Where to find Lists of Great books

I found many of the books at this website:
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html

Erica

The book 1001 Great Books You Must Read Before You Die has also been recommended.

Erica

I bought a set of books back in the early '60s called Great Books of the Western World (54 volumes) (published by Encyclopedia Brittanica and the University of Chicago). I'm not sure if it's still published or not.

Anyhow (copying from the comments section of my LJ entry for the whole thang (I didn't have time to list the titles)), it includes 54 Volumes:

Volume 1: The Great Conversation
Volume 2: The Great Ideas I
Volume 3: The Great Ideas II
Volume 4: Homer
Volume 5: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes
Volume 6: Herodotus, Thucydides
Volume 7: Plato
Volume 8: Aristotle I
Volume 9: Aristotle II
Volume 10: Hippocrates, Galen
Volume 11: Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Nicomachus
Volume 12: Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius
Volume 13: Virgil
Volume 14: Plutarch
Volume 15: Tacitus
Volume 16: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler
Volume 17: Plotinus
Volume 18: Augustine
Volume 19: Thomas Aquinas I
Volume 20: Thomas Aquinas II
Volume 21: Dante
Volume 22: Chaucer
Volume 23: Machiavelli, Hobbes
Volume 24: Rabelais
Volume 25: Montaigne
Volume 26: Shakespeare I
Volume 27: Shakespeare II
Volume 28: Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey
Volume 29: Cervantes
Volume 30: Francis Bacon
Volume 31: Descartes, Spinoza
Volume 32: Milton
Volume 33: Pascal
Volume 34: Newton, Huygens
Volume 35: Locke, Berkeley, Hume
Volume 36: Swift, Sterne
Volume 37: Fielding
Volume 38: Montesquieu, Rousseau
Volume 39: Adam Smith
Volume 40: Gibbon I
Volume 41: Gibbon II
Volume 42: Kant
Volume 43: American State Papers, The Federalist, J. S. Mill
Volume 44: Boswell
Volume 45: Lavoisier, Fourier, Faraday
Volume 46: Hegel
Volume 47: Goethe
Volume 48: Melville
Volume 49: Darwin
Volume 50: Marx
Volume 51: Tolstoy
Volume 52: Dostoevsky
Volume 53: William James
Volume 54: Freud

(and, you're right, they're all dead and male and white).

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

Though at least two of these are listed at the site mentioned by EricaKline above, you may want to check out:
The Best English-Language Fiction of the 20th Century.

It has the Modern Library list, and the Radcliffe list (compiled in response), but also the Library Journal List (from librarians) and Koen Book Distributors list. Even better, they're combined together with a weighted ranking.

Just a note about "The Great Books" 54 volume set - I own a secondhand bookshop - and - fyi - it is out of print. You can still find it - complete - every now and then. It really is a fine set.

kerry

That's quite a list doogiewray,

I have to agree that all or most of them are "important", but I'm not sure I'd want to read them all.

The Philosophers, for instance - I have read some Philosophy, and I've found summaries designed for the modern lay-person to be much more accessible.

The Scientists - Galilelo, Copernicus, etc...most of their work is covered in basic science classes - I'd be more interested in reading current science books.

The list is also a little weak on fiction or, for ancient times, myth and legend.

Just my opinion, however, and I still think it's a good list of works to consider.

Erica

...check out:
The Best English-Language Fiction of the 20th Century.

This sounds good, I'll definitely take a look at it.

Here's a couple more I've found:

http://library.christchurch.org.nz/Guides/GoodReads/100alltime.asp

http://www.harvard.com/onourshelves/top100.html - from the Harvard bookstore.

Erica

If the Harvard link doesn't work, try:
http://www.harvard.com/index.htm and click on "On Our Shelves".

Erica

The Great Books of the Western World which was the Encyclopedia set that was listed above is the "list".

Of course there are other authors that have written books about these books or have even created a list themselves.

Invitation to the Classics by Os Guiness

The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer

A Lifetime Reading Plan by Radiman

How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom

Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See

How to Read A Book by Mortimer Adler

How to Read Slowly by Sire

The Art of the Novel by Kundera

100 Great Books
Great Books by Denby

Start with Adler's How to Read a Book, then read The Well-Educated Mind, these will equip you to read difficult books, then figure out what you want to read.

I'm currently reading The Iliad and I've already read Adler, Bauer, and Gilgamesh. Educate yourself about the Great Books first and then tackle them.

I have the encyclopedia set, as well as the Gateway to the Great Books set, and The Great Ideas Program set. These have reading plans in them. I also lead a discussion group at http://osbornz.net/gbrp/index.php, it is free and open to all readers of the Great Books.

Hope this helps
Jessica
http://triviumacademy.blogspot.com

Tagging off from Jessica, Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon has an extensive appendix of the books that he feels are the "core" of Western Literature. Fun to explore and eminently worth arguing over.

Twacorbies,
I didn't like that book, but I take Harold Bloom with a grain of salt. You'll find a few books about the Great Books but I feel a person would be better served reading How to Read A Book by Mortimer Adler. I don't think there is any better start to reading the Great Books of the Western World, now if you're just wanting to pick through a few of the books- Bloom can be relatively harmless.

Those dedicated to the ten-year reading program or one of the other reading plans in the Great Books encyclopedia sets just use books like Bloom's as means of gaining insight when they need it.

I'm still trying to figure out this forum, is everyone here actively reading the Great Books or is this just a place to talk about starting it? No disrespect, just want to know if I joined the right forum.

Thanks!
: ) Jessica

Hi Jessica -

The original description for this group is that it is for "discussing the goal of reading the books that are considered "Great"."

As such, I think that this group is about any collection of great books, rather than just being limited to the Great Books of the Western World. I pasted in my list of that set above, because, well, of course, any discussion of great books probably should include the Great Books, right?

So, my guess is, that most people checking this forum out are not actively reading the GBotWW, but a discussion about starting to read the GBotWW would not be out of place here.

Cheers-

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

Oh, joy!

Doing a bit of research (also known as wasting time on the web), I just found the entire Harvard Classics online at Bartleby's (Click here)!

Still, not the same as actually holding a well-worn and well-loved volume in your own hands, but very quickly I just discovered two very good poems that I had never read before.

Shamelessly copying from the Wikipedia link above (ah, I didn't make that so obvious, did I? Click on "Harvard Classics"), the basic philosophy of this set was: The Harvard Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, was a fifty one volume anthology of works selected by Charles W. Eliot. It was originally published in 1909. Dr. Eliot...(felt that)...the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending fifteen minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf.

This set of books and it's philosophy were the forerunners of the later Great Books of the Western World set.

So, instead of doing critical chores and errands, I'll be reading The Duchess of Malfi by Webster today (grin).

Anyhow, what the heck ... here's the table of contents:

The Harvard Classics
NEW YORK: P.F. COLLIER & SON, 1909–1917

His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin; Journal, by John Woolman; Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn

The Apology, Phædo and Crito of Plato; The Golden Sayings of Epictetus; The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Essays, Civil and Moral & The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon; Areopagitica & Tractate on Education, by John Milton; Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne

Complete Poems Written in English, by John Milton

Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poems and Songs, by Robert Burns

The Confessions of Saint Augustine; The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas á Kempis

Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies & Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus; Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles; Hippolytus & The Bacchæ; of Euripides; The Frogs of Aristophanes

On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero; Letters, by Pliny the Younger

Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith

The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin

Lives, by Plutarch

Æneid, by Virgil

Don Quixote, Part 1, by Cervantes

The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan; The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton

Stories from the Thousand and One Nights

Fables, by Æsop; Household Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen

All for Love, by John Dryden; The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan; She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith; The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, by Robert Browning; Manfred, by Lord Byron

Faust, Part I, Egmont & Hermann and Dorothea, by J.W. von Goethe; Dr. Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri

I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni

The Odyssey of Homer

Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr..

On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke

Autobiography & On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill; Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott, by Thomas Carlyle

Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca; Polyeucte, by Pierre Corneille; Phèdre, by Jean Racine; Tartuffe, by Molière; Minna von Barnhelm, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich von Schiller

English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay

Essays: English and American

The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin

Scientific Papers

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Literary and Philosophical Essays

Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern

Discourse on Method, by René Descartes; Letters on the English, by Voltaire; On the Inequality among Mankind & Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, by Jean Jacques Rousseau; Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes

The Chronicles of Jean Froissart; The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory; A Description of Elizabethan England, by William Harrison

The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli; The Life of Sir

Thomas More, by William Roper; Utopia, by Sir Thomas More; The Ninety-Five Theses, Address to the Christian Nobility & Concerning Christian Liberty, by Martin Luther

Some Thoughts Concerning Education, by John Locke; Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, by George Berkeley; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume

The Oath of Hippocrates; Journeys in Diverse Places, by Ambroise Paré; On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey; The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox, by Edward Jenner; The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, by Oliver Wendell Holmes; On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, by Joseph Lister; Scientific Papers, by Louis Pasteur; Scientific Papers, by Charles Lyell

Prefaces and Prologues

English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray

English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald

English Poetry III: Tennyson to Whitman

American Historical Documents: 1000–1904

Confucian: The Sayings of Confucius; Hebrew: Job, Psalms & Ecclesiastes; Christian I: Luke & Acts

Christian II: Corinthians I & II & Hymns; Buddhist: Writings; Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita; Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran

Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe; Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth & The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

The Shoemaker's Holiday, by Thomas Dekker; The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson; Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher; The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster; A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger

Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
Epic & Saga: Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Destruction of Dá Derga's Hostel & The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs

Index

Lectures on the Harvard Classics

The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction

1 & 2 The History of Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding

3 A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne; Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

4 Guy Mannering, by Sir Walter Scott

5 & 6 Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

7 & 8 David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

9 The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot

10 The Scarlet Letter & Rappaccini's Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Rip Van Winkle & The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving; Three Short Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe; Three Short Stories, by Francis Bret Harte; Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, by Samuel L. Clemens; The Man Without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale

11 The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James

12 Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Marie Hugo

13 Old Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac; The Devil's Pool, by George Sand; The Story of a White Blackbird, by Alfred de Musset; Five Short Stories, by Alphonse Daudet; Two Short Stories, by Guy de Maupassant

14 & 15 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship & The Sorrows of Werther, by J. W. von Goethe; The Banner of the Upright Seven, by Gottfried Keller; The Rider on the White Horse, by Theodor Storm; Trials and Tribulations, by Theodor Fontane

16 & 17 Anna Karenin & Ivan the Fool, by Leo Tolstoy

18 Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

19 A House of Gentlefolk & Fathers and Children, by Ivan Turgenev

20 Pepita Jimenez, by Juan Valera; A Happy Boy, by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson; Skipper Worse, by Alexander L. Kielland

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

Wiping the drool away...

: )
Jessica

If you're looking for lists of great books you might want to try www.listsofbests.com Almost all of the lists mentioned above are on there plus the site remembers which books you have read and is a great way to keep track of everything. And if you don't see your list up there, you can add it for everyone to enjoy!

Courtesy of the Time Reading Program I've enjoyed some great--er--pretty good books that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise, most recently The Big Sky, Delilah, Logbook for Grace, Mistress to an Age, John Paul Jones, The True Believer, Kabloona, Eastern Approaches, The Greek Way, The Wapshot Chronicle, and The Crime of Galileo. My 50 or so TRP books were the last chosen for a 1980s release by journalists and others associated with Time-Life, and all seem to date from the first half of the 20th c. LT readers have tagged 107 books 'Time Reading Program'. Also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Reading_Program

I think that anyone intent on reading "Great Books" should read the Great Conversation volume by Robert Maynard Hutchins that is the introduction to the 54 volume Great Books set. That set has now been replaced by a 60 volume set with an abridged version of Hutchin's book.
Hutchins talks about why the books are "great" and why they are important. His premise is the importance of a liberal arts education and that the books are the substance of that type of education. He also talks about the great conversation that has been taking place since humans learned to write. Certain questions are raised by human existence and the different solutions proposed to those questions through time create the great conversation.
I think Hutchin's premise is valid and that is why a bunch of books by dead white European males are important. Ideas from other cultures are very important, but I am a product of western culture and it is important for me to understand my origins.
I have read different topics in the two volume Syntopicon, a topical approach to the set. The 20-30 page essays are an invaluable introduction to the the ideas of the great conversation. Each essay is followed by an indexed outline showing page by page how the ideas appear in the volumes of the set.
I have decided to make an earnest effort to tackle the 54 volume set. So much to read and so little time. I am certainly not going to just sit down and read volumes 4 through 54. I have read some of them. I am going to make them an essential part of my to be read list. Try to read one every other book. I want to tackle the books and not the summaries. I don't read abridged books and there is a reason to at least try to read Hegel. I will also try to include other great books using Library of America and Modern Library as source material. The Great Books set does have lists of further reading also. I don't see this as just reading the Brittanica Great Books.
I have a copy of Adler's How to Read a Book. The last time I read it I put it down quickly. In the face of all the recommendations I will try again. If all of this stops being fun and turns into pure work I will change my approach. Maybe a journal with my ideas will add to the fun part.

I highly recommend The New Lifetime Reading Plan as well as the previous edition The Lifetime Reading Plan. The latter is limited to "western" titles. The short essays will help you decide what to read next.

I was ~JUST~ going to post that same recommendation. They're compiled by the late Clifton Fadiman -- highly respected editor and book critic -- and father of my favorite author Anne Fadiman.

18, 19
I actually refer to Fadiman's book(s) in my LT profile - I own the 3rd and 4th editions (the 4th being the New plan, with a co-author and the first inclusion of "non-western" classics), and prior to those purchases, I'd checked the 2nd edition out from the library.

I really love books about books, and enjoy reviewing the different lists of "best" and "great" books. I wish I had more *time* to read them, though! ;-)

Sort of an aside: I've been looking at the Talk threads for just "My Groups" for weeks, and now I've got the day off (and a few minutes before the kids bug me again!), and talk was a bit slow, and I thought I'd check "All Groups" and see what I found. I'm glad I found this topic! :-)

1,
The site you mentioned is by far, the best on this subject. I'm constantly referring to it. The compilation of compilations.

20,
I know there's a Group on the subject of books about books. But I did want to mention I am a huge fan of the works of Nicholas Basbanes.

Apologies in advance if this is redundant, but other great books about great books, include A Lifetime's Reading by Phillip Ward (1983), and Classics for Pleasure} by Michael Dirda (2007).

Oh, and don't forget Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth. The essay format of these are similar to those of Dirda, Fadiman and Ward.