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. Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition
  5. Aristophanes: The Clouds
  6. Aristotle: Poetics: Norton Critical Editions (completed December 2020)
  7. Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
  8. Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron
  9. Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (completed May 2020)
  10. Borges, Jorge Luis: The Aleph
  11. Bosco, Henri: Malicroix
  12. Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita
  13. Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress
  14. Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange
  15. Camus, Albert: The Stranger
  16. Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
  17. de Saint-Exupery, Antoine: The Little Prince
  18. Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  19. Dostoevesky, Fyodor: The Idiot
  20. Eliot, George: Middlemarch
  21. Goethe, Johann: The Sorrows of Young Werther
  22. Gogol, Nikolai: Petersburg Tales (completed July 2020)
  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: Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing
  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. Said, Edward W: Orientalism
  39. Shi Nai’an: Outlaws of the Marsh
  40. Shikibu, Murasaki: The Tale of Genji
  41. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  42. Stendhal: The Red and The Black
  43. Sturluson, Snorri: Prose Edda
  44. Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair (completed November 2020)
  45. Unknown: The Mahabharata
  46. Unknown: Táin Bó Cúailnge (completed September 2020)
  47. Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge Over San Luis Rey (completed January 2021)
  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)