristophanes. Lysistrata
19. —. The Birds
20. —. The Clouds
21. Attar, Farid-ud-din. The Conference of the Birds
22. Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations
23. Badarayana. Brahma Sutras
24. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote
25. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales
26. Confucius. The Analects
27. Descartes, René. Principles of Philosophy
28. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamzov
29. —. Crime and Punishment
30. —. The Idiot
31. Eco, Umberto. Il nome della rosa
32. —. La Misteriosa fiamma della Regina Loana
33. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly
34. Espronceda, José de. El estudiante de Salamanca (Don Juan)
35. Euripides. The Bacchae
36. —. Medea
37. Al Farabi. On the Perfect State
38. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
39. Ferdowsi. Shahnameh
40. Ganjavi, Nizami. Panj Ganj
41. Gautama. Nyaya Sutras
42. Goethe, JWG. Faust
43. Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls
44. Grotius, Hugo. The Law of War and Peace
45. Hafez. Divan-e Hafez
46. Herodotus. Histories
47. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan
48. Homer. The Iliad
49. —. The Odyssey
50. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature
51. Ishvarakrishna. Samkhya Karika
52. Jaimini. Purva Mimamsa Sutras
53. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis
54. Kalidasa. Abhijñanashakuntalam
55. —. Kumarasambhava
56. Kanada. Vaisheshika Sutra
57. Kautilya. The Arthashastra
58. Ibn Khaldun. Al Muqaddimah
59. Khayyam, Omar. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
60. Khosrow, Amir. Khamsa-e Nizami
61. —. Wast-ul Hayat
62. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government
63. Luo Guanzhong. Romance of the Three Kingdoms
64. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince
65. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street)
66. Maimon, Moshe ben. The Guide for the Perplexed
67. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur
68. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain
69. Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi Sposi
70. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital
71. Milton, John. Paradise Lost
72. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty
73. More, Thomas. Utopia
74. al-Mulk, Nizam. Siyasatnama
75. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
76. Ovid. Metamorphoses
77. Petrarch. De vita solitaria (The Solitary Life)
78. —. Il Canzoniere (Song Book)
79. Plato. Apology
80. —. Meno
81. —. The Republic
82. Plotinus. The Enneads
83. Rumi, Jalaluddin. Masnavi-e Manavi
84. Ibn Rushd. The Incoherence of the Incoherence
85. Saadi. Gulistan
86. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet
87. —. King Lear
88. —. Macbeth
89. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. The First Circle
90. Sophocles. Oedipus Rex
91. —. Oedipus at Colonus
92. —. Antigone
93. Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics
94. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations
95. Tasso, Torquato. Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered)
96. Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War
97. Toynbee, Arnold. A Study of History
98. Ibn Tufayl. Hayy ibn Yaqzan
99. Valmiki. The Ramayana
100. Virgil. The Aeneid
101. Vyaasa. The Mahabharata