Reading classic books can boost your learning experience. There are some reasons why classic books can do that: they have stood the test of time, they give you different “lenses” to look through, and they will most likely be relevant even to the far future. Reading the classics is an excellent intellectual exercise which will arm you with a lot of powerful intellectual tools.
To find good classic books, there are trusted recommendations that can help us. The recommendations are found in the books How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, and The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, both of which I believe are high-quality books. You can read the books for complete information about their recommendations (with suggestions on how to read them), but here I will directly give you the titles of the books which are recommended by both of them.
While I believe a book which is recommended by any of them is good, I think it’s safe to say that a book which is recommended by both of them is great.
So without further ado, here are the recommended classic books along with the Amazon and free download links (if any):
Novel
1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes –
2. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift –
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen –
4. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens –
5. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne -
6. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville –
7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert –
8. Crime and Punishmentt by Fyodor Dostoevsky –
9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy –
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain –
11. The Trial by(Franz Kafka –
Autobiography and Memoir
1. The Confessions by(Augustine –
2. The Complete Essaysby Michel de Montaigne –
3. Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes –
4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau –
History
1. The Histories by Herodotus –
2. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides –
3. The Republic by Plato –
4. Lives by Plutarch –
5. City of God by Augustine –
6. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli –
7. Utopia by Sir Thomas More –
8. The Social Contract by Jean Jaques Rousseau –
9. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by(Edward Gibbon –
10. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville –
11. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx –
Drama
1. Agamemnon by Aeschylus –
2. Oedipus the King by Sophocles –
3. Medea by Euripides--
4. The Birds by Aristophanes –
5. Poetics by Aristotle –
6. Richard III by William Shakespeare –
7. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare – ）
8. Hamlet by William Shakespeare –
9. Tartuffe by Moliere –
10. The Way of the World by William Congreve –
11. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen –
12. Saint Joan by by George Bernard Shaw –
13.Man and Suprernan by George Bernard Shaw –
14. No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre –
Poet
1. The Iliad by Homer –
2. The Odyssey by Homer –
3. Odes by Horace –
4. Inferno by Dante Alighieri –
5. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer –
6. Sonnets by William Shakespeare –
7. Paradise Lost by John Milton –
8. Selected Poetry by William Wordsworth –
9. The Complete Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge –
It may take years to read all these books, but it undoubtedly will be a very rewarding intellectual journey; they are among the best books of human civilization.