You may decide you want to read the books along with another person or with a group. Of course, in a way I am reading them with you if you read my comments on each author, but that’s not the same as having friends join you for, say, ten days of discussion a year. I think that would be fun, and I wish I could be there with you.
YEAR ONE
Homer, The Iliad
Homer, The Odyssey
Aeschylus, The Oresteia (counts for 2)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus,
Antigone (counts for 3)
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
YEAR TWO
Euripides, Alcestis, Hippolytus, Medea, Iphigenia
among the Taurians (counts for 4)
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, Clouds, Birds (counts for 3)
Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like
It, The Winter’s Tale (counts for 3)
YEAR THREE
Herodotus, The History (selections—read as much as you can or want to)
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (selections)
Tacitus, The Annals, The Histories (selections—read only the juicy parts) Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates, The Symposium, The Republic (counts for 2)
Aristotle, Poetics, Nicomachean Ethics (counts for 2)
Euclid, The Elements (at least Book I)
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
YEAR FOUR
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Virgil, The Aeneid (counts for 2)
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (selections)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra (counts for 2)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (counts for 2)
YEAR FIVE
Augustine, Confessions (Sheed translation)
Aquinas, Summa Theologica (selections—counts for 2)
Dante, Divine Comedy (counts for 3)
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Cryseide (counts for 2)
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Machiavelli, The Prince
YEAR SIX
Bacon, Essays
Molière, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
John Locke, Second Treatise, On Toleration
Thomas Jefferson et al., Abraham Lincoln, American State Papers (counts for 2)
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, On Representative Government
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
YEAR SEVEN
Cervantes, Don Quixote (counts for 2)
William Congreve, The Way of the World
Voltaire, Candide
Goethe, Faust (counts for 2—maybe only selections of Part Two)
Byron and Keats, selected poems
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion
Stendhal, The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma (counts for 2)
YEAR EIGHT
Claude Bernard, Introduction to Experimental Medicine
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, Our Mutual Friend (counts for 2)
Walt Whitman, “Out of the cradle …” , “When lilacs last …”, other selected poems
Emily Dickinson, selected poems
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (skip first chapter)
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
YEAR NINE
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (counts for 2)
Henry James, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl (counts for 2)
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
Robert Frost, selected poems
W.B. Yeats, selected poems
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Mario and the Magician
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners
Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
YEAR TEN
Sigmund Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Saint Joan
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
C.G. Darwin, The Next Million Years
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie
Albert Camus, The Stranger, The Plague
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Saramago, Blindness, The Cave
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Authors and Works
