300 Books to Read before you Die

1940 How To Read a Book by Mortimer Adler

2000 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

1850BC The Epic of Gilgamesh

750 Homer’s Iliad

750 Homer’s Odyssey

540 Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

500  The Art of War by Sun Tzu

500 Bhagavad Gita 

479 The Analects Confucius 

425 Herodotus The Histories

420 Aeschylus Prometheus Unbound

410 Euripides Medea, Bacchae

406 Sophocles Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus

399-350 Plato’s Dialogues The Republic, Apology, Symposium

399 Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War

390 Aristophanes The Clouds

380 Xenophon Anabasis

330 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

300 The Essential Epicurus

180 Jesus ben Sirach Wisdom of Sirach

100 Wisdom of Solomon
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees

58-50 Julius Caesar Gallic Wars

55 LucretiusOn the Nature of Things

50 CiceroOn the Nature of the gods, On Moral Duties

40  Virgil’s Aeneid

20 BC Ovid, Metamorphosis

AD 65 Seneca's Letters from a Stoic

75 The Jewish War by Josephus

75 Musonius Rufus’ Teachings

80 Plutarch Parallel Lives

90 Antiquities by Josephus

90-140 The Apostolic Fathers

108 Epictetus Discourses, Enchiridion

117 Tacitus Annals

119 Suetonius Lives of the Caesars

150 Justin Martyr: First and Second Apology, Dialogue with Trypho

180 Against Heresies by Irenaeus

180 Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

220 Apology, Against Marcion by Tertullian

240 On Prayer, Against Celsus by Origen

250 Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

270 The Enneads by Plotinus

319 On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius

315 Eusebius Church History

362 The Life of St. Antony by St. Athanasius

380 The 5 Theological Orations by St. Gregory of Nazianzus

398 Confessions by St. Augustine

426 City of God by St. Augustine

426 On Christian Doctrine by St. Augustine

428 On the Trinity by St. Augustine

440 On the Unity of Christ by Cyril of Alexandria

500 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology,The Divine Names

523 The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

540 Rule of St. Benedict by St. Benedict

591 Pastoral Rule by Pope Gregory the Great

632 The Quran by Mohammed

700 Beowulf 

731 Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking People

1000 The Song of Roland

1098 Why God Became Man by St. Anselm

1136 Sermons on the Song of Songs by St. Bernard of Clairvaux

1142 The Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Peter Abelard

1150 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed Intro to First Part, I.50-II.31, III.8-24 

1200 Bonaventure, The Itinerary of the Mind into God, The Reduction of the Arts to Theology

1207 The Poem of the Cid

1250 The Nibelungenlied/The Volsunga Saga
The Saga of Burnt Njal

1274 -Summa Theologiae and Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas

1300 Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, dist. 2, qu. 1: I, dist.3, qu. 1; II, dist.3, part 1, qu. 1-6 

1340 William of Ockham, Ordinatio I, dist. 2, qu. 4-8, Qs on the Physics I, qu. 132-36, QuodlibetI, qu. 1 

1320 The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

1343 Richard Rolle’s The Fire of Love

1377-78 St. Catherine of Siena’s The Dialogue of Divine Providence

1380 -Sir Gawain and the Greek Knight
-The Cloud of Unknowing
-The Scale of Perfection by Walter Hilton

1395 Revelations of Divine Love by St. Julian of Norwich

1387-1400 Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

1405 Christine de Piza’s The Book of the City of Ladies

1418 The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis

1485 Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur

1500 Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks

1516 Lectures on Romans by Martin Luther

1516 Utopia by Thomas More

1517 Martin Luther On the Bondage of the Will

1517 In Praise of Folly by Erasmus

1520  Freedom of a Christian by Martin Luther

1532 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin

1563 John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

1564 Francois Rebelais Gargantua and Pantagruel

1577 The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila

1578 Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross

1580 Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

1592 Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

1600s William Shakespeare’s Plays & Sonnets 

1609 Francis de Sales’ Introduction a la vie devote

1610 The Alchemist by Ben Johnson

1615 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote de la Mancha

1620 Francis Bacon Novum Organum, Essays

1637 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

1651  Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

1665 Maximes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

1667 John Milton’s Paradise Lost

1668-1694 Fables by Jean de La Fontaine

1670 Blaise Pascal’s Pensées 

1673 Molière’s The Misanthrope, Tartuffe

1677 Jean Baptiste Racine’s Phedre; Andromache

1677 Baruch Spinoza Ethics

1678 John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

1685 Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics

1690 John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

1700 John Owen’s Overcoming Sin and Temptation, Communion with God

1706 1001 Arabian Nights

1710 George Berkeley A Treatise on Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

1719  Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe

1726 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

1732  The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

1734 Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques

1736 Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion

1737 Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God by Jonathan Edwards

