Reading The Classics

A list of 48 of humanity's best books:

Reading classic books can boost your learning experience. There are some reasons why classic books can do that: they have stood the test of time, they give you different “lenses” to look through, and they will most likely be relevant even to the far future. Reading the classics is an excellent intellectual exercise which will arm you with a lot of powerful intellectual tools.

While you can find good old books by looking at all-time best-seller list or Project Gutenberg Top 100, there may be problems with them. For all-time best-seller list, the problem is recent books enjoy advantage in term of printing technology and distribution, and because of that many good old books may not make the list. For Project Gutenberg Top 100, the list is limited to what people currently like, which may not include some really good books.

Fortunately, there are trusted recommendations that can help us. The recommendations are found in the books How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, and The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, both of which I believe are high-quality books. You can read the books for complete information about their recommendations (with suggestions on how to read them), but here I will directly give you the titles of the books which are recommended by both of them.

While I believe a book which is recommended by any of them is good, I think it’s safe to say that a book which is recommended by both of them is great.

It may take years to read all these books, but it undoubtedly will be a very rewarding intellectual journey; they are among the best books of human civilization.

Follow the link to see the list, including links to free downloads for all of them.

Looking over the list, I realize how woeful my education has been in these classics. It's about time I started delving into these.