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
- Aeschylus: Oresteia
- Aesop: Aesop’s Fables
- Amis, Kingsley: Lucky Jim
- Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition
- Aristophanes: The Clouds
- Aristotle: Poetics: Norton Critical Editions (completed December 2020)
- Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
- Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron
- Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (completed May 2020)
- Borges, Jorge Luis: The Aleph
- Bosco, Henri: Malicroix
- Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita
- Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress
- Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange
- Camus, Albert: The Stranger
- Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
- de Saint-Exupery, Antoine: The Little Prince
- Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Dostoevesky, Fyodor: The Idiot
- Eliot, George: Middlemarch
- Goethe, Johann: The Sorrows of Young Werther
- Gogol, Nikolai: Petersburg Tales (completed July 2020)
- Hardy, Thomas: Far from the Madding Crowd
- Heller, Joseph: Catch 22
- Herodotos: The Histories
- Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Kafka, Franz: The Trial
- Kavan, Anne: Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing
- Kempe, Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe (completed September 2020)
- Macauley, Rose: What Not (completed July 2020)
- Mahdi, Muhsin: The Arabian Nights
- Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus
- Ngugi wa Thiong’o : A Grain of Wheat
- Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar
- Plato: Apology of Socrates
- Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades and Selected Works
- Said, Edward W: Orientalism
- Shi Nai’an: Outlaws of the Marsh
- Shikibu, Murasaki: The Tale of Genji
- Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Stendhal: The Red and The Black
- Sturluson, Snorri: Prose Edda
- Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair (completed November 2020)
- Unknown: The Mahabharata
- Unknown: Táin Bó Cúailnge (completed September 2020)
- Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge Over San Luis Rey (completed January 2021)
- Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own
- Woolf, Virginia: The Waves
- Zola, Emile: The Attack on the Mill (completed October 2020)