The recommended reading list in The Well Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. I transcribed this list from my personal copy of the book and will be part of my personal reading journey.

Updated 10/15/2021: Upon reflection (and events of the last five years), I’ve removed a book from the Autobiography/Memoir section that I won’t be reading even though it’s on the reading list in the book.

Reviews will be linked when completed.

Novel

  1. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote (1605)
  2. John Bunyan – Pilgrim’s Progress (1679)
  3. Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
  4. Jane Austen – Pride & Prejudice (1815)
  5. Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist (1838)
  6. Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre (1847)
  7. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter (1850)
  8. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (1851)
  9. Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)
  10. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary (1857)
  11. Fyodor Dostoyevsky- Crime and Punishment (1866)
  12. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina (1877)
  13. Thomas Hardy – The Return of the Native (1878)
  14. Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
  15. Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
  16. Stephen Crane – The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
  17. Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness (1902)
  18. Edith Wharton – The House of Mirth (1905)
  19. F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (1925)
  20. Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  21. Franz Kafka – The Trial (1925)
  22. Richard Wright – Native Son (1940)
  23. Albert Camus – The Stranger (1942)
  24. George Orwell – 1984 (1949)
  25. Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man (1952)
  26. Saul Bellow – Seize the Day (1956)
  27. Gabriel García Márquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
  28. Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler (1972)
  29. Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon (1977)
  30. Don DeLillo – White Noise (1985)
  31. A. S. Byatt – Possession (1990)
  32. Cormac McCarthy – The Road (2006)

Autobiography & Memoir

  1. St. Augustine – The Confessions (c. 400 AD)
  2. Margery Kempe – The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1420)
  3. Michel de Montaigne – Essays (1580)
  4. Teresa of Ávila – The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself (1588)
  5. René Descartes – Meditations (1641)
  6. John Bunyan – Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)
  7. Mary Rowlandson – The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration (1682)
  8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Confessions (1781)
  9. Benjamin Franklin – The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791)
  10. Frederick Douglass – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
  11. Henry David Thoreau – Walden (1854)
  12. Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861)
  13. Booker T. Washington – Up From Slavery (1901)
  14. Frederich Nietzsche – Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1908)
  15. Mohandas Gandi – An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with the Truth (1929)
  16. Gertrude Stein – The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
  17. Thomas Merton – The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
  18. C. S. Lewis – Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)
  19. Malcolm X – The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
  20. Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
  21. May Sarton – Journal of a Solitude (1973)
  22. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
  23. Charles C. Colson – Born Again (1977)
  24. Richard Rodriguez – Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
  25. Jill Ker Conway – The Road from Coorain (1989)
  26. Elie Wiesel – All Rivers Run to the Sea: A Memoir (1995)

History & Politics

  1. Herodotus – The Histories (441 BC)
  2. Thucydides – The Peloponnesian War (c. 400 BC)
  3. Plato – The Republic (c. 375 BC)
  4. Plutarch – Lives (AD 100-125)
  5. St. Augustine – The City of God (425)
  6. Bede – The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731)
  7. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince (1513)
  8. Sir Thomas More – Utopia (1516)
  9. John Locke – The True End of Civil Government (1690)
  10. David Hume – The History of England, Volume V (1754)
  11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract (1762)
  12. Thomas Paine – Common Sense (1776)
  13. Edward Gibbon – The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88)
  14. Mary Wollstonecraft – The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
  15. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America (1835-40)
  16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto (1848)
  17. Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860)
  18. W. E. B. du Bois – The Souls of Black Folks (1903)
  19. Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)
  20. Lytton Strachey – Queen Victoria (1921)
  21. George Orwell – The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
  22. Perry Miller – The New England Mind (1939)
  23. John Kenneth Galbraith – The Great Crash 1929 (1955)
  24. Cornelius Ryan – The Longest Day (1959)
  25. Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique (1963)
  26. Eugene D. Genovese – Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)
  27. Barbara Tuchman – A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978)
  28. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – All The President’s Men (1987)
  29. James M. McPherson – Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988)
  30. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich – A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990)
  31. Francis Fukuyama – The End of History and The Last Man (1992)

