Bruce Fein’s 100 Book Reading List
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.
The Trial of Socrates
Plato’s Republic
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Lysistrata
Antigone
Oedipus Rex
Herodotus The Histories
Pericles’ Funeral Oration
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
Edith Hamilton’s Mythology
The Old Testament
The New Testament
The Holy Koran
Mahabharata
The Teachings of Buddha
Confucius’ Analects
Reflections of Marcus Aurelius
Tacitus, the Annals and the History
Suetonius, Twelve Caesars
Cicero, Collected Works
Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars
Saint Augustine's Confessions
Seneca’s Essays
The Philosophy of Epicurus
Cato’s Letters or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, Two Volumes, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon
Plutarch’s Lives
Flavius Josephus, The Complete Works
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah The Guide for the Perplexed
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Song of Roland
Machiavelli, The Prince
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Shakespeare: Julius Caesar
John Milton: Paradise Lost
Alexander Pope: Essay on Man
Daniel Defoe : Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels ; A Modest Proposal
John Locke Second Treatise on Civil Government
Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws
David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature
Adam Smith Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Immanuel Kant Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
Voltaire’s Candide
Rousseau’s Social Contract
Pascal’s The Mind on Fire
Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy
The Federalist Papers
The Writings of James Madison
The Writings of George Washington
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution
Sir Thomas More Utopia
Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Women
John Quincy Adams’ Diaries
Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex
The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Rights of Man
Montaigne’s Essays
James Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans
Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
Alexander Dumas The Three Musketeer’s
Victor Hugo Les Miserables
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America
John Marshall Life of Washington
Washington Irving The Complete Writings
William Babington Macauley The History of England from the Accession of James the Second
Moneypenny and Buckle The Life of Disraeli
John Morley Life of Gladstone
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Edward Bellamy Looking Backward
Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
Emile Zola J’acccuse
Gustaf Flaubert’s Madam Bovary
Jane Austin Pride and Prejudice
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Moliere Tartuffe
U.S. Grant’s War Memoirs
The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas
Booker T. Washington Up From Slavery
W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America
Thomas Sowell Ethnic America
Gunnar Myrdal An American Dilemma
Woodrow Wilson Congressional Government
James Bryce The American Commonwealth
Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf
Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Frederick von Hayek Road to Serfdom
Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged
Carl Sandburg Abraham Lincoln
Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto
Samuel Johnson Lives of the Poets
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
Robert Caro’s Ascent to Power
Winston Churchill’s The Second World War
