“An Addition to Great Books to Read"

“An Addition to Great Books to Read"

Ladies and gentlemen: The other day on these pages I wrote an essay entitled “The Centrality of Reading and why it is of paramount importance and a list of great books to know and read.” In that essay I took the position that in a society that is increasingly driven by the electronic medium, the book and literary culture are increasingly being lost. I stated that without reading and re-reading the great books of the past, our society is increasingly descending into darkness and ignorance. I provided a beginning list of must-read books that no person should be without reading and knowing. 

I now provide an added list of books that no person should miss or be without. All these books will stretch and develop the person’s mind beyond their immediate experiences and their environment:

1.  Edmund Spenser’s works
2.  Cervantes: Don Quixote
3.  Montaigne’s essays
4.  Shakespeare’s works
5.  Milton’s works
6.  Pascal’s works
7.  Locke’s works
8.  Swift’s works
9.  Pope’s works

10.  Samuel Johnson’s works

11.  Kant’s works 

12.  Gibbon’s works

13.  Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

14.  Goethe’s works

15.  Wordsworth’s works

16.  Coleridge’s works

17.  Jane Austen’s works

This is a partial continuation of the list of great books that I recommend and take the view that none should do without. I owe this list to the great book by Mortimer J Adler entitled How to Read a Book, published in 1940 by Simon and Schuster.