Introductory Reading List

 

This list consists of fiction and nonfiction works varying from analyses of history, psychology, philosophy, as well as literary and fictional works that observes some of the same topics as well as contain brilliant topics for discussion.

Fiction:

Political Literature/dystopian:

- 1984 - George Orwell

- Animal Farm - George Orwell

- We - Yevgeny Zamyatin

- Anthem - Ayn Rand

- Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

- A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

- The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

- Harrison Bergeron - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

- Candide - Voltaire

Philosophical Fiction:

- The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

- Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

- The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

- Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

- The Trial - Franz Kafka

- The Stranger - Albert Camus

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche 

- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

- The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy

Classical Literature:

- Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

- The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

- A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

- For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

- East of Eden - John Steinbeck

- The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger 

- The Iliad + The Odyssey - Homer

- Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

- Paradise Lost - John Milton

- The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

- Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

- Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Plays:

- Macbeth - Shakespeare

- Othello - Shakespeare

- Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare

- Hamlet - Shakespeare

- Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

- Ivanov - Anton Chekhov

- The Crucible - Arthur Miller

- The Oedipus Cycle - Sophocles

- Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

- Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe

Nonfiction:

Psychology:

- Ordinary Men - Christopher Browning

- The Lucifer Effect - Phillip Zimbardo

- Civilization and its Discontents - Sigmund Freud

- Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud

- The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud

- Modern Man in Search of Soul - C.G. Jung

- Man and His Symbols - C.G. Jung

- The Red Book, Liber Novus - C.G. Jung

- Aion - C.G. Jung

- Answer to Job - C.G. Jung

- Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle - C.G. Jung

- Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

Philosophy:

- Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche

- The Gay Science - Friedrich Nietzsche

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

- The Anti-Christ - Friedrich Nietzsche

- Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard

- The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus

- Mediations - Marcus Aurelius

Politics/History:

- The Gulag Archipelago Vol. I/II/III - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (I encourage to read all three volumes, but if that turns out to be too much reading, you can also read the abridged version)

- Gulag: A History - Anne Applebaum

- A Conflict of Visions - Thomas Sowell

- The Vision of the Anointed - Thomas Sowell

- The Origins of Totalitarianism - Hannah Arendt

- How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place - Bjorn Lomberg

- Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith

- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-62

- Mao: The Unknown Story - Jung Chang

- Survival in the Killing Fields - Haing Ngor

Note: I will update this as I, too, read more books, but this is what I can suggest thus far.