100 Classics in 3000 Days

I'm starting a new endeavour: A Classics Education. This book list is from "A Thomas Jefferson Education" by Oliver Van DeMille and is a jumping off point for a classics education. My education wasn't poor, but from reading this list, I realize my education is not rich in the classics.

THE GOAL: Complete all 100 classics in 1000 days (June 5, 2017)
That's an average of 1 book a month, in addition to my other reading endeavors .

After reading, they are marked in orange. If I've previously read them and have a good memory of them, they are marked (those that were thoroughly studied in college). If I only vaguely remember (from high school), I am rereading the book.

THE LIST:

Source: appendix A of Oliver Van DeMille's

A Thomas Jefferson Education:

Teaching a New Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century, © 2000.



1. Acton, The History of Freedom

2. John Adams, "Thoughts on Government"

3. Aquinas, "On Kingship"

4. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

5. Aristotle, Politics

6. Aristotle, Rhetoric

7. Augustine, The City of God

8. Aurelius, Meditations

9. Austen, Pride and Prejudice

10. Austen, Sense and Sensibility

11. Bacon, Novum Organum

12. Bastait, The Law

13. Bastait, "What is Seen and Not Seen"

14. Benson, "The Proper Role of Government"

15. The Bible (Ongoing project)

16. Boethius, The Consolidation of Philosophy

17. Bronte, Wuthering Heights

18. Bronte, Jane Eyre

19. Carson, The American Tradition

20. Capra, The Tao of Physics

21. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (currently reading)

22. Churchill, Collected Speeches

23. Cicero, The Republic

24. Cicero, The Laws

25. Clausewitz, On War

26. Confucius, Analects

27. The Constitution of the United States (ongoing project)

28. Copnicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

29. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

30. Dante, The Divine Comedy

31. The Declaration of Independence (ongoing project)

32. DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe

33. Descartes, A Discourse on Method

34. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

35. Dickens, Great Expectations

36. Douglas, Magnificent Obsession

37. Durant, A History of Civilization

38. Einstein, Relativity

39. Emerson, Collected Essays

40. Euclid, Elements

41. Frank, Alas Babylon

42. Franklin, Letters and Writings

43. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

44. Galileo, Two New Sciences

45. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

46. Goethe, Faust

47. Hobbes, Levathan

48. Homer, The Iliad

49. Homer, The Odyssey

50. Hugo, Les Miserables

51. Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary

52. Jefferson, Letters, Speeches, and Writings

53. Keegan, History of Warfare

54. Kepler, Epitome

55. Martin Luther King, Jr., Collected Speeches

56. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

57. Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry

58. Lewis, Mere Christianity

59. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

60. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

61. Lincoln, Collected Speeches

62. Locke, Second Treatise of Government

63. Machiavelli, The Prince

64. Madison, Hamilton and Jay, The Federalist Papers

65. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

66. More, Utopia

67. The Magna Charta

68. Mill, On Liberty

69. Milton, Paradise Regained

70. Mises, Human Action

71. The Monroe Doctrine

72. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

73. Newton, Mathematical Principles

74. Nichomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic

75. Neitzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

76. The Northwest Ordinance

77. Orwell, 1984 Read in 1988, will read again, even if I run out of time

78. Plato, Collected Works

79. Polybius, Histories

80. Potok, The Chosen  4/09

81. Plutarch, Lives

82. Ptolemy, Algamest

83. Shakespeare, Collected Works (Read: Hamlet, MacBeth, Richard II, Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice) Re-reading Taming of the Shrew for a Face to Face with Greatness Seminar 3/09

84. Skousen, The Five Thousand Year Leap

85. Skousen, The Majesty of God's Law

86. Skousen, The Making of America

87. Smith, The Wealth of Nations

88. Solzhenitsyn, "A World Split Apart"

89. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

90. Sophocles, Oedipus Trilogy

91. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

92. Sun Tzu, The Art of War

93. Thackeray, Vanity Fair

94. Thoreau, Walden

95. Tolstoy, War and Peace

96. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars

97. Tocqueville, Democracy in America

98. Washington, Letters, Speeches, and Writings

99. Weaver, Mainspring of Human Progress

100. Wister, The Virginian

Add ons:

101.  Little Britches, Ralph Moody  4/09

After creating this list, I'm actually excited to get started. I remember studying classics in High School and my impression was that they were "boring required reading." In retrospect, I think it was the mandatory multiple-choice tests that were boring. As an adult, the idea of reading to grow, learn and tap into the great minds of the past really motivates me.