Classics Reading List

First a warning: this has absolutely nothing to do with astronomy, but it is analogue.

I love reading, and I love reading classic literature, and whilst there’s is a classic canon of astronomical literature (perhaps to be defined later), mostly it doesn’t qualify on the grand scale of things. So for the moment you’ll have to indulge me 😉

So below is a list of books that I consider to be “classics” and aim to read by the end of May 2025. The books are listed in alphabetic order of the author’s surname. There are many great books that aren’t on my list because I’ve already read them, they don’t float my boat, or I’ll be reading them next.

I will read all of these in English, and perhaps some in French and Greek where appropriate as well.

My Classics Club reading list

  1. Aeschylus: Oresteia
  2. Aesop: Aesop’s Fables
  3. Amis, Kingsley: Lucky Jim
  4. Aristophanes: The Clouds
  5. Aristotle: Poetics
  6. Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
  7. Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron
  8. Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (completed May 2020)
  9. Borges, Jorge Luis: The Aleph
  10. Bosco, Henri: Malicroix
  11. Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita
  12. Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress
  13. Camus, Albert: The Stranger
  14. Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
  15. Clarke, Arthur C: Childhood’s End
  16. de Saint-Exupery, Antoine: The Little Prince
  17. Dostoevesky, Fyodor: The Idiot
  18. Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
  19. Eliot, George: Middlemarch
  20. Goethe, Johann: The Sorrows of Young Werther
  21. Gogol, Nikolai: Petersburg Tales (completed July 2020)
  22. Greene, Graham: The Quiet American
  23. Hardy, Thomas: Far from the Madding Crowd
  24. Heller, Joseph: Catch 22
  25. Herodotos: The Histories
  26. Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  27. Kafka, Franz: The Trial
  28. Kavan, Anne: Asylum Piece
  29. Kempe, Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe (completed September 2020)
  30. Macauley, Rose: What Not (completed July 2020)
  31. Mahdi, Muhsin: The Arabian Nights
  32. Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus
  33. Ngugi wa Thiong’o : A Grain of Wheat
  34. Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  35. Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar
  36. Plato: Apology of Socrates
  37. Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades and Selected Works
  38. Shi Nai’an: Outlaws of the Marsh
  39. Shikibu, Murasaki: The Tale of Genji
  40. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  41. Sturluson, Snorri: Prose Edda
  42. Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
  43. Unknown: The Mahabharata
  44. Unknown: Táin Bó Cúailnge, Kinsella translation (completed September 2020)
  45. Verne, Jules: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
  46. Wells, HG: War of the Worlds
  47. Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge Over San Luis Rey
  48. Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own
  49. Woolf, Virginia: The Waves
  50. Zola, Emile: The Attack on the Mill (completed October 2020)