There comes a point when collecting books is no longer enough.
For years I have built lists: chronological lists, comparative lists, expanded canons that attempt to hold East and West in a single arc. I have merged women’s voices into inherited traditions and imagined a reading life that stretches across centuries. Yet aspiration is not discipline. Admiration is not participation.
So, I am beginning something deliberate: a book club grounded in Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book. Not a casual reading circle. Not an exercise in summaries. But a disciplined apprenticeship in reading well.
Adler argues that reading is an activity governed by levels of engagement. Most readers never move beyond the first. If I am to read the Great Books seriously—if I am to allow them to shape rather than decorate my thinking—I must submit myself to the method.
Adler identifies four levels of reading.
- Elementary reading is simple comprehension. What do the words say? What is happening on the page?
- Inspectional reading is structural awareness. Before lingering in the details, I must understand the architecture of the work. What kind of book is this? What question is it attempting to answer? How is it organized?
- Analytical reading demands rigor. Here I identify key terms, propositions, and arguments. I must restate the author’s claims in my own words. I must understand before I evaluate. This requires intellectual humility and the willingness to suspend reaction until understanding is secure.
- Syntopical reading is the highest form. It places multiple authors in conversation around a shared question. Justice cannot be understood through Plato alone; he must be read alongside Aristotle. Augustine speaks differently about love than Aquinas. Shakespeare complicates Machiavelli. The question expands as the voices multiply.
This book club will attempt precisely that: disciplined reading that builds toward conversation across centuries.
I read roughly one book a week as I have the time. That rhythm will continue. But now the Great Books will become fixed pillars within that flow. Contemporary works, novels, scholarship—all will remain—but the spine of my reading life will be shaped by the texts Adler believed indispensable to entering what he called the Great Conversation.
There is something personal at stake in this commitment. I have spent my career teaching students that growth is conditional upon structure, discipline, and relationship. If I believe that for them, I must believe it for myself. Reading well is a form of intellectual self-governance. It is training in patience. It is resistance to distraction. It is apprenticeship to minds greater than my own.
This club is not about finishing a list. It is about formation.
The canon below is the list included in How to Read a Book. It is unapologetically Western and male in emphasis, and I will continue to expand my broader reading project to include Eastern and other global voices. But this list provides a structured beginning. It provides me a foundation from which to engage the long inheritance of ideas that have shaped my intellectual world as a Westerner.
To read them well—inspectionally, analytically, syntopically—is to step into a conversation that began long before me and will continue long after me.
I do not intend merely to complete these books.
I intend to join them.
How to Read a Book, Appendix A
- Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
- The Old Testament
- Aeschylus – Tragedies
- Sophocles – Tragedies
- Herodotus – Histories
- Euripides – Tragedies
- Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
- Hippocrates – Medical Writings
- Aristophanes – Comedies
- Plato – Dialogues
- Aristotle – Works
- Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
- Euclid – Elements
- Archimedes – Works
- Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections
- Cicero – Works
- Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
- Virgil – Works
- Horace – Works
- Livy – History of Rome
- Ovid – Works
- Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
- Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
- Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
- Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion
- Ptolemy – Almagest
- Lucian – Works
- Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
- Galen – On the Natural Faculties
- The New Testament
- Plotinus – The Enneads
- St. Augustine – "On the Teachers"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
- The Song of Roland
- The Nibelungenlied
- The Saga of Burnt Njál
- St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica
- Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy; The New Life; On Monarchy
- Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
- Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
- Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
- Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
- Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
- Thomas More – Utopia
- Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
- François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
- John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Michel de Montaigne – Essays
- William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
- Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
- Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
- Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
- William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
- Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
- Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
- William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
- Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
- René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
- John Milton – Works
- Molière – Comedies
- Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
- Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
- Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics
- John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
- Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
- Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
- Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
- Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
- William Congreve – The Way of the World
- George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge
- Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
- Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
- Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary; Micromegas
- Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
- Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
- David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract
- Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
- Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
- Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
- Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
- James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
- Antoine de Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
- Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers
- Jeremy Bentham – An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
- William Wordsworth – Poems
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria
- Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
- Carl von Clausewitz – On War
- Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
- Lord Byron – Don Juan (poem)
- Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
- Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
- Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
- Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
- Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
- Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
- Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
- John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
- Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
- Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
- Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
- Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
- Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto
- George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
- Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
- Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
- Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
- Henrik Ibsen – Plays
- Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
- Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
- William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
- Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
- Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
- Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
- Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
- Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
- John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic: the Theory of Inquiry
- Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
- George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
- Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revolution
- Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Things Past
- Bertrand Russell – The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
- Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
- Albert Einstein – The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
- James Joyce – 'The Dead' in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
- Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
- Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
- Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
- Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; The Cancer Ward
