Stumbled across a genius idea in Greater Books
It is a tabulation of how many times a book appears on one of 47 lists of “Great Books”. Below I have copied and pasted the “Short List”, which are the 488 works that appear on at least five of these 47 lists, sorted by time period.
This takes the guesswork out of trying to decide whether something is, in fact, a great work, by effectively democratising the work of collators past. I am confident that reading this list would give anyone the foundations of a true liberal education.
Prehistory to 700 A. D.
- Homer
The Odyssey_36 - Homer
The Iliad_33 - Virgil
The Aeneid_26 - Herodotus
History_25 - Sophocles
Oedipus the King_25 - Plato
The Republic_24 - Augustine of Hippo
Confessions_23 - Thucydides
The Peloponnesian War_23 - Sophocles
Antigone_22 - Sophocles
Oedipus at Colonus_20 - Aeschylus
Oresteia_19 - Lucretius
On the Nature of Things_19 - Plutarch
Parallel Lives_18 - Euripides
Medea _17 - Marcus Aurelius
Meditations_17 - The Bible_17
- Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics_16 - Plato
The Apology_16 - Aristotle
Poetics_15 - Euripides
The Bacchae _14 - Ovid
Metamorphoses_14 - Plato
Phaedo_14 - Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologiae_13 - Aristophanes
Lysistrata_13 - Aristophanes
The Birds_13 - Plato
Crito_13 - Vyasa
Mahabharata_13 - Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound_12 - Confucius
Analects_12 - Aristophanes
The Clouds_11 - Euripides
Hippolytos _11 - Horace
Odes_11 - Lăozĭ
Tao te Ching_11 - The Epic of Gilgamesh_11
- The Quran_11
- Aristotle
Politics_10 - Plato
Symposium_10 - Plato
Dialogues_10 - Tacitus
Annals_10 - Valmiki
Ramayana_10 - Aristophanes
The Frogs_9 - Augustine of Hippo
The City of God_9 - Epictetus
Discourses_9 - Vyasa
Bhagavad Gita_8 - The Book of Job_8
- Euripides
Electra_7 - Euripides
The Trojan Woman _7 - Apuleius
The Golden Ass_6 - Cicero
On Old Age_6 - Euclid
Elements_6 - Euripides
Alcestis_6 - Horace
Satires_6 - Horace
Epodes_6 - Kalidasa
The Recognition of Sakuntala_6 - Livy
History of Rome_6 - Lucian
True History_6 - Plato
Euthyphro_6 - Plotinus
Enneads_6 - Tacitus
Histories_6 - Aesop
Fables_5 - Aristophanes
The Acharnians_5 - Aristophanes
The Knights_5 - Aristophanes
Peace_5 - Aristophanes
Thesmophoriazousai_5 - Aristotle
Physics_5 - Boethius
Consolatio Philosophiae_5 - Euripides
Plays_5 - Euripides
Ion _5 - Hesiod
Works and Days_5 - Horace
Ars Poetica_5 - Catullus
Poems_5 - Cicero
On Friendship_5 - Mencius
Mengzi_5 - Petronius
Satyricon_5 - Plato
Protagoras_5 - Sappho
Poems_5 - Sophocles
Ajax_5 - Sophocles
Philocetes_5 - Suetonius
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars_5 - Zhuāngzī
Zhuāngzī_5 - The Book of Genesis_5
- Ecclesiastes_5
700 to 1650
- Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote_37 - Dante
The Divine Commedy_33 - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales_30 - Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince_29 - William Shakespeare
Hamlet_27 - Michel de Montaigne
Essays_26 - François Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel_22 - William Shakespeare
King Lear_21 - William Shakespeare
The Tempest_20 - The Arabian Nights_17
- William Shakespeare
Macbeth_16 - Thomas More
Utopia_14 - William Shakespeare
A Midsummer’s Night Dream_14 - William Shakespeare
Othello_14 - Thomas Malory
Le Morte d’Arthur _13 - William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra_13 - William Shakespeare
The First Part of Henry IV_13 - William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet_13 - Beowulf_13
- Giovanni Boccaccio
The Decameron_12 - Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji_12 - William Shakespeare
As You Like It_12 - William Shakespeare
The Second Part of Henry IV_12 - William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice_11 - William Shakespeare
Richard III_11 - Francis Bacon
Novum Organum_10 - Desiderius Erasmus
In Praise of Folly_10 - Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus _10 - William Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing_10 - William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will_10 - William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure_10 - William Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale_10 - William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar_9 - William Shakespeare
Henry V_9 - William Shakespeare
Richard II_9 - William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew_9 - The Song of Roland_9
- John Donne
Poems_8 - William Shakespeare
All’s Well That Ends Well_8 - William Shakespeare
Coriolanus_8 - William Shakespeare
Sonnets_8 - John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion_7 - Benvenuto Cellini
Autobiography_7 - Ferdowsi
Shahnameh_7 - Ben Jonson
Volpone_7 - Christopher Marlowe
Tamburlaine the Great _7 - William Shakespeare
The Comedy of Errors_7 - William Shakespeare
Timon of Athens_7 - William Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida_7 - William Shakespeare
The Two Gentlemen of Verona_7 - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_7
- Nicolas Copernicus
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres_6 - Pierre Corneille
Le Cid_6 - Dante
The New Life_6 - Dante
Inferno_6 - William Shakespeare
The First Part of Henry VI_6 - William Shakespeare
The Second Part of Henry VI_6 - William Shakespeare
The Third Part of Henry VI_6 - William Shakespeare
Henry VIII_6 - William Shakespeare
The Merry Wives of Windsor_6 - William Shakespeare
Love’s Labour Lost_6 - William Shakespeare
Cymbeline_6 - Wú Chéng-ēn
Monkey_6 - Nibelungenlied_6
- Pierre Abélard
Historia Calamitatum_5 - Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando Furioso_5 - Francis Bacon
Nova Atlantis_5 - Pierre Corneille
Polyeucte_5 - Ben Jonson
Bartholomew Fayre_5 - Martin Luther
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church_5 - Martin Luther
To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation_5 - Christopher Marlowe
The Jew of Malta _5 - William Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus_5 - Shī Nài’ān
The Water Margin_5 - Leonardo da Vinci
Notebooks_5 - Njáls Saga_5
1650 to 1900
- Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice_30 - Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary_29 - Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels_29 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust_27 - John Milton
Paradise Lost_27 - Herman Melville
Moby-Dick_26 - Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace_25 - Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species_23 - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamozov_23 - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment_23 - Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_23 - Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn_23 - Voltaire
Candide_23 - George Eliot
Middlemarch _22 - James Boswell
The Life of Samuel Johnson_21 - Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe_21 - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter_21 - Blaise Pascal
Thoughts_20 - Henry David Thoreau
Walden_20 - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina_20 - Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass_20 - Henry Fielding
Tom Jones_19 - John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress_18 - Victor Hugo
Les Misérables_18 - Stendhal
The Red and the Black_18 - William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair_18 - Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights_17 - Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_17 - René Descartes
Discourse on the Method_17 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Social Contract_17 - Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre_16 - Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness_16 - Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan_16 - John Stuart Mill
On Liberty_16 - Charles Dickens
David Copperfield_15 - Charles Dickens
Great Expectations_15 - Sigmund Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams_15 - Molière
Tartuffe_15 - Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra_15 - Baruch Spinoza
Ethics_15 - Honoré de Balzac
Father Goriot_14 - Charles Dickens
The Pickwick Papers _14 - Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d’Urbervilles_14 - Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady_14 - Henrik Ibsen
A Doll’s House_14 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Confessions_14 - Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy_14 - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Communist Manifesto_13 - Molière
The Misanthrope_13 - Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations_13 - Francis Bacon
Essays_12 - Henry James
The Ambassadors_12 - Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason_12 - Karl Marx
Capital_12 - John Milton
Areopagitica_12 - Mary Shelley
Frankenstein_12 - Stendhal
The Charterhouse of Parma_12 - Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America_12 - Jane Austen
Emma_11 - William Blake
Songs of Innocence and Experience_11 - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Idiot_11 - Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls_11 - Alexander Hamilton; John Jay; James Madison
The Federalist Papers_11 - Jean Racine
Phèdre_11 - Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Children_11 - Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There_10 - Anton Chekhov
Uncle Vanya_10 - David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_10 - Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler_10 - Émile Zola
Germinal_10 - Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in France_9 - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Demons_9 - Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage_9 - Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist _9 - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays_9 - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw_9 - John Locke
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding_9 - Herman Melville
Billy Budd_9 - Isaac Newton
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_9 - William Wordsworth
The Prelude_9 - Charles Baudelaire
The Flowers of Evil_8 - Lord Byron
Don Juan_8 - Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Life Is a Dream_8 - Anton Chekhov
Three Sisters_8 - Anton Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard_8 - Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities_8 - Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education_8 - Galileo
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems_8 - Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native_8 - Henrik Ibsen
The Wild Duck_8 - William James
Pragmatism_8 - Ben Jonson
The Alchemist_8 - Omar Khayyám
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_8 - John Locke
Second Treatise_8 - John Milton
Paradise Regained_8 - Molière
The Miser_8 - Montesquieu
The Spirit of Laws_8 - Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil_8 - George Orwell
Animal Farm_8 - George Bernard Shaw
Saint Joan_8 - Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene_8 - Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest_8 - Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_8 - William Wordsworth
Poems_8 - Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Bette_7 - Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet_7 - George Berkeley
The Principles of Human Knowledge_7 - Robert Burns
Poems_7 - Cáo Xuěqín
Dream of the Red Chamber_7 - Geoffrey Chaucer
Troilus and Criseyde_7 - Anton Chekhov
The Seagull_7 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’_7 - Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders_7 - Charles Dickens
Bleak House_7 - Charles Dickens
Hard Times_7 - Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew_7 - Denis Diderot et al.
Encyclopédie_7 - George Eliot
Adam Bede _7 - Benjamin Franklin
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin_7 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther_7 - Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure_7 - Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre Dame_7 - Samuel Johnson
Rasselas_7 - John Stuart Mill
Autobiography_7 - Molière
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_7 - Thomas Paine
The Rights of Man_7 - Alexander Pope
The Rape of the Lock_7 - Alexander Pushkin
Eugene Onegin_7 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on Inequality_7 - Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_7 - Jonathan Swift
A Modest Proposal_7 - Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_7 - William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lyrical Ballads_7 - William Butler Yeats
Words for Music Perhaps_7 - Louisa M Alcott
Little Women_6 - Francis Bacon
The Advancement of Learning_6 - Anton Chekhov
Stories_6 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria_6 - William Congreve
The Way of the World_6 - Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim_6 - René Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy_6 - Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol_6 - Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend_6 - Emily Dickinson
Poems_6 - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes From Underground_6 - Arthur Conan Doyle
A Study in Scarlet_6 - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_6 - George Eliot
Silas Marner _6 - Jean de la Fontaine
Fables_6 - Oliver Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield_6 - Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge_6 - George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Philosophy of History_6 - Henrik Ibsen
Peer Gynt_6 - Samuel Johnson
A Dictionary of the English Language_6 - Samuel Johnson
The Lives of the English Poets_6 - John Keats
Poems_6 - Henry Fielding
Joseph Andrews_6 - Oliver Goldsmith
She Stoops to Conquer_6 - Rudyard Kipling
Kim_6 - Choderlos de Laclos
The Dangerous Liaisons_6 - Thomas Robert Malthus
An Essay on the Principle of Population_6 - John Milton
‘Lycidas’_6 - Molière
The Doctor in Spite of Himself_6 - Molière
Don Juan_6 - Molière
The Imaginary Invalid_6 - Molière
The School for Wives_6 - Blaise Pascal
The Provincial Letters_6 - Edgar Allan Poe
Stories_6 - Jean Racine
Andromaque_6 - Arthur Rimbaud
A Season in Hill_6 - Richard Brinsley Sheridan
School for Scandal_6 - Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy_6 - Bram Stoker
Dracula_6 - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom’s Cabin_6 - Henry Dead Thoreau
‘Civil Disobedience’_6 - Giambattista Vico
The New Science_6 - Voltaire
Zadig_6 - Émile Zola
Nana_6 - Hans Christian Andersen
Fables_5 - Jane Austen
Persuasion_5 - Basho Matsuo
The Narrow Road to the Deep North_5 - William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_5 - William Blake
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion_5 - James Boswell
London Journal_5 - Thomas Browne
Religio Medici_5 - Lord Byron
Poems_5 - Lord Byron
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_5 - Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh_5 - Kate Chopin
The Awakening_5 - Daniel Defoe
A Journal of the Plague Year_5 - Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby _5 - Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit_5 - Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass_5 - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The American Scholar_5 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Poetry and Truth_5 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship_5 - Thomas Hardy
Far From the Madding Crowd_5 - William Harvey
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals_5 - George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Elements of the Philosophy of Right_5 - Henrik Ibsen
An Enemy of the People_5 - John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism_5 - Molière
Plays_5 - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Genealogy of Morals_5 - Edgar Allan Poe
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’_5 - Edgar Allan Poe
‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’_5 - Alexander Pope
Essay on Man_5 - Alexander Pushkin
The Captain’s Daughter_5 - Samuel Richardson
Clarissa_5 - Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations_5 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Émile_5 - Walter Scott
Ivanhoe_5 - Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poems_5 - August Strindberg
Miss Julie_5 - John Millington Synge
The Playboy of the Western World_5 - Cornelius Tacitus
Germania_5 - William Makepeace Thackeray
Henry Esmond_5 - Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich_5 - Giorgio Vasari
The Lives of the Artists_5 - Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_5 - François Villon
The Grand Testament_5 - Voltaire
Letters Concerning the English Nation_5 - Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Grey_5 - Émile Zola
L’Assommoir_5
1900 to present
- James Joyce
Ulysses_20 - Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude_18 - F Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby_17 - George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four_17 - Marcel Proust
In Remembrance of Things Past_17 - Franz Kafka
The Trial_16 - James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_14 - Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis_14 - Albert Camus
The Stranger_14 - Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot_13 - William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury_13 - Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man_12 - Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain_12 - Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse_12 - Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams_11 - T S Eliot
‘The Waste Land’_11 - Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita_11 - John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath_11 - Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway_11 - T S Eliot
Four Quartets _10 - Joseph Heller
Catch-22_10 - James Joyce
Dubliners_10 - Franz Kafka
The Castle_10 - Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart_9 - Aldous Huxley
Brave New World_9 - D H Lawrence
Sons and Lovers_9 - Toni Morrison
Beloved_9 - Albert Camus
The Plague_8 - Rachel Carson
Silent Spring_8 - Willa Cather
My Ántonia_8 - William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying _8 - Thomas Mann
Death in Venice_8 - Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire_8 - Eugene O’Neill
Long Day’s Journey Into Night_8 - Richard Wright
Native Son_8 - Simone Beauvoir
The Second Sex_7 - T S Eliot
Ash Wednesday_7 - William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom!_7 - E M Forster
A Passage to India_7 - Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents_7 - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of Seven Gables_7 - Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea_7 - Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls_7 - Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God_7 - Ezra Pound
Cantos_7 - Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Children_7 - J D Salinger
Catcher in the Rye_7 - Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea_7 - George Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman_7 - George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion_7 - Jorge Luis Borges
Ficciones_6 - Jorge Luis Borges
Labyrinths_6 - Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita_6 - F Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night_6 - James George Frazer
The Golden Bough_6 - William Golding
Lord of the Flies_6 - Günter Grass
The Tin Drum_6 - Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms_6 - Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises_6 - Henry James
The Golden Bowl_6 - William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience _6 - Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman_6 - Jean-Paul Sartre
No Exit_6 - J R R Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings_6 - Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence_6 - William Butler Yeats
The Wind Among the Reeds_6 - William Butler Yeats
The Shadowy Waters_6 - William Butler Yeats
Michael Robartes and the Dancer_6 - William Butler Yeats
The Tower_6 - William Butler Yeats
The Winding Stair_6 - William Butler Yeats
New Poems [1938]_6 - Henry Adams
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_5 - Sherwood Anderson
Winesburg, Ohio_5 - Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale_5 - Italo Calvino
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler_5 - Joseph Conrad
Nostromo_5 - Albert Einstein
Relativity_5 - Robert Graves
I, Claudius_5 - Knut Hamsun
Hunger_5 - William James
The Principles of Psychology_5 - James Joyce
Finnegans Wake_5 - Franz Kafka
In the Penal Colony_5 - Jack Kerouac
On the Road_5 - Ken Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_5 - Thomas S Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_5 - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Leopard_5 - D H Lawrence
Women in Love_5 - Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird_5 - Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt_5 - André Malraux
Man’s Fate_5 - Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks_5 - Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca_5 - Robert Musil
The Man Without Qualities_5 - Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago_5 - Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar_5 - Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front_5 - Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies_5 - Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness_5 - Upton Sinclair
The Jungle_5 - Robert Penn Warren
All the King’s Men_5 - Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome_5 - Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth_5 - Thornton Wilder
Our Town_5 - Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Name Desire_5 - Virginia Woolf
The Waves_5 - William Butler Yeats
Poems_5 - William Butler Yeats
The Collected Poems of W B Yeats_5