The Curriculum for Earning the Right to an Opinion

The Ancient Foundations
1. The Odyssey by Homer
2. The Histories by Herodotus
3. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
4. The Republic by Plato
5. The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
6. The Aeneid by Virgil
7. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
8. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
9. The Confessions by Saint Augustine
10. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

The Early Modern World
11. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
12. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
13. King Lear by William Shakespeare
14. The Essays by Michel de Montaigne
15. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton
16. Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes
17. Pensees by Blaise Pascal
18. Ethics by Baruch Spinoza
19. Paradise Lost by John Milton
20. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

The Enlightenment and Revolution
21. Candide by Voltaire
22. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
23. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
24. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
25. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
26. The Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel
27. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
28. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
29. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
30. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The Nineteenth Century
31. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
32. Capital by Karl Marx
33. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
34. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
35. Middlemarch by George Eliot
36. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
37. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
38. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
39. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
40. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

The Modernist Break
41. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
42. Ulysses by James Joyce
43. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
44. The Trial by Franz Kafka
45. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
46. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
47. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
49. Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
50. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The World at War and After
51. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
52. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
53. If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
54. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
55. The Second World War by Winston Churchill
56. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
57. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
58. Beloved by Toni Morrison
59. The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
60. The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Science and the Cosmos
61. The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
62. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
63. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg
64. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
65. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
66. The Double Helix by James Watson
67. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
68. The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson
69. What Is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger
70. The Story of Earth by Robert Hazen

Mathematics and Computation
71. Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
72. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
73. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
74. The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1 by Donald E. Knuth
75. How to Solve It by George Polya

Mind and Brain
76. Principles of Neural Science by Eric R. Kandel
77. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
79. Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
80. The Quest for Consciousness by Christof Koch

Economics and Society
81. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
82. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
83. The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon
84. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
85. Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
86. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
87. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
88. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Art and the Examined Life
89. The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich
90. Ways of Seeing by John Berger
91. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
92. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
93. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
94. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
95. The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski
96. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

Practical and Final Wisdom
97. The Letters of Seneca
98. The Essays of E.B. White
99. Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
100. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges