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 😉

Therefore 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 (completed September 2021)
  4. Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition
  5. Aristophanes: Clouds
  6. Aristotle: Poetics: Norton Critical Editions (completed December 2020)
  7. Augustine of Hippo: The City of God
  8. Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (completed February 2021)
  9. Balzac, Honoré: Old Goriot (completed June 2021)
  10. Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron
  11. Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (completed May 2020)
  12. Borges, Jorge Luis: The Aleph (completed May 2021)
  13. Bosco, Henri: Malicroix
  14. Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita
  15. Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress
  16. Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange (completed April 2021)
  17. Camus, Albert: The Stranger
  18. Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
  19. Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  20. Dostoevesky, Fyodor: The Idiot (completed December 2021)
  21. Eliot, George: Middlemarch (completed March 2021)
  22. Goethe, Johann: The Sorrows of Young Werther
  23. Gogol, Nikolai: Petersburg Tales (completed July 2020)
  24. Hardy, Thomas: Far from the Madding Crowd
  25. Heller, Joseph: Catch 22 (completed August 2021)
  26. Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (completed October 2021)
  27. Kafka, Franz: The Trial
  28. Kempe, Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe (completed September 2020)
  29. Macauley, Rose: What Not (completed July 2020)
  30. Mahdi, Muhsin: The Arabian Nights
  31. Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus (completed July 2021)
  32. Ngugi wa Thiong’o : A Grain of Wheat
  33. Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  34. Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar (completed May 2022)
  35. Plato: Apology of Socrates
  36. Pushkin, Alexander: The Captain’s Daughter: Essential Stories (completed January 2022)
  37. Said, Edward W: Orientalism (completed March 2022)
  38. Saint-Exupery, Antoine: The Little Prince
  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 Alliterative Morte Arthure
  46. Unknown: TĂĄin BĂł CĂșailnge (completed September 2020)
  47. Unknown: The Mahabharata (completed June 2021)
  48. Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge Over San Luis Rey (completed January 2021)
  49. Woolf, Virginia: The Waves
  50. Zola, Emile: The Attack on the Mill (completed October 2020)