The books that everyone must read
My (brief) list is as follows:
The Gulag Archipelago (this book should be required reading in all high schools), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Cancer Ward by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.
Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kingdom of God is Within You, A Confession, and The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy.
The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.
On the Concept of Irony, The Concept of Anxiety, Journals, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death, The Present Age, and Attack Upon Christendom by Soren Kierkegaard.
The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer.
Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Othello, and sonnets by William Shakespeare.
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton.
Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell.
Confessions and The City of God by St. Augustine.
The Summa Theologiae and The Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Spiritual Canticle and The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Human Condition, Love and St. Augustine, and On Revolution by Hannah Arendt.
The Trial and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
The Gulag Archipelago (this book should be required reading in all high schools), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Cancer Ward by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.
Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kingdom of God is Within You, A Confession, and The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy.
The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.
On the Concept of Irony, The Concept of Anxiety, Journals, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death, The Present Age, and Attack Upon Christendom by Soren Kierkegaard.
The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer.
Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Othello, and sonnets by William Shakespeare.
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton.
Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell.
Confessions and The City of God by St. Augustine.
The Summa Theologiae and The Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Spiritual Canticle and The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Human Condition, Love and St. Augustine, and On Revolution by Hannah Arendt.
The Trial and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
Comments (75)
Boy. Pretty depressing. I don't think teenagers need to be more depressed than they already are. Also, a lot of this stuff is specifically Christian. I'm not a big fan of the ram it down their throats approach. Teach them to read and show them things worth reading, which can include stuff on your list. Allow them to find things of their own they like to read, even if it's auto repair. Teach them to write. Teach them history and geography. Teach them science and math. Teach them German (or Japanese, or Latin).
Here are books I've given to my children because they've meant so much to me:
"Freedom not License" by A.S. Neill
"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad
"The Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu. I give the Stephen Mitchell translation
"Foundation" by Isaac Asimov
"The Poetry of Robert Frost" by Robert Frost
"The Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan Watts
"Life's Ratchet" by Peter Hoffman
"The Panda's Thumb" and other books of essays by Stephen J. Gould
"The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin
"Titus Groan" by Melvyn Peake
"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner
"The Education of a Poker Player" by Herbert Yardley because my father gave it to me
"You Have the Right to Remain Innocent" by James Duane
I could keep going. I don't suggest making students read these books and I don't think these are by any means the best or the most important. I don't think that matters. Well written matters. Taste matters - not that it's important that students agree with yours, but they should learn that they need to find their own.
Solzhenitsyn in particular should be required reading. Was going to add Lao Tzu along with Chuang Tzu as well as the Dhammapada and stuff from Confucianism but I got caught up at work. Being a native of Massachusetts I love Robert Frost. I made this list irrespective of age group; perhaps the books I posted are geared more at higher education. Solzhenitsyn however, as I said, needs to be taught in both secondary and higher education. Darwin is also good (wasn’t at the top of my list when I was typing it up). I wholeheartedly agree with you that students needs to find their own interests in reading, but books like these are called “classics” for a reason.
I've often heard it said that we should eschew viewing TV and instead cultivate a reading habit, but really, how different are books from TV programs? :chin: Did pre-TV times see people telling each other not to read books but do something else?
Wittgenstein reportedly read very little of his predecessors' and coevals' works. Look how he turned out. Dead! :lol:
Don't
All
Have
To
Be the same, read the same books, agree about everything. Some of us need to read The Plumber's Bible, but not all of us.
Are you a Plumbatarian?
:up:
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
I got beaten up here on the forum for starting the discussion "You don't need to read philosophy to be a philosopher," so you can sort of see where I'm coming from. I'm not really a classics kind of guy. On the other hand, as I noted, I think taste is very important. Students need to figure out what their taste is. There's no better way to do that than by having someone passionate show them theirs.
I left "Self-Reliance" by Emerson off my list.
Relax, relax. We'll make them read Yeats, Joyce, and French too.
Mandatory 'Finnegan's Wake'? That'll teach 'em. :naughty:
“The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?“ - Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Gotta have my Yeats; one of the perks of being half Irish is hearing the older folks recite his poetry on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Regardless of what we think students should be reading (we can make a cause for all of these books) it is unfortunate that other states here in America don’t encourage reading like this. There are many reasons for it but speaking as a native of Massachusetts there is a worrying fusion of politics and education that I see rearing it’s head.
And maybe Kierkegaard should be reserved for college… but he’d definitely have something to say about politics in the classroom.
Sinful, ain't it? :snicker:
I count some of the items on your list as great literature. I can't think of any reason why everyone should read everything on your list. I majored in English (a long time ago) and have since read quite a bit in classics, religious studies, science fiction, history, and science. Many of the books I read were good FOR ME to read. Should everyone read my long list of books? Of course not!
The best advice I can offer "everyone" is this: If you have the inclination to read a lot, then read widely. If you don't feel inclined to read a lot then you probably won't. If you can, at least find a few books that you enjoy.
There are authors who I love--Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg. I also like Allen Ginsberg and some other beat poets. William Blake is on my A-list, and so is John Donne. There are a mixed batch of poets I have read with pleasure (and not a few I tossed aside with disgust).
Load the cannons with insufferable canons of literature (and every other art) and fire away.
It's not canonical books; it's canonical lists.
I've read many of those, and some I started but they were too dull and/or irrelevant to my experience. I don't hold to a worldview wherein everyone should read key books. Dostoyevsky I find awfully turgid - I like The Gambler over all his other works, concise, biting - a wonderful and gruesome depiction of addiction, perhaps the only subject D really knew.
I can't say I am a big reader any more and I generally don't read for pleasure. My preference is for essays. I draw little from poetry or Shakespeare... As far as Solzhenitsyn is concerned, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich will suffice - the other stuff is interminable but of historical significance. I would read Anne Applebaum's Gulag for a stunning overview of the Soviet approach.
Some of my preferred authors have been: George Elliot, Saul Bellow, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, Bruce Chatwin, John Steinbeck, Patrick White, Joseph Conrad, Cervantes, Flaubert, and Joris-Karl Huysmans.
I can't say I have read any philosophy that has made a big impact - but I have not been voracious in this area - Nietzsche, Seneca, Schopenhauer (I enjoyed some essays), Montaigne, Camus, Thoreau, Rorty, Murdoch, and lots of essays/papers by everyone from Thomas Nagel to Susan Haack. Mostly forgotten now.
If I was recommending a couple of books to a 20 year-old, they might be The Great Gatsby (for it's acute observations about people and its use of English) and Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt for its arse-kicking politics. My favourite novel might be Voss.
You clearly once were though.
Quoting Tom Storm
Any in particular?
This has been on the back burner for awhile; should it move up?
Quoting Bitter Crank
One of the most beautiful things I've read in a long time (to me at least, highlighting the sentiment in the thread here) was from his "Spiritual Canticle":
Return thou, dove,
For the wounded hart appears on the hill
At the air of thy flight, and takes refreshment.
Here's a link to a review I did.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/642269
Sounds like I need to order it. It was in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, of which I once had a hair-brained goal of collecting them all...but I can't find a cheap Ballantine copy. Guess I'll have to settle for something else.
Scratch that, found one. Ordered! I also saw below your review that @jamalrob is a fan. Extra motivation to read.
1. The Diamond Sutra (The Earliest Dated Book; 11 May 868).
2. The most printed book in history: The Bibila Sacra (5 billion copies).
3. The most translated author: Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976) aka the Duchess of Death.
Going by the above list of authors and topics, it appears that there's a mystery of a religious nature; in all likelihood a murder has been commited (Jeeeezuz!). Friends, Romans, countrymen, we have corpus delecti. Our task is to solve this case!
Can we?
:lol:
Tomorrow's Children, edited by Asimov
Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien's best work IMO
Assassin's Apprentice and sequels, Robin Hobb. Best fantasy author I've read.
Ronald Dahl's short stories
The Remains Of the Day, Ishiguro
Loud Hands, various autistic authors
The Once and Future King, T H White
Quoting Noble Dust
A favourite of mine. If you like Titus Groan read the second book too. Gormenghast is just as good. In fact, the two books read as one.
Regarding the OP, I used to think there were "books that everyone must read", but now I don't.
Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
Linda Zerilli - Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Ellen Meiskins Wood - The Origin of Capitalism
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu - How the West Came to Rule
Andre Leroi-Gourhan - Gesture and Speech
Miguel de Beistegui - Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology
Alicia Juarrero - Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behaviour as a Complex System
Alva Noe - Action in Perception
Fredrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil + On the Genealogy of Morals
Alphonso Lingis - The Imperative
:up:
lol
This applies to books too. There are so many great books of all kinds. That's the reason I reject "must read" or "best books o all time" lists. It might be more helpful to present lists of bad books.
It's a bit of a cliché I'm afraid - George Orwell, Gore Vidal and Pauline Kael (film essays), Susan Sontag, PL Travers, Clive James, Martin Amis, Andrew O'Hagen, Gideon Haigh, Martin Gardner, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Hunter Thompson, Evelyn Waugh, George Packer.
Good ole American style pragmatism. I like it! I could use a copy of the Plumbers Bible right now.
Oh dear, I've really let myself down there! :grimace:
Thanks.
Whenever I hear anyone complaining about the quality of books I always want to say - We get to choose from 5,000 years of written works. There are tens of thousands of wonderful books, not even counting the merely good ones. They're available without leaving our homes, many of them free. Starting in the past 20 years, the same has been true for TV, movies, and music. This is the golden age of access to art of all kinds.
I did read "Gormenghast" finally. I was....disappointed isn't the right word, but it didn't have the magic for me that "Titus Groan" did. While reading, it struck me that might be the point, at least partly.
My interests overlap with many of the books you and the other posters mention as important to them. I am going to check out a number of titles mentioned that I have not read.
Books not mentioned yet, that are important to me, are the wittings of Greeks from Homer onwards. I have spent most of my time in that neck of the wood on the works of philosophy but the plays and poems interest me too.
Some other books I love without having to think much about it are:
Rupert Thomson's Five Gates of Hell
The Poetry of Rilke, Auden, Neruda, C.S Merwin, and Charles Olson.
Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class
Yuri Slezkine's The House of Government
Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series.
Virgil's Aeneid translated by Dryden
I like Bitter Crank's idea for a worst ever list. I am going to slip into a Hazmat suit before entering that conversation.
I've just started reading this and I'm enjoying it a lot.
It has given me a boost when my other guilty pleasures did not.
There's more to it than my favorite part about the stupidity pf lawns.
C. Peter Domhoff Who Rules America and The Bohemian Grove and other retreats;: A study in ruling-class cohesiveness and others. Domhoff has (surprisingly) also written about dreams. Some of Bomhoff's material is on line at https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu.
C. Wright Mills The Power Elite 1956, but still true. "C. Wright Mills was a radical public intellectual, a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia University."
Dorothy Day The Long Loneliness: (the autobiography of the legendary Catholic social activist)
Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find and other stories.
John Rechy City of Night 1963 Lets hear it for a great account of sexual adventures (cruising the streets and parks of Los Angeles) If you prefer your erotica served up as sociology, try Laud Humphrey's Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places his scandalous PhD dissertation about gay sex in St. Louis, Missouri city park toilets in the 1960s. The scandal was much less about men having sex in public toilets and much more about his methods of studying it.
Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited & the BBC's dramatization
Robert Brooks I Claudius & the BBC's dramatization
Yes, much more than the lawns.
I am familiar with Mills, Waugh, O'Connor, and Brooks. Will check out the others.
I think Steinbeck is a part of this. Conformity as a means to survival in contrast to people imagining their future in Dickens.
Rupert Thomson, lives in Veblen's basement, should you check him out.
And then whatever you think is interesting. :cool:
Well, then, what is Chomsky's reading list?
It's extremely long, and should only be of interests to those who think what he's saying makes sense.
I was only half-joking about "having" to read that book.
I agree with others here that there is no must read, especially in philosophy - there are too many ways of thinking about the world and people often feel attracted to very different perspectives, making recommendations pointless.
Unless they are looking for a specific branch of philosophy, then one can throw out some suggestions.
I don't think recommendations are pointless. I disagree with Chomsky in many ways but respect the way he pulls together what he thinks is coherent. I don't think he would be cool with the idea that his ideas are just one of many. He wants his idea to win.
Recommendations without a area of interest are very strange to me. If you specify, I'm interested in Chomsky's political (or philosophical) recommendations, then that's fine.
But to ask, what book must be read? Assumes there has to be such a book. The onus is on the person providing the book to say what this book must be read, out of all possible books.
He's happy to get people thinking for themselves. I think he wants to find out the truth, but knowns that in human affairs, there are likely no final answers.
Yes. Let the onus fall on you.
I wouldn’t recommend any work of philosophy as a ‘must read’ tbh. If I had to pick one I’d go for The Republic.
If we are talking purely about philosophy then I think anyone serious about the subject should tackle Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
I second that. Other than Shakespeare Orwell is a must and I think Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are must reads also. The Republic in my opinion is more literature than philosophy but I definitely think it is more than accessible to high schoolers. Kant I personally think might be a tad too difficult but you never know.
Crime and Punishment is certainly one I’d highly recommend to most people (and have done). 1984 was one that really cut through the nonsense and conveyed a message everyone needs to take seriously though.
I agree. I personally think Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work needs to be taken seriously, too. What communism did to Eastern Europe and East Asia is not widely spread knowledge among today’s youth.
“The sun is up. The sun is yellow. The yellow sun is over the house. It is hot out here in the sun.”
Who among us haven't noticed these very same things yet never were able to put them in verse?
“The dogs are all going around, and around, and around.”
Ha! What a whimsical thought! Dogs spinning, turning, and doing such non-dog things! Who doesn't love this imagery?
“A dog party! A big dog party! Big dogs, little dogs, red dogs, blue dogs, yellow dogs, green dogs, black dogs, and white dogs are all at a dog party! ”
We're all thinking the same thing! Why wasn't I invited to this canine fiesta? Dogs of all stripes and colors partying at the most diverse of galas!
If we are going to evaluate children's books as philosophy, I put my money on "Goodnight Moon."
That's on my reading list. I've started it a few times, but I haven't been able to get completely through it yet.
Here are some other suggestions:
Self-Reliance by Emerson
Everything by Steven Pinker.
Everything by Dawkins.
Everything by Hawking.
Everything by Jack Kornfield
Everything by Ken Wilber
Everything by Aristotle
Everything by Hume
Everything by Locke
Everything by Smith
Meditations by Aurelius
A history of Western Philosophy by Russell, Durant, Voltaire. I would suggest my own one, but removed it from the net.
There is probably 400-500hrs of reading here. And to think that I've read so much more.
First Aid Manual 11th Edition, Red Cross.
Popper's Argument for Inderterminism is to my knowledge the only source of a workable metaphysics for modern physics. Very few philosophers have dealt with this issue, surprisingly.
Jacob's The Possible & The Actual attempts to the same for modern biology. It is short but very rich in ideas, clear, and to me, illuminating.
I would add Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics, for its radically simple and effective way to conceptualize metaphysics.
For ‘must reads’ I have a fairly limited span in philosophical works but I would say:
- Critique of Pure Reason, because it is a challenge to read and requires concentration and study to get to grips with, as well as being one of the most important philosophical work ever produced.
- The Republic, because it is a great insight in ancient Greece and the origins of western philosophy.
- Being and Time, because it is awful yet a completely different and evasive style of writing that offers some nice points but ultimately outlines the border between meaningless drivel and brilliance.
- Something by Nietzsche, but do not start with Thus Spake … as he, like Heidegger, introduces a different style of writing to the world of philosophy.
- Philosophical Investigations, because it tackles important issues about language and language use, as well as being an amalgam of of ideas/thoughts.
I think these five give a pretty nice map of philosophy in terms of approach and style.
I still think Critique of Pure Reason is an essential read for anyone serious about philosophy. Second in line would probably be Being and Time. Not that I am a fan of Heidegger exactly, I just think it is important to see how obtuse philosophical texts can get and where, more or less, things went a bit off the rails.
A tale of greed, of adversity, of toil, of satisfaction; of the fundamental fact that all things must pass; of overcoming oneself to achieve transformation.
Some are as great; there is none greater.
I agree. I struggled for a long time with the idea of metaphysics. I wasn't sure what it is, but I knew what I want it to be. Collingwood helped me put words to that.
Weren't you the one who introduced this great book here? Including to me. Tx for it. It did help me get more relaxed about metaphysics, more understanding of its importance, and able to reason at that level with more ease.
Popper's piece on indeterminism is a book I read out of sheer need for survival, at 20. I was finding the general consensus around determinism suffocating and toxic, not to mention scientifically outdated and not practical. For me, reading Popper was like drinking from a fresh and pure spring after a long walk in the desert. But even Popper, while writing page after page of excellent and lucid metaphysics, was under the (false) impression that he was staying away from metaphysics. Such was the negative connotation of this word even in his prodigious, original mind.
It was Tim Wood who showed it to me.
Bless be he.
Accurate list of books. Nevertheless, I think it is made for a West minded point of view. You shall not forget Asian books and culture, I think it would amaze you. I highlight what @T Clark wrote about Tao. I completely feel that is one of the most important books about thought and knowledge ever written. Give it a try.
I also recommend you these books:
Generally speaking, I expect that most readers will have a positive reaction to the content and ideas found within the books recommended above. As the techno-optimist paradigm, is a "glass half-full" worldview.
Politics:
Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste by Philip Mirowski
Philosophy:
A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality by Ralph Cudworth
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
Novels:
Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
This forces me to leave our portions of books which I would otherwise recommend, such as Hume's Skepticism with Regard to the Senses which is a chapter, or Richard Burthogge's An Essay Upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits which I did not read in complete form, or indeed Kant's Solution of The Cosmological Idea of Totality in the Derivation of World Events from Their Causes,Possibility of the Causality through Freedom... Eludiation of the Cosmological Idea of A Freedom... or even essays, such as Chomsky's What Can We Understand? which I consider the most important essay in epistemology/metaphysics.
Same thing with fiction, I have to leave our portions of books, such as the first half of Michael Cisco's Animal Money, or the short stories of Borges, etc.
And I'm sure I'm leaving out stuff that I would kick myself for forgetting. But it's kind of inevitable.
It's almost impossible to write such a list, but it's an interesting exercise.
Is it not what you read. It is how you read ... and whether you can actually (rather than merely passing your eyes over some words vacantly).
I can barely read btw :) No shame in that though. I do my best and hopefully slowly improve here and there.
I've got a handle on what Kant's Critique is all about, but here one must allow Kant the courtesy of explaining himself. I suggest reading the challenge that Kant presents to his reviewer, found in the Appendix to his "Prolegomena ...". The challenge is open to all thinkers, philosophical or otherwise. To come to grips with the Critique one has to take to account the problems of metaphysics, mentioned in the intro to the Critique, as being God, Freedom, and Immortality. If these problems are not kept in mind throughout one's reading of the Critique, one will get lost in the forest of Kant's rhetoric, and so many of his readers do indeed get lost, having lost sight of these problems The Critique of Pure Reason is so called because it is a critical examination of how far pure reason can go toward resolving these probllems. The challenge found in the Appendix is a challenge that has not been met by any of Kant's followers, or detractors, or any neutral agent. I've given it a shot however, here's a link to my answer to Kant (but this is only if you want to understand Kant more fully--there is an Appendix included that quotes Kant and David Hume). Hegel is also mentioned in the body of the work, and the work can be considered in the Kantian sense, a science of metaphysics):
https://philarchive.org/archive/LIIRTP