Mortimer Adler Reading List: All 137 Recommendations

Jump to an Era

• About the List
• Ancient Greece and the Hellenistic World
• Rome and Late Antiquity
• The Middle Ages
• Renaissance and Reformation
• The Seventeenth Century
• Restoration and Enlightenment
• Revolution and Romanticism
• The Nineteenth Century
• Modern Thought and the Twentieth Century
• Additional Works in My Personal Reading Project
• Personal Notes

1. Homer
Recommended works: The Iliad; The Odyssey

2. The Old Testament
Recommended works: The Old Testament

3. Aeschylus
Recommended works: Tragedies

4. Sophocles
Recommended works: Tragedies

5. Herodotus
Recommended works: History of the Persian Wars

6. Euripides
Recommended works: Tragedies, especially Medea, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae

7. Thucydides
Recommended works: History of the Peloponnesian War
Status: Started
Difficulty: Difficult
Edition or translation: Thomas Hobbes edition
Personal notes: Link is to the Thomas Hobbes edition. It is the best. Learned a lot from The Last Psychiatrist.

8. Hippocrates
Recommended works: Medical Writings

9. Aristophanes
Recommended works: Comedies, especially The Clouds, The Birds, and The Frogs

10. Plato
Recommended works: Dialogues, especially The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, and Theaetetus
Status: Started
Difficulty: Easy
Personal notes: Language is easy to understand so far.

11. Aristotle
Recommended works: Organon; Physics; Metaphysics; On the Soul; Nicomachean Ethics; Politics; Rhetoric; Poetics

12. Epicurus
Recommended works: “Letter to Herodotus”; “Letter to Menoeceus”

13. Euclid
Recommended works: Elements

14. Archimedes
Recommended works: Works, especially On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, and The Sand-Reckoner

15. Apollonius of Perga
Recommended works: On Conic Sections

16. Cicero
Recommended works: Works, especially Orations, On Friendship, and On Old Age
Additional tracked work: On Duties
Status: Reading
Difficulty: Easy
Personal notes: Charlie Munger recommends Cicero.

17. Lucretius
Recommended works: On the Nature of Things

18. Virgil
Recommended works: Works, including The Aeneid

19. Horace
Recommended works: Works, especially Odes and Epodes and The Art of Poetry

20. Livy
Recommended works: History of Rome

21. Ovid
Recommended works: Works, especially Metamorphoses

22. Plutarch
Recommended works: Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; Moralia

23. Tacitus
Recommended works: Histories; Annals; Agricola

24. Nicomachus of Gerasa
Recommended works: Introduction to Arithmetic

25. Epictetus
Recommended works: Discourses; Encheiridion (Handbook)

26. Ptolemy
Recommended works: Almagest

27. Lucian
Recommended works: Works, especially The Way to Write History, The True History, and The Sale of Creeds

28. Marcus Aurelius
Recommended works: Meditations
Status: Read
Difficulty: Easy and enjoyable to read. Can dip in and out.
Personal notes: Got initially interested in reading it because of Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday’s reading list.

29. Galen
Recommended works: On the Natural Faculties

30. The New Testament
Recommended works: The New Testament

31. Plotinus
Recommended works: The Enneads

32. St. Augustine
Recommended works: On the Teacher; Confessions; The City of God; On Christian Doctrine

33. The Song of Roland
Recommended works: The Song of Roland

34. The Nibelungenlied
Recommended works: The Nibelungenlied
Related text noted in Appendix A: The Volsunga Saga, the Scandinavian version of the legend

35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
Recommended works: The Saga of Burnt Njal

36. St. Thomas Aquinas
Recommended works: Summa Theologica

37. Dante Alighieri
Recommended works: The New Life; On Monarchy; The Divine Comedy

38. Geoffrey Chaucer
Recommended works: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales

39. Leonardo da Vinci
Recommended works: Notebooks

40. Niccolò Machiavelli
Recommended works: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy

41. Desiderius Erasmus
Recommended works: The Praise of Folly

42. Nicolaus Copernicus
Recommended works: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

43. Sir Thomas More
Recommended works: Utopia

44. Martin Luther
Recommended works: Three Treatises; Table-Talk

45. François Rabelais
Recommended works: Gargantua and Pantagruel

46. John Calvin
Recommended works: Institutes of the Christian Religion

47. Michel de Montaigne
Recommended works: Essays

48. William Gilbert
Recommended works: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies

49. Miguel de Cervantes
Recommended works: Don Quixote

50. Edmund Spenser
Recommended works: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene

51. Francis Bacon
Recommended works: Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis

52. William Shakespeare
Recommended works: Works

53. Galileo Galilei
Recommended works: The Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
Additional tracked work: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

54. Johannes Kepler
Recommended works: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World

55. William Harvey
Recommended works: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood

56. Thomas Hobbes
Recommended works: Leviathan

57. René Descartes
Recommended works: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy

58. John Milton
Recommended works: Works, especially the minor poems, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes

59. Molière
Recommended works: Comedies, especially The Miser, The School for Wives, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, and Tartuffe

60. Blaise Pascal
Recommended works: The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises

61. Christiaan Huygens
Recommended works: Treatise on Light

62. Benedict de Spinoza
Recommended works: Ethics

63. John Locke
Recommended works: A Letter Concerning Toleration; “Of Civil Government” from Two Treatises of Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education

64. Jean Racine
Recommended works: Tragedies, especially Andromache and Phaedra

65. Isaac Newton
Recommended works: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks

66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Recommended works: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology

67. Daniel Defoe
Recommended works: Robinson Crusoe

68. Jonathan Swift
Recommended works: A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal

69. William Congreve
Recommended works: The Way of the World

70. George Berkeley
Recommended works: Principles of Human Knowledge

71. Alexander Pope
Recommended works: An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man

72. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
Recommended works: Persian Letters; The Spirit of Laws

73. Voltaire
Recommended works: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary

74. Henry Fielding
Recommended works: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones

75. Samuel Johnson
Recommended works: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets, especially the essays on Milton and Pope

76. David Hume
Recommended works: A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays, Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Recommended works: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; Discourse on Political Economy; Émile; The Social Contract
Additional tracked work: Confessions

78. Laurence Sterne
Recommended works: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

79. Adam Smith
Recommended works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

80. Immanuel Kant
Recommended works: Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace

81. Edward Gibbon
Recommended works: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography

82. James Boswell
Recommended works: Journal, especially London Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

83. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
Recommended works: Elements of Chemistry

84. John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton
Recommended works: The Federalist Papers, together with the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence

85. Jeremy Bentham
Recommended works: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions

86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Recommended works: Faust; Poetry and Truth

87. Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier
Recommended works: The Analytical Theory of Heat

88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Recommended works: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Status: Started
Difficulty: Hard
Personal notes: Obtuse and obscure. Hard read.

89. William Wordsworth
Recommended works: Poems, especially Lyrical Ballads, the Lucy poems, the sonnets, and The Prelude

90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Recommended works: Poems, especially “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Biographia Literaria

91. Jane Austen
Recommended works: Pride and Prejudice; Emma

92. Carl von Clausewitz
Recommended works: On War

93. Stendhal
Recommended works: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love

94. George Gordon, Lord Byron
Recommended works: Don Juan

95. Arthur Schopenhauer
Recommended works: Studies in Pessimism

96. Michael Faraday
Recommended works: The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity

97. Charles Lyell
Recommended works: Principles of Geology

98. Auguste Comte
Recommended works: The Positive Philosophy

99. Honoré de Balzac
Recommended works: Père Goriot; Eugénie Grandet

100. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Recommended works: Representative Men; Essays; Journal

101. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Recommended works: The Scarlet Letter

102. Alexis de Tocqueville
Recommended works: Democracy in America

103. John Stuart Mill
Recommended works: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography

104. Charles Darwin
Recommended works: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography

105. Charles Dickens
Recommended works: Works, especially The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and Hard Times

106. Claude Bernard
Recommended works: An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

107. Henry David Thoreau
Recommended works: “Civil Disobedience”; Walden

108. Karl Marx
Recommended works: Capital, together with The Communist Manifesto

109. George Eliot
Recommended works: Adam Bede; Middlemarch

110. Herman Melville
Recommended works: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd

111. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Recommended works: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
Status — Crime and Punishment: Read
Difficulty: Easy to read
Personal notes: Love Dostoevsky. This book stayed with me for a long time.

112. Gustave Flaubert
Recommended works: Madame Bovary; Three Stories

113. Henrik Ibsen
Recommended works: Plays, especially Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, and The Wild Duck

114. Leo Tolstoy
Recommended works: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What Is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
Status — Anna Karenina: Read
Difficulty: Accessible, easy to read.
Personal notes: Read when I was younger. Will re-read.

115. Mark Twain
Recommended works: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger

116. William James
Recommended works: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism

117. Henry James
Recommended works: The American; The Ambassadors

118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Recommended works: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power

119. Jules Henri Poincaré
Recommended works: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method

120. Sigmund Freud
Recommended works: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

121. George Bernard Shaw
Recommended works: Plays and prefaces, especially Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan

122. Max Planck
Recommended works: The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography

123. Henri Bergson
Recommended works: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

124. John Dewey
Recommended works: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry

125. Alfred North Whitehead
Recommended works: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas

126. George Santayana
Recommended works: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places

127. Nikolai Lenin
Recommended works: The State and Revolution

128. Marcel Proust
Recommended works: Remembrance of Things Past

129. Bertrand Russell
Recommended works: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

130. Thomas Mann
Recommended works: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers

131. Albert Einstein
Recommended works: The Meaning of Relativity; “On the Method of Theoretical Physics”; The Evolution of Physics, with Leopold Infeld

132. James Joyce
Recommended works: “The Dead” in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

133. Jacques Maritain
Recommended works: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism

134. Franz Kafka
Recommended works: The Trial; The Castle

135. Arnold J. Toynbee
Recommended works: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial

136. Jean-Paul Sartre
Recommended works: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness

137. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Recommended works: The First Circle; Cancer Ward

Additional Works in My Personal Reading Project

These works were already part of my tracker but are not numbered recommendations in Appendix A. They are retained separately so the original 1–137 sequence remains accurate.

Seneca
Tracked work: Letters from a Stoic
Status: Reading
Difficulty: Easy and very good!

Søren Kierkegaard
Tracked works: Either/Or; Fear and Trembling

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tracked works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Philosophical Investigations