The List

Here is my official list for my Quarterly Classics series.  They're a hodgepodge from the reading lists of Torrey Honors Institute, Great Books of the Western World, and other books I think are worthy of the list.  I've done a bit of editing so as not to be overwhelmed with philosophy and decided to limit the original list to 92 books.  I couldn't think of the last 8 books to make it a full 100, but who cares?  Honestly, this is all rather arbitrary, but you've got to start somewhere.  If I read four of these books per year this will only take me 23 years.  Without further adieu, the list:

1. Homer, The Iliad
2. Aeschylus, The Oresteia
3. Euripedes, The Bacchae 
4. Aristophanes, Lysistrata
5. Herodotus, The History
6. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
7. Plato, Meno
8. Plato, Symposium
9. Plato, Phaedo
10. Aristotle, Metaphysics
11. Aristotle, Rhetoric
12. Virgil, The Aeneid
13. Plutarch, The Lives of the Grecians and Romans
14. Tacitus, Histories
15. Horace, Odes and Epodes
16. Livy, The History of Rome
17. Ovid, Metamorphoses 
18. Quintillian, Institutes of Oratory
19. Cicero, On the Orator
20. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
21. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
22. Plotinus, Enneads
23. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
24. Dante, Divine Comedy
25. The Song of Roland
26. The Song of the Nibelung
27. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
28. Machiavelli, The Prince
29. Francis Bacon, The New Organon
30. Isaac Newton, The Principia
31. Michel de Montaigne, Essays
32. Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote 
33. Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queene
34. Shakespeare, King Lear
35. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
36. Shakespeare, As You Like It
37. Shakespeare, Othello
38. Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences
39. Jon Donne, selected poems
40. George Herbert, Selected Poems
41. Blaise Pascal, Pensees
42. John Milton, Paradise Lost
43. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
44. John Locke, Treatise on Government
45. Alexander Pope, An Essay in Criticism
46. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
47. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
48. The Federalist Papers
49. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
50. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
51. Hegel, Reason in History
52. William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, selected poems
53. S. T. Coleridge, selected poems
54. William Wordsworth, selected poems
55. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
56. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
57. Thackeray, Vanity Fair
58. Charles Dickens, Hard Times
59. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
60. George MacDonald, At the North of the Back Wind
61. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
62. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
64. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
65. Goethe, Faust
66. Charles Darwin, On the Original of Species
67. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto
68. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
69. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
70. George Elliot, Adam Bede
71. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
72. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
73. Frederick Douglass, Narrative
74. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
75. Edgar Allan Poe, selected poems and stories
76. Abraham Lincoln, selected speeches and writings
77. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
78. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday
79. T. S. Elliot, The Four Quartets, The Waste Land
80. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University
81. John Dewey, How We Think
82. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
83. Robert Frost, Collected Poems
84. James Joyce, Ulysses 
85. Albert Einstein, The Evolution of Physics
86. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
87. Jacques Maritain, Freedom and the Modern World
88. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
89. John Paul Sartre, Nausea 
90. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
91. John Updike, Rabbit
92. Philip Roth, American Pastoral