WEM Reading List
We’re using Susan Wise Bauer’s reading list from The Well-Educated Mind. She allows for substitutions, but all three of us are first-borns and we like to follow the rules. Anything less, or different, or even out of order from this list, would feel like cheating.
You don’t like cheaters, do you? We didn’t think so.
Here are the titles, but we strongly encourage you to get your own copy of WEM, because SWB’s list is beautifully annotated, and includes recommended editions. Not to mention that she doesn’t just tell you what to read, but also how to read it. Important stuff.
Since we have multiple readers I won’t clutter up the list with lots of designations. Just these:
Finished Titles
Currently Reading
Fiction
Don Quixote – Miguel de CervantesThe Pilgrim’s Progress – John BunyanGulliver’s Travels – Jonathan SwiftPride and Prejudice – Jane AustenOliver Twist – Charles DickensJane Eyre – Charlotte BrontëThe Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel HawthorneMoby-Dick – Herman MelvilleUncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher StoweMadame Bovary – Gustave FlaubertCrime and Punishment – Fyodor DostoyevskyAnna Karenina – Leo TolstoyThe Return of the Native – Thomas HardyThe Portrait of a Lady– Henry JamesThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark TwainRed Badge of Courage – Stephen CraneHeart of Darkness – Joseph ConradThe House of Mirth – Edith WhartonThe Great Gatsby – F. Scott FitzgeraldMrs. Dalloway – Virginia WoolfThe Trial – Franz KafkaNative Son – Richard WrightThe Stranger – Albert Camus1984 – George OrwellInvisible Man – Ralph EllisonSeize the Day – Saul BellowOne Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez- If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
- Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
- White Noise – Don Delillo
- Possession – A.S. Byatt
Autobiographies
- The Confessions – Augustine
- The Book of Margery Kempe – Margery Kemp
- Essays – Michel de Montaigne
- The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself – Teresa of Ávila
- Meditations – René Descartes
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners – John Bunyan
- The Narrative of the Captivity of Restoration – Mary Rowlandson
- Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- An Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin – Benjamin Franklin
- Walden – Henry David Thoreau
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself – Harriet Jacobs
- Life and Times of Frederick Douglass – Frederick Douglass
- Up from Slavery – Booker T. Washington
- Ecce Homo – Friedrich Nietzsche
- Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler
- An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth – Mohandas Gandhi
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
- The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
- Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life – C.S. Lewis
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X
- Journal of a Solitude – May Sarton
- The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
- Born Again – Charles W. Colson
- Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez – Richard Rodriguez
- The Road from Coorain – Jill Ker Conway
- All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs – Elie Wiesel
Histories
- The Histories – Herodotus
- The Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
- The Republic – Plato
- Lives – Plutarch
- The City of God – Augustine
- The Ecclesiastical History of the English People – Bede
- The Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli
- Utopia – Thomas More
- The True End of Civil Government – John Locke
- The History of England, Volume V – David Hume
- The Social Contract – Jean-Jasques Rousseau
- Common Sense – Thomas Paine
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
- A Vindication of the Rights of Women – Mary Wollstonecraft
- Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville
- The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy – Jacob Burckhardt
- The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – Max Weber
- Queen Victoria – Lytton Strachey
- The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
- The New England Mind – Perry Miller
- The Great Crash – John Kenneth Galbraith
- The Longest Day – Cornelius Ryan
- The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan
- Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made – Eugene D. Genovese
- The Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century – Barbara Tuchman
- All the President’s Men – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era – James M. McPherson
- A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
- The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama
Dramas
- Agamemnon – Aeschylus
- Oedipus the King – Sophocles
- Medea – Euripides
- The Birds – Aristophanes
- Poetics – Aristotle
- Everyman
- Doctor Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
- Richard III – William Shakespeare
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare
- Tartuffe – Moliere
- The Way of the World – William Congreve
- She Stoops to Conquer – Oliver Goldsmith
- The School for Scandal – Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
- The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
- The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov
- Saint Joan – George Bernard Shaw
- Murder in the Cathedral – T. S. Elliot
- Our Town – Thornton Wilder
- Long Day’s Journey Into Nght – Eugene O’Neill
- No Exit – Jean Paul Sartre
- A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams
- Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
- Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
- A Man for All Seasons – Robert Bolt
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard
- Equus – Peter Shaffer
Poetry
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Iliad and the Odyssey – Homer
- Greek Lyricists
- Odes – Horace
- Beowulf
- Inferno – Dante Alighieri
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
- Sonnets – William Shakespeare
- John Donne
- Psalms – King James Bible
- Paradise Lost – John Milton
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience – William Blake
- William Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- John Keats
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Christina Rossetti
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- William Butler Yeats
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Robert Frost
- Carl Sandburg
- William Carlos Williams
- Ezra Pound
- T. S. Eliot
- Langston Hughes
- W.H. Auden
Jillian ♣
March 19, 2012 at 8:27 pm
I’m excited to follow your journey here, and really glad you joined the club. Welcome!! 🙂
Also — it’s so handy to see this list now and know what’s coming up next! I’m planning to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the world tomorrow. There’s a readathon. 😀
Christina Joy
March 19, 2012 at 8:50 pm
Thank you! And thanks for hosting the club!
I know, I read about the UTC readathon on your blog earlier. We’re always missing the boat. Well, this time we’re on the boat, that’s the problem. I’m posting about it tomorrow.
Jillian ♣
March 19, 2012 at 8:51 pm
Oh, really? That’s AWESOME! 😀
Elizabeth Johnson
May 31, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Just found you – and just got my own copy of WEM! Will be attempting to work through the list along with you all!
Christine
May 31, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Welcome! We’re happy to have you read along with us. The next novel we’ll be tackling is Madame Bovary.
Elizabeth Johnson
June 1, 2012 at 12:43 pm
So, question. I’m late to the party. If I’ve already read the first 8 books on the list “back in the day” should I just skip them for now and start with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I’ve never read? Or should I go back to the beginning (for instance, I don’t remember anything about DQ other than the windmills) and try to speed-read through it all to catch up?
Christina Joy
June 1, 2012 at 12:52 pm
I would just jump in with UTC – it will be over a week before we begin Madame Bovary, and since you’ve already read the others I wouldn’t go back, at least not now. You can always jump back and read one later if you find that some reference keeps popping up that you wished you remembered better. In the meantime you can always read our old blog post or Classics in a Minute to trigger your memory 🙂
Oh, and you’ve read all of the first eight already?!?!?! Wow!!! On your own, or as parts of classes, or both? That’s a seriously impressive reading history.
Elizabeth Johnson
June 1, 2012 at 1:17 pm
I read them on my own; I enjoy classic fiction. But that’s about it – there’s only 2 others on the list that I’ve already read 🙂
Thanks for the input!
BookerTalkertalk
November 10, 2013 at 5:43 am
What is the theory behind reading these in the sequence prescribed? Does each novel lead on for the earlier one in theme or style or technique for example?
Christina Joy
November 11, 2013 at 9:15 pm
I believe Susan Wise Bauer is trying not only to expose readers of her list to literature, but to the greater corpus of knowledge. She approaches all the works chronologically in order to lay a historical foundation, but she has separated the genres to provide the most accessible works (fiction) first, and then move the reader through more difficult sources as the base knowledge continues to grow.