Drama

  1. Aeschylus – Agamemnon (c. 458 BC)
  2. Sophocles – Oedipus the King (c. 450 BC)
  3. Euripides – Medea (c. 431 BC)
  4. Aristophanes – The Birds (c. 400 BC)
  5. Aristotle – Poetics (c. 330 BC)
  6. Everyman (14th Century)
  7. Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus (1588)
  8. William Shakespeare – Richard III (1592-93)
  9. William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594-95)
  10. William Shakespeare – Hamlet (1600)
  11. Molière – Tartuffe (1669)
  12. William Congreve – The Way of the World (1700)
  13. Oliver Goldsmith – She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
  14. Richard Brinsley Sheridan – The School for Scandal (1777)
  15. Henrik Ibsen – A Doll’s House (1879)
  16. Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest (1899)
  17. Anton Chekhov – The Cherry Orchard (1904)
  18. George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan (1924)
  19. T.S. Eliot – Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
  20. Thornton Wilder – Our Town (1938)
  21. Eugene O’Neill – Long Day’s Journey into Night (1940)
  22. Jean-Paul Sartre – No Exit (1944)
  23. Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
  24. Arthur Miller – Death of a Salesman (1949)
  25. Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot (1952)
  26. Robert Bolt – A Man for All Seasons (1960)
  27. Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967)
  28. Peter Shaffer – Equus (1974)

Poetry

Read at least the best known poems or the collected poems if available.

  1. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BC)
  2. Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey (c. 800 BC)
  3. Greek Lyricists – [Greek Lyrics trans. Richard Lattimore] (c. 600 BC)
  4. Horace – The Odes (65-68 BC)
  5. Beowulf  (c. 1000)
  6. Dante Alighieri – Inferno (1265-1321)
  7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1350)
  8. Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales  (c. 1343-1400)
  9. William Shakespeare – Sonnets (1564-1616)
  10. John Donne (1572-1631)
  11. King James Bible – Psalms (1611)
  12. John Milton – Paradise Lost (1608-1674)
  13. William Blake – Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1757-1827)
  14. Williams Wordsworth (1770-1850)
  15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
  16. John Keats (1795-1821)
  17. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
  18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
  19. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
  20. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
  21. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
  22. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
  23. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
  24. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
  25. Robert Frost (1874-1963)
  26. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
  27. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
  28. Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
  29. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
  30. Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
  31. W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
  32. Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
  33. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
  34. Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
  35. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
  36. Mark Strand (1934-2014)
  37. Mary Oliver (1935- 2019)
  38. Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
  39. Robert Pinsky (1940- )
  40. Robert Haas (1941- )
  41. Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)
  42. Rita Dove (1952- )

Science

  1. Hippocrates – On Airs, Waters, and Places (460-370 BC)
  2. Aristotle – Physics (c. 330 BC)
  3. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things (c. 60 BC)
  4. Nicolaus Copernicus – Commentariolus (1514)
  5. Francis Bacon – Novum Organum (1620)
  6. Galileo Galilei – Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
  7. Robert Hooke – Micrographia (1665)
  8. Isaac Newton – “Rules” and “General Scholium” from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687/1713/1726)
  9. Georges Cuvier – “Preliminary Discourse” (1812) [Essay on the Theory on the Theory of Earth, trans. Robert Jameson (1818)]
  10. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology (1830-1832)
  11. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species (1859)
  12. Gregor Mendel – Experiments in Plant Hybridization (1865)
  13. Alfred Wegener – The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915/1929)
  14. Albert Einstein – The General Theory of Relativity (1916)
  15. Max Planck – The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory (1922)
  16. Julian Huxley – Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
  17. Erwin Schrodinger – What is Life? (1944)
  18. Rachel Carson – Silent Spring (1962)
  19. Desmond Morris– The Naked Ape (1967)
  20. James D. Watson – The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA (1968)
  21. Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene (1976)
  22. Steven Weinberg – The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977) [updated edition: 1993]
  23. E. O. Wilson – On Human Nature (1978)
  24. James Lovelock –  Gaia (1979)
  25. Stephen Jay Gould – The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
  26. James Gleick – Chaos: Making a New Science (1987)
  27. Stephen Hawking – A Brief History of Time (1988)
  28. Walter Alvarez  – T. Rex and the Crater of Doom (1997)

Source: The Well Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer.