The New Lifetime Reading Plan

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

The New Lifetime Reading Plan, 202 Books

Clifton Paul "Kip" Fadiman (May 15, 1904 – June 20, 1999) was an American intellectual, author, editor, radio and television personality.

The New Lifetime Reading Plan provides readers with brief, informative and entertaining introductions to more than 130 classics of world literature. From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. In addition, this new edition offers a much broader representation of women authors, such as Charlotte Bront%, Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, as well as non-Western writers such as Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Chinua Achebe, Mishima Yukio and many others.
This fourth edition also features a simpler format that arranges the works chronologically in five sections (The Ancient World; 300-1600; 1600-1800; and The 20th Century), making them easier to look up than ever before. It deserves a place in the libraries of all lovers of literature.

This list was originally published in 1999 and was added to this site almost 12 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
264 The Epic Of Gilgamesh Unknown -2100 Multiple Akkadian
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
621 Analects Confucius -479 Chinese Classical chinese
285 Oresteia Aeschylus -458 Greek Ancient greek
106 Oedipus the King Sophocles -429 Greek Ancient greek
383 Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles -401 Greek Ancient greek
125 Antigone Sophocles -441 Greek Ancient greek
3106 Alcestis Euripides -438 Greek Ancient greek
307 Medea Euripides -431 Greek Ancient greek
2516 Hippolytus Euripides -428 Greek Ancient greek
2199 Trojan Women Euripides -415 Greek Ancient greek
986 Electra Sophocles -409 Greek Ancient greek
943 The Bacchae Euripides -405 Greek Ancient greek
624 The Histories of Herodotus Herodotus -450 Greek Ancient greek
596 The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides -410 Greek Ancient greek
835 The Art of War Sun Tzu -500 Chinese Classical chinese
876 Lysistrata Aristophanes -411 Greek Ancient greek
932 The Clouds Aristophanes -423 Greek Ancient greek
1383 The Birds Aristophanes -414 Greek Ancient greek
388 The Complete Works of Plato Plato -387 Greek Ancient greek
1449 Corpus Aristotelicum Aristotle -322 Greek Greek
1913 Mencius Mencius -300 Chinese Classical chinese
422 Ramayana Valmiki -200 Indian Sanskrit
323 Mahabharata Vyasa -400 Indian Sanskrit
7031 Records of the Grand Historian Sima Qian 91 Chinese Classical chinese
405 De Rerum Natura Lucretius 55 Roman Latin
70 The Aeneid Virgil -19 Roman Latin
313 Meditations Marcus Aurelius 161 Roman Greek
133 Confessions Augustine 397 Roman Latin
9857 Meghadūta Kālidāsa -400 Indian Sanskrit
505 The Quran Unknown 610 Arabic Arabic
8340 Platform Sutra Huineng 713 Chinese Chinese
1091 Shahnameh Ferdowsi 1010 Iranian Persian
865 The Pillow Book Sei Shōnagon 1002 Japanese Japanese
130 The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu 1001 Japanese Classical japanese
736 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Edward FitzGerald 1859 British English
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
802 Romance of the Three Kingdoms Guanzhong Luo 1400 Chinese Chinese
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
145 Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais 1532 French French
367 Journey to the West Wu Cheng'en 1592 Chinese Chinese
75 Essays Michel de Montaigne 1580 French French
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
129 First Folio William Shakespeare 1623 British English
1239 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne John Donne 1952 British English
1282 The Plum in the Golden Vase Unknown 1610 Chinese Chinese
863 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo 1632 Italian Italian
345 Leviathan Thomas Hobbes 1651 British English
543 Discourse on Method Rene Descartes 1637 French French
127 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
11109 The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton John Milton 2007 British English
2052 The Misanthrope Molière 1666 French French
316 Pensées Blaise Pascal 1670 French French
551 Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan 1678 British English
952 Two Treatises of Government John Locke 1689 British English
2713 The Narrow Road to the Deep North Matsuo Bashō 1684 Japanese Japanese
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
1997 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding David Hume 1748 Scottish English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
484 Dream of the Red Chamber Cao Xueqin 1754 Chinese Chinese
275 The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1782 French French
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
10390 Basic Documents in American History Richard Brandon Morris 1958 American English
404 The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay 1787 American English
96 Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1808 German German
1112 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake William Blake 1827 British English
1611 The Prelude William Wordsworth 1850 British English
2415 Lyrical Ballads William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1798 British English
1652 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1798 British English
6178 The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1828 British English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
83 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
42 The Red and the Black Stendhal 1830 French French
228 Father Goriot Honoré de Balzac 1835 French French
510 Eugenie Grandet Honoré de Balzac 1833 French French
3238 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson 2000 American English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
1157 Twice-Told Tales Nathaniel Hawthorne 1837 American English
229 Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 French French
743 On Liberty John Stuart Mill 1859 British English
9857 The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill 1869 British English
1728 The Voyage of the Beagle Charles Darwin 1839 British English
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
104 Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol 1842 Russian Russian
98 The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 1902 American English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
277 The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens 1836 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
7624 Hard Times Studs Terkel 1970 American English
387 Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens 1864 British English
1464 Little Dorrit Charles Dickens 1855 British English
3110 The Warden Anthony Trollope 1855 British English
852 The Last Chronicle of Barset Anthony Trollope 1867 British English
4482 The Eustace Diamonds Anthony Trollope 1871 British English
703 The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope 1875 British English
9857 An Autobiography of Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope 1883 British English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
3245 Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau 1849 American English
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
324 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 1848 German German
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
460 Bartleby the Scrivener Herman Melville 1853 American English
414 The Mill on the Floss George Eliot 1860 British English
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
2924 The Poems of Walt Whitman Walt Whitman 1855 American English
9857 Democratic Vistas Walt Whitman 1871 American English
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian