Bruce Fein’s 100 Book Reading List
The Gateway to Wisdom, Justice, and a General Theory of Man
Sir Francis Bacon advised, “Reading maketh a full man.”
Reading enables deliberation and conversation with the greatest minds since the beginning of recorded time. It offers the knowledge to evaluate the gospel of Ecclesiastes:
“What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again: there is nothing new under the sun.”
Reading nourishes the development of a theory of man that explains the human narrative with the precision of Newton’s Laws of Motion. The Reading List is well worth the price of admission.
1. The Trial of Socrates
2. Plato’s Republic
3. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
4. The Iliad
5. The Odyssey
6. Lysistrata
7. Antigone
8. Oedipus Rex
9.Herodotus The Histories
10. Pericles’ Funeral Oration
11. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
12. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology
13. The Old Testament
14. The New Testament
15. The Holy Koran
16. Mahabharata
17. The Teachings of Buddha
18. Confucius’ Analects
19. Reflections of Marcus Aurelius
20. Tacitus, the Annals and the History
21. Suetonius, Twelve Caesars
22. Cicero, Collected Works
23. Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars
24. Saint Augustine’s Confessions
25. Seneca’s Essays
26. The Philosophy of Epicurus
27. Cato’s Letters or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, Two Volumes, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon
28. Plutarch’s Lives
29. Flavius Josephus, The Complete Works
30. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah The Guide for the Perplexed
31. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
32. Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
33. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
34. Song of Roland
35. Machiavelli, The Prince
36. Cervantes, Don Quixote
37. Shakespeare: Julius Caesar
38. John Milton: Paradise Lost
39. Alexander Pope: Essay on Man
40. Daniel Defoe : Robinson Crusoe
41. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels ; A Modest Proposal
42. John Locke Second Treatise on Civil Government
43. Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws
44. David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature
45. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments
46. Immanuel Kant Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
47. Voltaire’s Candide
48. Rousseau’s Social Contract
49. Pascal’s The Mind on Fire
50. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy
51. The Federalist Papers
52. The Writings of James Madison
53. The Writings of George Washington
54. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
55. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution
56. Sir Thomas More Utopia
57. Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Women
58. John Quincy Adams’ Diaries
59. Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex
60. The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
61. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Rights of Man
62. Montaigne’s Essays
63. James Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans
64. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
65. Alexander Dumas The Three Musketeer’s
66. Victor Hugo Les Miserables
67. Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America
68. John Marshall Life of Washington
69. Washington Irving The Complete Writings
70. William Babington Macauley The History of England from the Accession of James the Second
71. Moneypenny and Buckle The Life of Disraeli
72. John Morley Life of Gladstone
73. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
74. Edward Bellamy Looking Backward
75. Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn
76. Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
77. Emile Zola J’acccuse
78. Gustaf Flaubert’s Madam Bovary
79. Jane Austin Pride and Prejudice
80. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
81. Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin
82. Moliere Tartuffe
83. U.S. Grant’s War Memoirs
84. The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas
85. Booker T. Washington Up From Slavery
86. W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America
87. Thomas Sowell Ethnic America
88. Gunnar Myrdal An American Dilemma
89. Woodrow Wilson Congressional Government
90. James Bryce The American Commonwealth
91. Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf
92. Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
93. Frederick von Hayek Road to Serfdom
94. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged
95. Carl Sandburg Abraham Lincoln
96. Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto
97. Samuel Johnson Lives of the Poets
98. Boswell’s Life of Johnson
99. Robert Caro’s Ascent to Power
100. Winston Churchill’s The Second World War