1744 Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, Essay on Man

1746 Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards 

1748 David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

1749 The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

1749 Life and Diary of David Brainerd by Jonathan Edwards

1755  Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws

1759 Candide by Voltaire

1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions

1764 Voltaire Dictionnaire philosophique

1767 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

1776 -Adam Smith The Wealth of the Nations
-Thomas Paine Common Sense
-Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
-The Declaration of Independence

1777 A Plain Account of Christian Perfection by John Wesley

1781 Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

1784 Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

1788 The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton

1789 William Blake Songs of Innocence and of Experience

1789 Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

1791 James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson

1794 William Paley’s View of the Evidences of Christianity

1813 Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Persuasion

1818 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

1830 Stendahl The Red and the Black

1832 Goethe’s Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther

1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

1834-35 Le Père Goriot by Honore de Balzac

1835-40 Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

1838 Edgar Allan Poe The Complete Tales and Poems

1841 Theodore Parker Discourse on religious subject

1842 Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol 

1843 Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations

1844 Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments

1844 The Count of Monte Cristoby Alexandre Dumas

1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

1847 Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights

1847-48 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

1848 The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels

1850 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

1850 The Prelude by William Wordsworth

1851 Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

1854 Henry David Thoreau Walden; Civil Disobedience

1855 Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

1857 Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

1858 George MacDonald’s Phantastes

1859 On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

1859 John Stuart Mill On Liberty

1862 Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables 

1862 Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

1862 Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead

1864 John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua

1866 Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment

1868-69 Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot

1871-72 -Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Demons

-George Eliot Middlemarch

1877 Lord Acton’s The History of Freedom

1879 Henrik Ibsen A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler; The Wild Duck

1880 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christby Lewis Wallace

1884 Mark Twain’s Autobiography; Joan of Arc

1886 Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich[AB2] 

1886 Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1886 Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

1888 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1891 Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

1892 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1895 Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

1897 Dracula by Bram Stoker

1898 The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux

1898 The Autobiography of George Müller 

1899 Uncle Vanya by Anton Checkhov

1899 Leo Tolstoy Resurrection; Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Kingdom of God is Within You

1900 Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, The Anti-Christ, The Gay Science; Will to Power

1900 Sigmund Freud Interpretation of Dreams; Civilization and its Discontents

1901 Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

1902 Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

1903 George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman; Pygmalion; Saint Joan

1903 The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Du Bois

1906 Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus

1907 Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams

1908 E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View

1908 GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy

1913-27 Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

1915 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

1915 Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham

1920-22 Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

1922 James Joyce’s Ulysses

1922 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

1922 TS Eliot’s Divine Comedy: The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets

1924 Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain

1925 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

1925 The Trial Franz Kafka

1925 GK Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man

1927 Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway

1927 Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

1928 Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield

1929 William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

1929 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

1929 Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

1931 The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams

1932 Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society 

1932 Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World

1934 I, Claudius by Robert Graves

1935 The Autobiography of GK Chesterton

1935 Musashiby Eiji Yoshikawa

1936 Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People

1936 CS Lewis’ The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

1937 The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

1937 Descent into Hell by Charles Williams

1937 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

1937 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

1938 Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis; Perelandra, That Hideous Strength

1939 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; East of Eden

1940 Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

1942 Albert Camus’ The Stranger; The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague; The Fall; The Rebel

1942 Lloyd C. Douglas’ The Robe

1943 Jean Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness, No Exit

1943 The Forgiveness of Sins by Charles Williams 

1943 The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis

1945 Animal Farm by George Orwell

1946 Alfred North Whitehead’s An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World

1946 The Great Divorce by CS Lewis

1946 Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

1947 Miracles by CS Lewis

1948 Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

1949 George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

1951 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

1952 Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

1952 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

1952 The Old Man and the Sea; In Our Time; The Sun Also Rises; A Farwell to Arms by Hemingway

1952 Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood 

1953 Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot 

1953 Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury

1954-55  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 

1955 Surprised by Joy by CS Lewis

1957 Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; The Fountainhead 

1958 The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

1958 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

1958 The Once and Future King by T.H. White

1960 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

1960 Night by Elie Wiesel 

1960 Rabbit, Run by John Updike

1961 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

1961 A History of Madness by Michel Foucault

1962 Labrynths by Jorge Luis Borges 

1962 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 

1962 One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail by MLKjr; Autobiography

1964 The Master Plan of Evangelism by Robert Coleman

1966 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

1966 The Master and Margaritaby Mikhail Bulgakov

1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1969 The Godfather by Mario Puzo

1970 History of Western Philosophy

1970 Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

1973 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago

1977 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

1977 The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien

1978 Stephen King’s The Stand, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption

1981 After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

1986 The Cross of Christ by John Stott

1988 Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time 

1988 The Alchemist by Paul Coehlo

1988 The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

1995 How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

2000 A Personal Odyssey by Thomas Sowell

2003 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

2003 My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

2007 Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

2007 My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas 

2011 A Brief History of Thought by Luc Ferry

2016 The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan

2018 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

2019 The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray

2019 Dominion by Tom Holland

2021 Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson