Reading classic books can boost your learning experience. There are some reasons why classic books can do that: they have stood the test of time, they give you different “lenses” to look through, and they will most likely be relevant even to the far future. Reading the classics is an excellent intellectual exercise which will arm you with a lot of powerful intellectual tools.
To find good classic books, there are trusted recommendations that can help us. The recommendations are found in the books How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, and The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, both of which I believe are high-quality books. You can read the books for complete information about their recommendations (with suggestions on how to read them), but here I will directly give you the titles of the books which are recommended by both of them.
While I believe a book which is recommended by any of them is good, I think it’s safe to say that a book which is recommended by both of them is great.
So without further ado, here are the recommended classic books along with the Amazon and free download links (if any):
Novel
1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – （Download PDF）
2. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift – （Download PDF）
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – （Download Ebook）
4. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens – （Download PDF）
5. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - （Download PDF）
6. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville – （Download PDF）
7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – （Download PDF）
8. Crime and Punishmentt by Fyodor Dostoevsky – （Download PDF or DOC）
9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – （Download PDF）
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – （Download PDF ）
11. The Trial by(Franz Kafka – （Download PDF）
Autobiography and Memoir
1. The Confessions by(Augustine – （Download PDF ）
2. The Complete Essaysby Michel de Montaigne – （Download HTML）
3. Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes –（Download PDF）
4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau – （Download PDF）
History
1. The Histories by Herodotus – （Download PDF）
2. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides – （Download PDF）
3. The Republic by Plato – （Download PDF）
4. Lives by Plutarch – （Download PDF）
5. City of God by Augustine – （Download PDF）
6. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli – （Download PDF）
7. Utopia by Sir Thomas More – （Download PDF）
8. The Social Contract by Jean Jaques Rousseau –（Download PDF）
9. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by(Edward Gibbon – （Download PDF ）
10. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville – (PDF)
11. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx – （Download PDF）
Drama
1. Agamemnon by Aeschylus – （Download PDF ）
2. Oedipus the King by Sophocles – （Download PDF）
3. Medea by Euripides--（Download PDF）
4. The Birds by Aristophanes – （Download PDF）
5. Poetics by Aristotle – （Download PDF）
6. Richard III by William Shakespeare – （Download PDF）
7. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare – （Download PDF）
8. Hamlet by William Shakespeare – （Download PDF）
9. Tartuffe by Moliere – （Download PDF）
10. The Way of the World by William Congreve – （Download PDF）
11. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen – （Download PDF）
12. Saint Joan by by George Bernard Shaw –（Download PDF）
13.Man and Suprernan by George Bernard Shaw –（Download PDF）
14. No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre –（Download PDF）
Poet
1. The Iliad by Homer – （Download PDF）
2. The Odyssey by Homer – （Download PDF）
3. Odes by Horace – （Download PDF）
4. Inferno by Dante Alighieri – （Download PDF）
5. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer – （Download PDF）
6. Sonnets by William Shakespeare – （Download PDF）
7. Paradise Lost by John Milton – （Download PDF）
8. Selected Poetry by William Wordsworth – （Download HTML）
9. The Complete Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge – （Download PDF）
It may take years to read all these books, but it undoubtedly will be a very rewarding intellectual journey; they are among the best books of human civilization.
