Great Books Lists

As seen in A Guide to Oriental Classics, Whole Earth magazine, Winter 2002. (A revised version of the article is available at author Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site.)

This page:
Introduction | Western Canon | Eastern and World Canons | Contemporary Canon | Other Lists of Great Books | My Reading Lists | Indexes to these Great Books Lists

Introduction

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What are the Great Books? Aren't they all written by Dead White Males? What are these lists? Why isn't my favorite author listed? What are your indexes of these lists? What Great Books have you read? Where can I get these books?

Western Canon

• Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book
  [Included in indexes below]

• Bloom, Harold. Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
  [Included in indexes below]

• Borges, Jorge Luis. Selections for "The Library of Babel" and "A Personal Library"

• Fadiman, Clifton. Lifetime Reading Plan. 3rd ed., 1988.
  [Included in indexes below]

• Globe and Mail. 50 Greatest Books - Mostly Western classics, but includes a few Eastern ones (The Qur'an, Mahabharata, and Murasaki's Tale of Genji), as transcribed on LibraryThing

• Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers. 23rd ed., 1990.
  [Included in indexes below]

• Guardian (U.K.) lists:

  • The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, October 2003
  • The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books, June 2011
  • The 100 Best Novels in English, September 2015
  • The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books in English, late 2016

• Harvard Book Store's 100 Favorite Titles - Staff choices
  [Included in indexes below]

• Lubbock, Sir John. Choice of Books - Early Great Books list, from 1896
  [Included in indexes below]

• St. John's College reading list ("The great books school")
  [Included in indexes below]

• Seymour-Smith, Martin. 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written.
  [Included in indexes below]

• Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
  [Included in indexes below]

• Telegraph. 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library - List published in the Telegraph (U.K.), April 6, 2008
  [Included in indexes below]

• Thomas Aquinas College - Another school emphasizing the great books
  [Included in indexes below]

Eastern and World Canons

• Approaches to the Asian Classics. Ed. by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom
  [Included in indexes below]

• Fadiman, Clifton and John S. Major. New Lifetime Reading Plan. 4th ed., 1997.
  [Included in indexes below]

• A Guide to Oriental Classics. Ed. by Wm. Theodore de Bary, Ainslie T. Embree, and Amy Vladeck Heinrich. 3rd ed., 1989.
  [Included in indexes below]

• Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching. Ed. by Barbara Stoler Miller
  [Included in indexes below]

• The 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time - "A 2002 survey of around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the 'most meaningful book of all time' in a poll organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo." (Posted on the web site of Christchurch (N.Z.) City Library) Also published in the Guardian May 8, 2002, as the Top 100 Books of All Time
  [Included in indexes below]

• Rexroth, Kenneth. Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited
  [Included in indexes below]

• St. John's College graduate program in Eastern classics (Santa Fe campus)
  [Included in indexes below]

• Utne Reader's "Loose Canon" and The Loose Cannon, part 2 - "150 great works to set your imagination on fire" (originally published in Utne Reader, May/June 1998)
  [Included in indexes below]

• Ward, Philip. A Lifetime's Reading: The World's 500 Greatest Books
  [Included in indexes below]

Contemporary Canon

• Boston Public Library's 100 Most Influential Books of the Century (archived)
  [Included in indexes below]

• Burgess, Anthony. 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939
  [Included in indexes below]

• Funsten, Kenneth. "100 Books for the Modern Person." Los Angeles Times, Sep. 20, 1981.
  [Included in indexes below]

• "The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the War." TLS, Oct. 6, 1995 - Philosophy, History, Social Sciences, Science
  [Included in indexes below]

 

• Le Monde's 100 Livres du Siècle (100 Books of the Century), as transcribed on LibraryThing

• New York Public Library's Books of the Century - Compiled in 1995
  [Included in indexes below]

• Nobel Prize Winners in Literature
  [Included in indexes below]

• Time Magazine's "All Time 100 Novels" - Not really the greatest novels of all time, but Time magazine's choice of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923
  [Included in indexes below]

• Well-Stocked Bookcase - Book-of-the-Month Club list of 60 enduring American novels published 1926-1986
  [Included in indexes below]

Other Lists of Great Books

• Other Lists of Great Books - An annotated bibliography of some other sources of Great Books lists, both in books and on the Web
  
  

My Reading Lists

• My Reading Lists
  (Ancient Near East, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, China, Middle Ages)

Indexes to these Great Books Lists

Index by Author and Title:

Anonymous works and works with more than 2 authors are alphabetized under their titles (e.g., the Bible and Beowulf are both under "B")

• Authors A
• Authors B
• Authors C to D
• Authors E to F
• Authors G to H
• Authors I to L
• Authors M
• Authors N to P
• Authors Q to R
• Authors S
• Authors T to V
• Authors W to Z

Index by Period and Culture:

• Western Literature: Ancient (To 6th Century CE)
• Western Literature: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque (7th-17th Centuries)
• Western Literature: Modern (18th-21st Centuries, plus auxiliary reading for all periods)
• Non-Western Literature