A Well-Educated Mind Book Lists

A Well-Educated Mind

I highly recommend buying and reading A Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer.  It is the source of my current book list as well as my inspiration to begin this quest for self-education.  It's wonderfully motivating and a great resource book that you will come back to over and over again.

Novels (31)
Don Quixote*
The Pilgrim's Progress*
Gulliver's Travels*
Pride and Prejudice*
Oliver Twist*
Jane Eyre*
The Scarlet Letter*
Moby-Dick*
Uncle Tom's Cabin*
Madame Bovary*
Crime and Punishment*
Anna Karenina*
The Return of the Native*
The Portrait of a Lady*
Huckleberry Finn*
The Red Badge of Courage*
Heart of Darkness*
The House of Mirth*
The Great Gatsby*
Mrs. Dalloway*
The Trial*
Native Son*
The Stranger*
1984*
Invisible Man
Seize the Day
One Hundred Years of Solitude
If on a winter's night a traveler
Song of Solomon
White Noise
Possession

*I have already read these books

Autobiographies (26)
The Confessions, Augustine
The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery Kempe
Essays, Michel De Montaigne
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, Teresa of Avila
Meditations, Rene Descartes
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration, Mary Rowlandson
Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself, Harriet Jacobs
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Born Again, Charles W. Colson
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Richard Rodriquez
The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway
All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Elie Wiesel

Histories (32)
The Histories, Herodotus
The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
The Republic, Plato
Lives, Plutarch
The City of God, Augustine
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede
The Prince, Iccolo Machiavelli
Utopia, Sir Thomas More
The True End of Civil Government, John Locke
The History of England, Volume V, David Hume
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Common Sense, Thomas Paine
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
The New England Mind, Perry Miller
The Great Crash 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith
The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene D. Genovese
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman
All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstien
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, James M. McPherson
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama

Dramas (28)
Agamemnon, Aeschylus
Oedipus the King, Sophocles
Medea, Euripides
The Birds, Aristophanes
Poetics, Aristotle
Everyman
Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
Richard III, William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Tartuffe, Moliere
The Way of the World, William Congreve
She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw
Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill
No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
Equus, Peter Shaffer

Poetry (40)
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer
Greek Lyricists
Odes, Horace
Beowulf
Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Sonnets, William Shakespeare
John Donne
Psalms, King James Bible
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rossetti
Gerard Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
W.H. Auden

Philip Larken
Allen Ginsberg
Sylvia Plath
Mark Strand
Adrienne Rich
Seamus Heaney
Robert Pinsky
Jane Kenyon
Rita Dove

Science (29)


  • Hippocrates - On Airs, Waters and Places
  • Aristotle - Physics
  • Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
  • Nicolaus Copernicus - Commentariolus
  • Francis Bacon - Novum Organum
  • Galileo Galilie - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
  • Robert Hooke - Micrographia
  • Isaac Newton - excerpts from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica 
  • Georges Cuvier - Preliminary Discourse
  • Charles Lyell - Principles of Geology 
  • Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
  • Gregor Mendel - Experiments in Plant Hybridization
  • Alfred Wegener - The Origin of Continents and Oceans
  • Albert Einstein - The General Theory of Relativity
  • Max Planck - The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
  • Julian Huxley - Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
  • Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
  • Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
  • Desmond Morris- The Naked Ape 
  • James D. Watson - The Double Helix 
  • Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
  • Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes:
  • A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe 
  • E. O. Wilson- On Human Nature
  • James Lovelock -  Gaia 
  • Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
  • James Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science
  • Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
  • Walter Alvarez  - T. Rex and the Crater of Doom
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