The Canon Library

Western Canon reading list

Essential 100

A century of works that gives the broadest useful first view of the Western canon.

How to use this reading path

This path moves chronologically from ancient epic and philosophy through scripture, drama, political thought, the novel, and modernism. It is demanding by design; read it as a long conversation rather than a checklist.

Books
100
Estimated hours
1800
Suggested pace
36 months
Difficulty
Advanced

The reading order

  1. The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous
  2. The Hebrew Bible / Old Testament by Multiple authors
  3. The Iliad by Homer
  4. The Odyssey by Homer
  5. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
  6. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
  7. Antigone by Sophocles
  8. Medea by Euripides
  9. The Bacchae by Euripides
  10. The Histories by Herodotus
  11. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
  12. The Republic by Plato
  13. Symposium by Plato
  14. Apology by Plato
  15. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
  16. Politics by Aristotle
  17. Poetics by Aristotle
  18. Elements by Euclid
  19. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
  20. The Aeneid by Virgil
  21. Metamorphoses by Ovid
  22. Parallel Lives by Plutarch
  23. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  24. The New Testament by Multiple authors
  25. Confessions by Augustine of Hippo
  26. The City of God by Augustine of Hippo
  27. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
  28. Beowulf by Anonymous
  29. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
  31. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  32. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
  33. Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli
  34. Utopia by Thomas More
  35. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
  36. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  37. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  38. King Lear by William Shakespeare
  39. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
  40. Othello by William Shakespeare
  41. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
  42. Paradise Lost by John Milton
  43. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
  44. Discourse on Method by René Descartes
  45. Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes
  46. Ethics by Baruch Spinoza
  47. Pensées by Blaise Pascal
  48. Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
  49. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
  50. Principia Mathematica / Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton
  51. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
  52. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
  53. A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
  54. Candide by Voltaire
  55. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  56. Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  57. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
  58. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
  59. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
  60. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
  61. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
  62. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
  63. Faust, Parts One and Two by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  64. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  65. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  66. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
  67. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
  68. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
  69. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  71. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  72. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  73. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  74. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
  75. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  76. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
  77. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
  78. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  79. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  80. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  81. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  82. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  83. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  84. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  85. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  86. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
  87. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
  88. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  89. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
  90. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
  91. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  92. The Trial by Franz Kafka
  93. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  94. Ulysses by James Joyce
  95. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
  96. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  97. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  98. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  99. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
  100. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf