Reading list
Great Books of the Western World, free to read
In 1952 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the University of Chicago published Great Books of the Western World: fifty-four volumes, from Homer to Freud, chosen by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins as the works an educated person should know. The set was sold door to door and sat, often unread, in a great many living rooms.
41 books, all free to read
Nearly all of it is in the public domain. Here are the works we hold, in the set's own order, roughly chronological. You do not have to read them in order: the plays and the essays make the easiest start.
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5. The Birds
by Aristophanes
Aristophanes's Birds: two Athenians build a city in the sky. Comedy, in the great books.
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6. Histories
by Herodotus
Herodotus, the first historian, on the Persian wars and everything he heard along the way.
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7. History of the Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides
Thucydides on the war between Athens and Sparta, the first history that tries to be exact.
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14. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
by Plutarch
Plutarch's lives, a whole volume of their own.
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15. The Confessions of St. Augustine
by Augustine of Hippo
Augustine's Confessions, alongside his City of God.
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17. The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's pilgrims and their tales, from bawdy to holy.
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19. Leviathan
by Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes on why we need a sovereign: life without one is nasty, brutish and short.
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23. Philosophical Works with the Discourse on Method and the Meditations
by René Descartes
Descartes doubts everything and starts again from I think, therefore I am.
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26. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
by David Hume
Hume's Enquiry, in the volume with Locke and Berkeley.
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28. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy, the novel that cannot get started.
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29. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's Tom Jones, the great comic novel of the eighteenth century.
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30. The Social Contract
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau's Social Contract: man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
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32. The Life of Samuel Johnson
by James Boswell
Boswell's Life of Johnson, the greatest biography in English.
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33. The Federalist Papers
by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison
The Federalist, in the volume of American state papers.
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36. The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Communist Manifesto, bound with Capital.
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40. The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
by William James
William James's Principles of Psychology, the book that made psychology a science in English.
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41. Civilization and Its Discontents
by Sigmund Freud
Freud, the set's last volume, with Civilization and Its Discontents among his works.
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Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.