150 Books
I found out that with 150 well-chosen books a man possesses a complete analysis of all human knowledge, or at least all that is either useful or desirable to be acquainted with.
— Abbé Faria, The Count of Monte Cristo
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Suggestions? Email me at books@dtlarson.com
Classics
[x]The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky[x]War and Peace - Tolstoy[x]Don Quixote - Cervantes[ ]One Thousand and One Nights[ ]The Odyssey - Homer[ ]The Iliad - Homer[ ]The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu[ ]Moby Dick - Melville[x]The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas[ ]The Aeneid - Virgil[ ]The Epic of Gilgamesh[x]Middlemarch - George Eliot[ ]The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer[ ]Metamorphoses - Ovid[ ]Frankenstein - Mary Shelley[ ]Les Misérables - Victor Hugo[ ]Beowulf[ ]The Ramayana - Valmiki[ ]Journey to the West - Wu Cheng’en
Fables
[x]Aesop’s Fables[ ]Panchatantra - Vishnu Sharma
Modern
[x]East of Eden - John Steinbeck[ ]One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez[x]The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald[ ]Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov[ ]Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston[ ]The Trial - Franz Kafka[ ]Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison[ ]The Stranger - Albert Camus[ ]Brave New World - Aldous Huxley[ ]1984 - George Orwell[x]Siddartha - Hesse[ ]Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe[x]One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn[ ]Beloved - Toni Morrison[x]The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand[x]The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton[ ]Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges[ ]To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Philosophy
[ ]Meditations - Descartes[ ]Ethics - Aristotle[x]Meditations - Marcus Aurelius[x]The Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius[ ]Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche[ ]The Analects - Confucius[ ]Zhuangzi - Zhuang Zhou[x]Candide - Voltaire[ ]The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir[ ]Ethics - Baruch Spinoza[ ]An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume[x]Letters to a Stoic - Seneca[ ]Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard[ ]Emile, or On Education - Rousseau[x]The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell[ ]The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt[ ]Essays - Michel de Montaigne
Religion
[ ]The Bible[ ]The Quran[x]The Bhagavad Gita[ ]Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu[ ]The Golden Bough - James George Frazer[ ]The Dhammapada[ ]Confessions - St. Augustine[ ]The Upanishads[ ]The I Ching (Book of Changes)[x]95 Theses, The Freedom of a Christian - Martin Luther[ ]The Elementary Forms of Religious Life - Émile Durkheim[x]The Heart Sutra[ ]The Popol Vuh
Mathematics
[ ]Elements - Euclid[x]A Mathematician’s Apology - G.H. Hardy[ ]What is Mathematics? - Courant & Robbins[ ]Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter
Science
[ ]Origin of Species - Darwin[ ]Relativity - Albert Einstein[ ]The Character of Physical Laws - Richard Feynman[ ]The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn[ ]The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Psychology
[ ]The Interpretation of Dreams - Freud[ ]Modern Man in Search of a Soul - C. G. Jung[x]Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl[ ]Attachment - John Bowlby[ ]Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman[ ]The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James[x]Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman[ ]The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk
History
[ ]The Histories - Herodotus[ ]The History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides[ ]Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville[ ]Muqaddimah - Ibn Khaldun[ ]Annals - Tacitus[ ]The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - Shirer[ ]Records of the Grand Historian - Sima Qian[ ]The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
Poetry
[ ]The Essential Rumi[ ]Paradise Lost - Milton[ ]Leaves of Grass - Whitman[ ]The Complete Poems - Sappho[x]The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Drama
[ ]The Complete Greek Tragedies - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides[ ]Essential Shakespeare[ ]Faust - Goethe
Technology
[x]Computing Machinery and Intelligence - Alan Turing[ ]The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes[ ]Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Abelson & Sussman[ ]The Art of Doing Science & Engineering - Richard Hamming
Design
[ ]The Design of Everyday Things - Norman[ ]A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander[ ]Ten Books on Architecture - Vitruvius[ ]In Praise of Shadows - Junichiro Tanizaki[ ]The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
Biography
[x]The Diary of Anne Frank[x]The Autobiography of Malcolm X[ ]Parallel Lives - Plutarch[ ]The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[ ]Black Elk Speaks - John G. Neihardt
Politics
[ ]Republic - Plato[ ]On Liberty - John Stuart Mill[ ]The Second Treatise of Government - John Locke[x]The Prince - Machiavelli[ ]The Federalist Papers - Hamilton, Madison, and Jay[ ]The Social Contract - Rousseau[ ]The Spirit of the Laws - Montesquieu[ ]The Constitution of the United States[ ]The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois[ ]Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
Strategy
[ ]The Art of War - Sun Tzu[ ]On War - Clausewitz[ ]The Book of Five Rings - Musashi
Economics
[ ]Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman[ ]The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith[ ]Capital - Marx[ ]The General Theory - John Maynard Keynes[ ]The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber[ ]The Gift - Marcel Mauss
Art
[ ]The Story of Art - Ernst Gombrich[ ]Lives of the Artists - Giorgio Vasari[ ]Ways of Seeing - John Berger[ ]Art and Visual Perception - Rudolf Arnheim
Nature
[ ]Silent Spring - Rachel Carson[x]Walden - Henry David Thoreau[ ]Nature - Emerson[ ]A Sand County Almanac - Leopold
Health
[ ]Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine[x]Nutrition and Physical Degeneration - Weston A. Price[ ]The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Pragmatic
[x]How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie[ ]On Food & Cooking - Harold McGee[x]How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid[ ]Rhetoric - Aristotle