101 Significant Books

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

About this list

Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 105 Books

Good Reading first appeared as a pamphlet in 1932 and ended its run in 1989 with a 23rd edition behemoth of some 465 pages with thousands of books selected by educators and experts in their fields. Its purpose was always "to lead an increasing number of people to savor the great or significant books, both those that strive to light the dark places in our understanding of our complex world and our equally complex selves, and those that aim simply to delight."
A constant through all these different editions was a list of around 100 or so "significant books that many
people have found rewarding to know", revised several times. This list is from the last 23rd edition of Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers.
Note: List consists of 105 books

Who Voted?
Committee on College Reading of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Contemporary reviews describe it as “a co-operative effort of 35 members of the Committee on College Reading.”

This list was originally published in 1989 and was added to this site over 1 year ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
285 Oresteia Aeschylus -458 Greek Ancient greek
562 Aesop's Fables Aesop -560 Greek Ancient greek
4477 Comedies Of Aristophanes Aristophanes -425 Ancient greek
402 The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle -334 Greek Ancient greek
19 The Bible Unknown -1400 Jewish Hebrew, aramaic, greek
621 Analects Confucius -479 Chinese Classical chinese
2801 Collected Plays Of Euripides Euripides -405 Greek Ancient greek
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
585 Tao Te Ching Lao Tsu -300 Chinese Classical chinese
405 De Rerum Natura Lucretius 55 Roman Latin
220 The Republic Plato -379 Greek Ancient greek
1123 The Symposium Plato -385 Greek Ancient greek
334 Parallel Lives Plutarch 100 Greek 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
596 The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides -410 Greek Ancient greek
70 The Aeneid Virgil -19 Roman Latin
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
1162 Essays Francis Bacon 1597 British English
122 Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio 1353 Italian Italian
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
548 Le Morte d'Arthur Thomas Malory 1485 British Middle english
505 The Quran Unknown 610 Arabic Arabic
75 Essays Michel de Montaigne 1580 French French
881 Utopia Thomas More 1516 British Latin
736 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Edward FitzGerald 1859 British English
145 Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais 1532 French French
129 First Folio William Shakespeare 1623 British English
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
551 Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan 1678 British English
2173 Poems Of Robert Burns Robert Burns 1786 Scottish Scots
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
543 Discourse on Method Rene Descartes 1637 French French
1239 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne John Donne 1952 British English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
830 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon 1776 British English
404 The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay 1787 American English
458 Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1781 German German
1327 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke 1689 British English
1477 An Essay on the Principle of Population Thomas Robert Malthus 1798 British English
127 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
1296 The Works of Moliere Molière 1666 French French
1416 Rights of Man Thomas Paine 1791 British English
527 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762 French French
531 The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith 1776 Scottish English
374 Ethics Baruch de Spinoza 1677 Dutch Latin
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
510 Eugenie Grandet Honoré de Balzac 1833 French French
1273 Robert Browning's Poetry Robert Browning 1833 British English
1273 Selected Poems of Lord Byron Lord Byron 1800 British English
2078 The Major Plays Anton Chekhov 1964 Russian Russian
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
156 Poems of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 1890 American English
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
851 Essays, First And Second Series Ralph Waldo Emerson 1841 American English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
96 Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1808 German German
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
40 Les Misérables Victor Hugo 1862 French French
2685 Selected Plays of Henrick Ibsen Henrik Ibsen 1900 Norwegian Norwegian
974 The Poems of John Keats John Keats 1817 British English
328 Das Kapital Karl Marx 1867 German German
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
2381 The Will To Power Friedrich Nietzsche 1901 German German
98 The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 1902 American English
2016 The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley 1810 British English
42 The Red and the Black Stendhal 1830 French French
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
2161 The Poetical Works Of William Wordsworth William Wordsworth 1807 British English
356 Germinal Émile Zola 1885 French French
140 The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir 1949 French French
312 Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges 1962 Argentinian Spanish
315 Relativity Albert Einstein 1916 German German
2644 The Complete Poems And Plays T. S. Eliot 1952 British English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
1141 The Golden Bough James George Frazer 1890 British English
1212 A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis Sigmund Freud 1920 Austrian German
317 The Poems of Robert Frost Robert Frost 1913 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
62 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway 1926 American English
235 The Ambassadors Henry James 1903 American English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
227 Women in Love D. H. Lawrence 1920 British English
25 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 1924 German German
7191 The Complete Plays Of Eugene O'neill Eugene O'Neill 1959 American English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
2628 Selected Plays of George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw 1976 Irish English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
268 Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats 1933 Irish English