Jul 29, 2026

Books that should be read

Nothing complicated here. This is just a dump of all the books on my lifelong reading list that has been compiled over time. I am hesistant to add more books to the list and am instead freezing the list here until I have read ~80% of it.

General Ordering note: This is a lifelong reading map, not a prescribed curriculum. Sections generally progress from greater accessibility toward greater conceptual, stylistic, or historical density. Where chronology and intellectual lineage materially improve the reading experience, works are ordered historically instead. Dates are approximate where works have complex composition or publication histories.

Biography

Novels - Classics & Canon

Ordering note: Fiction is generally arranged by accessibility and literary density rather than chronology. The sequence is intended as a gradual progression, not a required reading order.

Short Fiction & Prose

The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli
The Complete Stories (selected) - Anton Chekhov
Dubliners - James Joyce
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges

Drama

Ordering note: Ordered chronologically to trace changing dramatic forms, themes, and theatrical traditions.

Oedipus Rex - Sophocles
Lysistrata - Aristophanes
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
King Lear - William Shakespeare
The Tempest - Shakespeare
A Doll’s House - Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

Poetry & Epic

Ordering note: Ordered broadly chronologically to trace the development of Western epic and poetry from the ancient world through modernism.

Science Fiction

Fantasy

Contemporary & Literary Fiction

Australian Literature

History (Ancient to Modern)

Ordering note: Ordered broadly chronologically to trace the development of societies, states, empires, revolutions, and modern political orders. Where a modern work covers an earlier period, it is placed according to the historical period it examines rather than its publication date.

Non-Fiction

Essays

Essays - Michel de Montaigne
Self-Reliance and Other Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays - Henry David Thoreau
A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf
Selected Essays - George Orwell
The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace

Philosophy & Psychology

Ordering note: Works are ordered primarily by the period in which their ideas were composed or taught, rather than strictly by the date of surviving publication. Where a work was recorded or compiled by others, the date reflects its historical placement in the development of the author’s ideas. The aim is to follow the philosophical lineage and see how later thinkers respond to, develop, or reject earlier ideas.

Apology - Plato (~399 BCE)
The Republic - Plato (~375 BCE)
Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle (~340 BCE)
Politics - Aristotle (~350–322 BCE)
Letters from a Stoic - Seneca (~65 CE)
Enchiridion - Epictetus (~125 CE)
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (~170–180 CE)

Medieval period -> Philosophy becomes deeply intertwined with theology and religious scholarship.

Religion & Wisdom Literature

Dating note: Dates are approximate composition, compilation, or redaction periods rather than publication dates. Many of these works developed over centuries and survive in manuscripts substantially later than their original composition.

Politics & Economics

Ordering note: Ordered broadly chronologically to trace changing ideas about the state, markets, liberty, democracy, power, and political institutions. Later works often respond directly or indirectly to problems raised by earlier thinkers.

Science

Ordering note: Ordered primarily by accessibility and conceptual density rather than chronology. The aim is to build broad scientific literacy first, then progressively move toward more specialised, technical, or conceptually demanding works.