The Library
107 books, free to read online.
Philosophy
What is real, how to live
Plato's Dialogues
Six conversations around Socrates
- Apology Socrates defends himself, and loses on purpose.
- Crito A friend at the cell door, an argument against escape.
- Phaedo The last hours, on the soul and what follows.
- The Republic What is justice? A city built in words to find out.
- Phaedrus A walk outside the walls; rhetoric, eros, the soul as chariot.
Aristotle
Ethics, politics, poetics
- Nicomachean Ethics How to live well, defined by the man who liked definitions.
- Politics Man is a political animal. Discuss.
- Poetics Why tragedy works, dissected.
The Stoics
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
- The Manual Pocket-sized stoicism, from a former slave.
- Meditations A Roman emperor talks to himself in the dark.
Christian Tradition
Augustine, à Kempis, Kierkegaard
- Confessions The first real autobiography — and an argument with God.
- The Imitation of Christ Devotional. The book second only to the Bible in old monastic cells.
- Fear and Trembling On Abraham, faith, and the things you can't explain.
Modern Philosophy
Descartes through Nietzsche
- Essays The book that invented the essay — "What do I know?"
- Meditations on First Philosophy How to doubt everything, and then put a little back.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding A devastating empiricism, written to be readable.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Duty, reason, and the categorical imperative in its shortest form.
- Walden Two years in a cabin, and notes on what was simplified out.
- Utilitarianism Pleasure, pain, and how to add them up.
- Beyond Good and Evil A hammer, applied to morality.
- On the Genealogy of Morals Where our values came from, and who they served.
Critical Rationalism
Popper, Deutsch and how knowledge grows
- The Sovereign Child Parenting without rules, argued from a theory of knowledge.
- Lords of the Cosmos From cosmic monotony to the Enlightenment, a history of everything told through knowledge.
- Bold Conjectures, Volume I David Deutsch in conversation, 2012–2024.
- Bold Conjectures, Volume II Physicists on what is still unsettled in fundamental physics.
- The Farthest Reaches Why people are the most important entities in the universe.
Politics & The State
Power, liberty, foundations
On the State
Constitutions, sovereignty, federalism
- Leviathan Without the state, life is "nasty, brutish, and short."
- The Wealth of Nations The invisible hand of the market, in five long books.
- Democracy in America A Frenchman tours America and figures out the future.
On Power & Tyranny
Machiavelli, Marx, and the dramatists
- The Prince How to take power and not lose it. Notoriously practical.
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass The most influential American slave narrative, written while its author was still legally a fugitive.
- The Communist Manifesto A specter is haunting Europe.
On Liberty
Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Mill
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman The case for educating women, made when it still had to be made.
- On Liberty Where one person's freedom ends — and why it must end there.
Founding Documents
Magna Carta, US founding, Federalist
- Magna Carta The first time a king signed away some of the power.
- The US Founding Documents Declaration, Constitution, Bill of Rights — bundled.
- The Federalist Papers 85 essays defending a new constitution, published under "Publius."
Drama
The plays, in four Shakespearean modes and a Greek tradition
Shakespeare — Tragedies
Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth & co.
- Romeo and Juliet Two households, both alike in dignity.
- Julius Caesar Et tu, Brute?
- Hamlet A ghost, a prince, the great deferral.
- Othello Iago whispers; a great man unravels.
- King Lear Divide the kingdom, lose your mind.
- Macbeth Three witches, an ambitious wife, a tomorrow and tomorrow.
- Antony and Cleopatra Two empires, two egos, one Nile.
- Coriolanus A warrior who cannot bow to the crowd.
Shakespeare — Comedies
Romances, farces, problem plays
- The Taming of the Shrew A famously thorny courtship comedy.
- The Comedy of Errors Two sets of twins, one city, infinite confusion.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream Fairies, lovers, donkeys, and a play within a play.
- The Merchant of Venice A pound of flesh, a casket riddle, a courtroom turn.
- As You Like It All the world's a stage.
- Twelfth Night Shipwreck, cross-dressing, love at all the wrong angles.
- The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff tries to seduce two women; both notice.
- Measure for Measure A problem play about a problem deputy.
Shakespeare — Histories
The English chronicle plays
- Richard III A villain in soliloquy.
- Henry V Once more unto the breach.
- Henry IV, Part 2 Falstaff, and the price of becoming king.
Shakespeare — Romances
The late, strange plays
- The Winter's Tale Jealousy, sixteen years, a statue that breathes.
- The Tempest A magician on an island, settling accounts.
- Cymbeline A late romance with everything in it.
Greek Tragedy
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
- The Oresteia A house cursed; the birth of trial by jury.
- Antigone Bury your brother, defy the king.
- Medea A wife scorned, in a foreign land, with options.
- Oedipus Rex A king investigates a plague and finds himself at the bottom of it.
- Oedipus at Colonus The exiled king finds, at last, a place to die.
- The Bacchae A god comes home to a city that won't worship him.
Modern Drama
Goethe's Faust
- Faust, Part One Original German available. English editions are temporarily unavailable.
Fiction
Novels and stories, by tradition
The Russians
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
- Notes from Underground I am a sick man — a spiteful man.
- Crime and Punishment A student commits a murder, then has to live with it.
- War and Peace Napoleon comes to Russia. So do five hundred other people.
- Anna Karenina All happy families are alike.
- The Brothers Karamazov Three brothers, one father, one murder, and God on trial.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich A successful judge confronts the life he built as death draws near.
19th-Century English Novels
Austen to Conrad
- Sense and Sensibility Two sisters confront love, money, and the limits of their own judgment after losing the security of their family home.
- Pride and Prejudice A truth universally acknowledged.
- Frankenstein The first science-fiction novel, written at nineteen.
- Jane Eyre Reader, she narrated it herself.
- Wuthering Heights Two Yorkshire households carry a childhood attachment, a family grievance and a struggle over property into another generation.
- Great Expectations A blacksmith's boy, a strange benefactor, a London education.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Alice follows a hurried rabbit into a world of shifting sizes, disputed meanings and impatient rulers.
- Middlemarch Interwoven lives in a provincial town test what ambition, marriage, and sympathy can make possible.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde A respectable doctor, a chemical, a second self.
- Heart of Darkness A boat up the Congo, and what it found there.
- A Little Princess A girl loses everything; her imagination keeps her warm.
American Novels
Melville and Chopin
- Moby Dick Call me Ishmael. The rest is the whale.
- The Awakening A woman in Louisiana realizes she's allowed to want.
Modernism
A new century, a new sentence
- Ulysses One day in Dublin, told several different ways.
- To the Lighthouse A summer house, a postponed trip, time itself as the protagonist.
Nordic Novels
Jacobsen and Lagerlöf
- Niels Lyhne A Danish atheist dreams, loses, and dies. Rilke loved it.
- Jerusalem A Swedish village uprooted by faith, headed for the holy land.
Satire
Voltaire and the philosophical tale
- Don Quixote A knight, a squire, a windmill. The first modern novel.
- Candide A young optimist tours the worst of all possible worlds.
- The Sorrows of Young Werther A young man writes himself into love and despair.
Adventure
Journeys, wagers and the open sea
- Around the World in Eighty Days Phileas Fogg bets the club; the clock starts.
- The Jungle Book A boy raised by wolves; assorted other tales.
Folk & Fairy Tales
Tales from the oral tradition
- Grimms' Fairy Tales Sixty-five tales of kings, tailors, stepmothers and talking animals, told in plain, repeated patterns.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments A sultan’s nightly story-bargain opens tales of genies, sailors, merchants and a magic lamp.
Poetry & Epic
From Gilgamesh to Milton
Ancient Epics
Gilgamesh, Homer, Virgil
- The Iliad The wrath of Achilles, and the long siege of Troy.
- The Odyssey A long way home, by way of every sea-monster between.
- The Aeneid A refugee from Troy founds Rome, sort of.
Sacred Epics
Dante and Milton
- The Divine Comedy A guided tour of hell, purgatory, and paradise — in terza rima.
- Paradise Lost The fall, in twelve books of blank verse.
Medieval Epics
Beowulf
- Beowulf Monsters, mead-halls, alliterative grandeur.
Scripture & Devotion
Sacred texts and contemplatives
Bible & Devotion
Scripture, and the books read alongside it
- The Bible Sixty-six books, two testaments. The library inside the library.
History
The first historians
Ancient History
The first historians
- The Histories The first history book, half ethnography and half tall tale.
- History of the Peloponnesian War Athens versus Sparta, by a participant who took notes.
War & Strategy
The art of conflict, and its history
Strategy
The art of conflict
- The Art of War Win without fighting, when you can.