I have meant to do this for a while, but only just got around to it. These works are the most important to me, and are presented as I might present them to an alien race from another planet, who visited earth and asked for recommendations for what I think are the essential books that they should read to see us at our best.
Why 96? Because I'm not going to include books just to make a more attractive and catchy title - after all, how could the list be authentic if it includes books merely for the purpose of rounding off the number? Plus, immediate investigation will show that there are way more than 100 in this list.
Notable omissions: I had better mention that Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald have never made much of a conquest of my tastes. And it may seem almost sacrilegious to say this, but I'm not especially enamoured with Thoreau's Walden either - despite many friends I regard having a huge fondness for it. I don't even have a fondness for Thoreau in the way I do for D.H. Lawrence, like a man has for a car he has no intention of driving. There are some good lines in it, but I have to confess to finding it a tad boring in large parts. I don't deny F Scott Fitzgerald the regard as a good writer, and Gatsby is packed with good lines. But I like my good lines to be almost imperceptibly woven into the story, not presented on the page like paintings in a gallery. One other omission worth mentioning purely due to ignorance is Finnegans Wake, which, despite having got to my mid-forties, I have never read. I bought a copy about 5 years ago, and it's still in my 'to read' pile.
That's it for the preamble - let's get to it. A good rule of thumb here is that the further down the list we go, the less the numerical order becomes as important.
1) The Bible
Comment: More essential than the rest on the list combined. The Bible tells us who God is, and who we are, in ways that are so simple a child can understand, and so complex that everybody who has ever lived and will ever live will only be able to understand a fraction of it in the aggregated lifetimes of us all. That is an absolutely remarkable accomplishment - and unless due respect is paid to it, we'll remain like chimps trying to understand the Internet.
The Bible tells a love story between God and humankind, and it does so by engaging with us at every level we require to fulfil our deepest needs: through philosophy, morality, theology, psychology, art, storytelling and all intellectual and emotional pursuits. Our best attempts at science, philosophy, psychology and morality are like the husk of a bone; Christianity is the marrow. Try to take Christianity out of the equation and all you’re left with is dry, crumbly flakes of membrane. Many people have fallen in love with the membrane like how Eve fell in love with her own reflection in Paradise Lost.
Whether you're a Christian or not (I am), let me tell you one thing with absolute certainty: if you don't try to evaluate the Bible through the starting lens of 'This is the most astounding book ever written', your interpretation of it will be grossly inadequate to the task of uncovering its deeper rewards.
2) The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Comment: Unmatched in writing style and depth. What more is there to say that hasn't already been said? It's simply genius - so good that it is out there on its own in fiction, in its own league. Shakespeare's plays are what one might expect if a large creative committee were pooled together and commissioned their best ever outputs over a number of years. It's astonishing that these works came from one man's mind.
3) Selected works of C.S. Lewis - Especially Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Four Loves and The Chronicles of Narnia
Comment: Nobody writes about the profound matters of Christianity with more elegant simplicity and beautiful accessibility than C.S. Lewis: he is the master Christian apologist - the best there's ever been. He's such a good writer that when I read his analogies and illustrations I'm amazed that no one before him had ever thought of them. It's like they've been waiting to be expressed for centuries, and we had to wait until 2000 years after Christ's incarnation for someone to finally state these truths so brilliantly.
4) Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Comment: I don't think anyone has written better on the nature of meaning in relation to the psychology of religious faith. Dostoevsky is probably the most balanced author I've ever read when it comes to the big questions. It's like an exploration of love, faith, guilt, fear, justice and mercy through the lens of dreaming and at the same time how those qualities play out in real life. He shows their qualities not just by their presence but by their absence too, like how you can see the beauty of Christian faith not just by looking at the many excellent believers who have it, but in the absence of it in those that do not. It's a bit like how we appreciate the sun in one way in the summer, and in quite another way in the winter - that's Dostoevsky's characters in a nutshell.
5) The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Comment: Absolutely ingenious tour of the underworld and afterlife - a masterly mix of Christian theology, philosophy, literature and mythology that takes us on the journey from sin to redemption, explicating the truth that the worldly profane things will pass away by the end, and that, like Milton's Paradise Lost, the devil is easily exposed as a schemer. There's a good reason Beatrice sent Virgil to guide Dante through Inferno and Purgatorio. Virgil represented the virtues of a good Roman, especially reason and virtue, and was an ideal guide. But he remained in purgation, unable to enter Heaven, because he wouldn’t be able to comprehend anything Divine. The Divine Comedy is a place to learn about our own journey, our exile, what we were created for, and the most important values of life. After the Bible, this is probably the most influential book in the western world.
6) Selected works of Soren Kierkegaard
Comment: At his best, Kierkegaard takes us into some deep theological contemplations that are unequalled in any writer I've read. Yes, sure, Kierkegaard is flawed (aren’t we all?), with some inadequate expositions (especially around subjectivity's relationship with truth and morality), but in writings like Works of Love, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Purity of Heart and Sickness Unto Death he tapped into a way of thinking that has, in my view, rarely been surpassed. If you're thinking of a foray, start with Fear and Trembling - it's his most accessible: it's a brilliant exposition on the Genesis story of Abraham being called to sacrifce Isaac. Here we encounter the phemomonel concept of ‘a teleological suspension of the ethical’, which throws ordinary morality up on its head.
7) Paradise Lost - John Milton
Comment: Nails the topic of fallenness like no one before or since. This contains some of the deepest ever thoughts about Heaven, Hell, Satan, Adam and Eve - an absolutely epic poem and one to read and re-read. Milton shows better than just about anyone how our minds have the power to make heaven out of hell, and a hell out of heaven. And along with Dante, Milton is also one of the best exponents of the idea that hell is a mental state into which you’ll be ensnared if you don’t pursue good - and that it is far more than a mere human invention. Paradise Lost really nails this by showing Satan’s delusion in thinking he doesn’t need God because of his own qualities. Satan falls in love with his own mind, and believes that that is a sufficient condition under which to operate. This delusion makes his reality more and more like hell.
8) Pensees - Blaise Pascal
Comment: At its best, this contains the most brilliant Christian writing I've ever read. I read this twice about twenty years ago when I first became a Christian, made loads of annotations in the margins, wrote about them in my own books, and I've never opened Pensees since. I suspect that's because I don't want to find that my matured self thinks a little less of it. This is also where you'll find the proper laying out of Pascal's Wager, which is much more deep and profound than the crass, diluted form that so often does the rounds. I blogged about it here.
9) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Comment: In my view, the best ever British novel. It was said of Ginger Rogers that she wasn't Hollywood's best singer in her era, or the best dancer, or the best actress - but in terms of the Gestalt whole she was the best star in musicals. That's how I feel about Jane Eyre - when it comes to love, grace, providence, self-determination, class stratifications and social status, this isn't the best novel in any one individual element, but it's the best English novel in terms of the Gestalt whole. Certainly my favourite of its kind.
10) The works of Charles Dickens
Comment: No real point singling any out - simply one of the greatest ever storytellers and character creators. Great Expectations is probably the best, but I have the softest spot for A Christmas Carol: it's the quintessential story of grace and redemption for all ages!
11) Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
Comment: I’m not entirely sure why this allures my palette as much as it does; it has many of the traits I dislike in novels. It’s overlong, pretentious in places, and the narrator of the story is not so fascinating that you feel such an epic length is justified. No novel needs to be this long. But all that said, there is a quality about this work that maybe exists in no other, except perhaps Ulysses. This is effectively about the phenomenology of being; it’s about life, about squeezing as much of the juices of life into one narrative – the observations, the streams of consciousness, the state of being. It’s about what it means to be alive, to see vulnerability in oneself and others, and in essence, about self-discovery. Just in writing this my memory has brought to the fore several episodes from my past where I’ve learned something valuable from an everyday interaction. I don’t think any book has ever elicited that kind of recall better than Remembrance of Things Past. Then again, I guess the clue's in the title, after all.
12) Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Comment: As good psychology as it is literature. Rarely does an author understand humanity so well that she understands her own creations with such aplomb.
13) A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume
Comment: The most important philosopher and his most important works. Hume's greatest contribution to philosophy is in laying out the proposition that everything is derived from experience (this is the basis of Hume’s fork – everything is classified as either Relations of ideas and Matters of fact). Hume lays out the important distinction between causation and causality.
14) The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy - G.K Chesterton
Comment: Apart from the works of C.S Lewis, these two books are my favourite books of Christian apologetics. This is Christianity at its smartest. GK Chesterton reminds us that even a watered down Christianity is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. Here's the man at his best in Orthodoxy:
"The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world".
15) The works of Carl Jung
Comment: In my first office job as the junior admin, I snuck to the photocopier over several days and printed just about everything Jung had ever published. I've had a complicated relationship with Jung, not quite love-hate, more like love-exasperation. There's no denying the depth of his mind. Perhaps the best homage to Jung is that it would be unwise to even start writing about his ideas - there are so many brilliant ones that any brief commentary would be inadequate to the coverage of their depth.
16) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Comment: An absolutely brilliant incursion into a psychological realism that takes us far beneath where we feel comfortable going. We engage with the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff; the class conflict, the psychology, the bitterness, and the obsession with revenge – it is one of the best deconstructions of traditional love while departing from the traditional love narrative that I’ve ever read. Emily Bronte quite brilliantly seduces the reader with romantic gestures at the beginning, leading us into a false sense of security about willing Heathcliff’s redemption and renewal, but then spends the rest of the book chipping away at the structure of that notion by showing him (and most of the characters for that matter) to be more and more cruel, self-centred and damaged. This is a kind of emotional Hades into which we just don’t want to be going often – a masterclass in expressing dormant, unfulfilled passions and longings, and what beasts lurk beneath the subducts when they remain unchecked. Stunningly good.
17) The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith
Comment: Adam Smith's two great works - both thoroughly excellent, but while the majority of people associate Smith with the Wealth of Nations approach to humankind, where the market develops by virtue of our self-serving instincts, his Theory of Moral Sentiments is much more concerned with our propensity to be kind and generous towards each other, and is equally good.
18) On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Comment: Racist book that's made almost no contribution to society. It should be banned! 😀
19) Selected works of Tolstoy - especially War and Peace, Anna Karenina and A Confession
Comment: Heck, this man suffered - he really suffered. He went through the whole gamut of pain, and came out as a stronger thinker and a believer. Isaiah Berlin placed Tolstoy as the greatest writer because he most aptly incorporated the skills of the Hedgehog and the Fox into his work (see further down the list). It was perhaps Tolstoy who gave us the most profound illustrations of human nature in war (as did Wilfred Owen in a rather different way) – illustrations that move us to consider human psychology in battle, and conclude that in spite of the horror, toil and misery, a few moments in war can teach us more about humanity than a lifetime of peace. But best of all, I think, Tolstoy wrenched the truth out of every arm of resistance. About our progression towards ‘truth’ itself, he concludes that “Our progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold”. Tolstoy’s language is evocative of something awaiting discovery – that these truths are already part of reality, and the human job is to gradually uncover them, much like we mine for gold. Only a man of faith could be that perspicacious.
20) Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Comment: An absolutely wonderful achievement. So many sharp insights and witty observations. What an adventure of the logical mind as well as of the literary one.
21) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Comment: One minor criticism would be that it's a little bit too long for my liking - Hugo doesn't quite have the capacious mind of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to justify this length. But that aside, this book has one of the greatest expositions of grace in all of literature, with recidivist Jean Valjean and the hugely benevolent Bishop of Digne, who helps him, takes him in and gives him shelter. But in the middle of the night, Jean Valjean steals the bishop’s silverware and runs. He is caught, but the bishop even though he was badly let down after various acts of charity and grace, rescues him by claiming that the silverware was, in fact, a gift, and at that point gives him his two precious silver candlesticks as well, reproving Jean Valjean for leaving in such a rush and forgetting these most valuable gifts. As you can imagine, Jean Valjean is stunned by such an act. That act of grace changes Jean Valjean's whole outlook on life and transforms his character (and no doubt many readers too). His life ethos is to emulate the grace and love of the bishop, just as Christians' life ethos should be to emulate Christ's outlook - the One who gave the greatest act of love and grace ever poured out on the world at Calvary. A wonderful story about redemption, and the futulity of being blind to its quality.
22) Persuasion -Jane Austen
Comment: I could actually make a case for all six of Austen's great novels - they are all quite different, and all just about equally good in their own right. I nearly went for Pride and Prejudice, but didn't because it's a slightly more charming fairytale, which is a point against it when measured alongside Persuasion (and perhaps Emma too).
23) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Comment: One of the great comedic novels; farcical, sublime, where sanity and insanity are seamlessly blended together with brilliant writing - but in the end it's really a horror story too. Heller laughs at bureaucracies with absurd subordinates and even more absurd leaders. It's part book of Ecclesiastes, part Evelyn Waugh, part Ernst Lubitsch, with a touch of the Marx Bros about it too. Everyone knows what a Catch 22 situation, but few know the exact text:
"Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."
24) To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Comment: Two of the best works on deeper introspection, wayward imagination and streams of consciousness. There are few more talented than Woolf at understanding her characters and using them to draw out our most intimate contemplations. Not an easy author to read though – as she cuts such a lonely, tragic figure, who never got to understand the really glorious truths about life. Like her characters, she was always giving herself over to social occasions to cover the silence.
25) The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Comment: I have to declare some personal distaste in enjoying this – I don’t really vibrate to the Marxist undertones that Steinbeck conveys, as the Joad family, plagued by the dustbowl storms that battered the land and ruined livelihoods, cross the Panhandle in search of better things in California. And the message about the nefarious divide between workers and owners is generally without sufficient nuance. But all that said, this is an astonishing novel about survival, about self-respect, about family, and most of all about humanity. This story really does convey a spirit of an impoverished group that demands to be taken seriously, because they are so full of dignity and authenticity.
26) Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Comment: Don’t forget Of Mice and Men too – it's an absolutely beautiful, essential read. A hugely gratifying expression of humanity and heart – and in the friendship of George and Lennie we have one of the best relationships captured in all of literature.
27) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Comment: Rarely does an author press a spike into the heart of your mind the way Nabokov does. Such beautiful language too. Nabokov is one of the best writers at showing us the periphery, making us believe we are there, and that the perceived centre is really quite illusory. This author understands better than most that, with complete knowledge and perfect hindsight, what most thought was the periphery will actually turn out to have been the centre.
28) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Comment: A fantastic story with great characters. Waugh treats his readers as though they are witty and intelligent, and that's why his novels are so good.
29) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Comment: Tremendous work, a well told story about wretched racial tensions, prejudices and bad attitudes, but where the noble characters rise above the culture and the zeitgeist. This is an unambiguous portrayal of what’s good and what’s bad, where Harper Lee shows that empathy, compassion and insight drives goodness, and apathy, blind ignorance and lazy-mindedness drives badness.
30) Ulysses - James Joyce
Comment: A hard read, but one to admire. The problem I suspect a lot of people have with Ulysses, including me, is that they read it for the first time too early. Begin your foray into classic literature, and you're likely to want to devour the most highly regarded works first, of which Ulysses is definitely one. Rudyard Kipling once said “What do they know of England, who only England know?”, and what he meant was, not only do you not know much of other countries if you only know England, you don't know so much of England either without knowing other countries with which to make comparisons. Lovers sometimes say that of beloveds too - they love them not just by knowing the beloved and all the qualities she has, but by knowing how the qualities and faults of others give further exhibition to what the beloved has to offer. I think this Kiplingian observation is true of Ulysses too - it is all the more appreciated extrinsically in light of other literature, as well as intrinsically on its more intimate contemplations.
One of the salutary observations that runs through Ulysses is that greatness in reality can be found not just in the splendid parts of life but also in the insipidly ordinary things we experience every day – that angels may well be treading in the most profane places and situations, as well as in the sublime, profound and beautiful instances of living. It seemed to Joyce, I think, that a wise person is someone who can get wisdom and truth from every situation, whether bad or good, right or wrong, or tragic or joyous – he is a bit like a gardener who can make the most of all different kinds of soil in his garden and not just cultivate plants, flowers, and vegetables in the soil that is obviously good.
31) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Comment: Everything that’s bad about authoritarianism is captured in this novel - and my oh my, Huxley is such a good writer. The quintessence of a dystopian novel is that the tyrannies that preside over us purport to being so for our good, where subjects are reconstituted into automata and develop Stockholm syndrome. Huxley is smarter than Orwell because his imagination of the future’s ’look’ and its technological advancement is more perceptive. What I think also gives Huxley the edge is that he captures the reality of how easy it is to obtain happiness in a life of unthinking. Most of the dystopian characters elsewhere aren’t very happy and content with their lot. But in Brave New World, the characters aren’t miserable at their plight – they have blindly accepted the system into which they have become ensnared.
32) Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
Comment: Absolutely superb psychological thriller, so tremendously written. Daphne Du Maurier smartly observes through unlikeable characters that wholesome qualities are earned not bestowed, and dark traits are not prized from the influences of others, but well up from the inner states of mind.
33) Selected works of Nietzsche
Comment: Well.... where do I start with my love/hate relationship with Nietzsche? It’s not easy to summarise my thoughts so succinctly, not least because I don’t believe Nietzsche would find it easy to summarise his own philosophies succinctly – they don’t make easy summations. The thing really worth mentioning about Nietzsche is what a brilliant writer he is – almost like a literary philosopher. Despite being replete with reality checks, I find him a joy to read. There’s no doubt too that he’s a brilliant mind and a deep thinker, offering profound perspectives on what it means to be human in a world where everyone gets so much wrong, and readily conforms to bad intellectual practices. He is mostly justifiably damning of a human species that doesn’t competently know itself or understand itself as well as it might. If you’re going to get into Nietzsche, you’re going to need to roll up your sleeves – but you should find it worth the journey. You could start with Beyond Good and Evil and then On the Genealogy of Morality – there Nietzsche is salutary and constructive in his observations. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a tough read though – it is full of great lines, but its underlying thematic is profane, irreverent and misguided. If only Nietzsche took his ideas to their most profound conclusions, he might have been the greatest writer of his age.
34) The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
Comment: A terrible writer, but if you take the time to sift through this, there are some great rewards, and plenty to appreciate. Kant sought to establish the categories as a priori modes of thought that are applied to concepts in order for them to be used by the mind via the faculty of judgement, and to determine what the categories themselves are, and what role each plays in their specific area of cognition. You'll know quite a bit about these categories anyway - they are now part of philosophy's general idiomatic structure (a priori, a posteriori, analytic, synthetic, noumena, phenomena, etc).
35) Jean Piaget's works
Comment: It's hard to come by in one simple fait accompli swoop - you have to lots of digging to read, but it's essential stuff. This should be taken as way more than mere cognitive development: It's great epistemology too.
36) William Blake collected works
Comment: There are several versions of this. Make sure the one you buy includes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and the Marriage of Heaven & Hell. The Clod and the Pebble is probably my favourite of the short poems - it's about the superiority of selfless love over selfish love.
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
37) Leibniz' Philosophical Writings
Comment: In Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God we find one of the greatest ideas ever - his "Best of all possible worlds". A deep thinker, and like the selected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a great compilation to dip into when you're in quiet solitude and have time to think. Like Jung's works, Leibniz is probably one part reading and three parts stopping and thinking about what you've just read.
38) Aesop's Fables
Comment: The influence of this book on the world is astounding. There's so much wisdom for young minds to distil from these brilliant fables. This is where we get so many of the dictums in common parlance, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Tortoise and the Hare, Sour Grapes, The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg, and so on. Every child should devour this stuff.
39) Areopagitica - John Milton
Comment: An essential work, and the best book ever on free speech and freedom of expression. Milton lays down the edict about the necessity of having a free press, the liberty to not be silenced or censored, and the wisdom that people who try to impede the freedom of expression in others harm themselves too, because they rob themselves of the ability to hear and think. That observation alone is one of the most profound and perceptive in the history of prose. Mill's On Liberty is worth reading too.
40) The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Comment: A deep and compelling novel about a love affair that gets stopped in its tracks by a promise to God, where questions of depth of love, sacrifice, loss, hate, cruelty, suffering and faith abound. Without wishing to give too much away, Bendrix's moment of realisation “I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.” is worth an essay in itself.
41) Principia - Isaac Newton
Comment: The foundation of classical mechanics and gravity - what's not to love?
42) Howards End - E.M Forster
Comment: This is powerful and reflective work, that explores the depths of love, friendship, social convention, familial differences, vulgarity within social classes, told within the juxtaposition all the three significant stratified classes of Edwardian England. There's a great subtext here too about the banalities associated with love of money, and the liberation of art and mind.
43) Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
Comment: Wonderful book about escaping the thrall of sin and finding a whole new world.
44) Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
Comment: As gripping as many great works of fiction. Although I think the underlying premise about black holes is wrong, as one of my books will explain – I have a hunch that they don’t exist at all in the way are conceived, and are really just reality being rinsed out in the mathematical wash of dark matter, which is also a feature of our conscious cognition. My multi-lens theory of reality theory predicts that difficult counterintuitive things like black holes, infinities and singularities are examples of us being locked into limited physical perceptions by virtue of our being physical agents. Here’s a blog on it
45) Richard Dawkins best works on biology - The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow
Comment: Absolutely terrible philosopher, and he’s utterly daft when talking about religious faith. But few write more beautifully about evolution than Dawkins – he really does justice to the beauty of biology and diversity in the animal kingdom.
46) The Evolution of Everything & The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley
Comment: In my opinion, these are two of the most entertaining books in recent years. In The Rational Optimist, Ridley lays out the wonders of modern human achievement, and in Evolution of Everything he develops the case that bottom-up evolution rather than top-down design is the main driving force that has shaped much of our culture, technology and society, and is shaping our future. His central argument in both books is spot on: that change in technology, language, morality and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual and spontaneous, and that much of the success of the human world is the result of local human action, not of centrally planned human design; it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the top down organisations of a few.
47) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Comment: Joyce at his most accessible: a terrific account of challenging and leaving behind the dogmas and uncritical cultural thralls into which one is born, or by which one is seduced, and parting company with one's roots for a life of self-determination and pursuing one's own inner-self and creative talents.
48) Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Comment: Amusing, clever and insightful. I find it better in small doses than lengthy readings. It's even better if you read it aloud.
49) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Comment: This isn’t as beautifully written as some of the literary classics I’ve loved and omitted from this list. But its central message – that all is contained within, in potentia - is one so alluring to me, and so important to my own deliberations, that I think it’s a must read. My inner conflict about whether to include this is, of course, part of the book’s quintessence, and maybe in dealing with this duality, I slightly edged towards the book’s inclusion.
50) Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Comment: Tremendous novel, full of providence, and perhaps the best explicator of Byron’s great observation that “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt in solitude, where we are least alone”.
51) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Comment: I've known a few ladies in my life who were like Emma Bovary - ruined by their imagination and sense of adventure when it isn't anchored to ethical discipline. It's not a novel I especially like, but I greatly admire it, which I guess is, in itself, a kind of liking. Flaubert does, at least, know the cheat of a degenerate mind, and exposes it with depth of imagination.
52) Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Comment: Hardy’s such a good writer, and such a good storyteller, and this is probably him at his best – the tale of Bathsheba, who becomes more likeable as the novel progresses, as she is able to learn about self-determination from her experiences with her three suitors. The novel is packed with great lines, and profound insights about the talents and worth of women, and how we should abhor societies and cultural practices that expect mere compliance and temperance. Most of Hardy's works are worth reading.
53) Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Comment: Masterly creation, superb embedded narrative, but such a real tragedy of a tale too. Mary tells an even better Prometheus tale than Percy, and the central message is always the same. Today we are still stealing fire, and bringing about our doom while expecting too much from our creations. I have a particular fondness for epistolaries too.
54) Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
Comment: Classic adventure full of biting satire, sardonically disapproving of dry English customs and even drier politics. This mordantly captures the many silly things that divide humans – it prefigures Freud’s narcissism of small differences – and recognises that the good we do for each other by mutual cooperation far surpasses the good we try to do in politics.
55) Animal Farm - George Orwell
Comment: Orwell’s best book, I think. Orwell wasn’t as witty as Aldous Huxley, but this amuses me more than 1984, even though the extremities are nothing to find funny. Ironically, the animals seem so much more human than the actual humans in 1984.
56) The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Comment: Tremendously eerie. Whether the ghosts are real or whether the governess is mad isn’t really the main debate in my view. It’s the apprehension of both that always tells the greater story.
57) The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
Comment: I haven't read much modern fiction, but this is one for which I made an exception, as the film is so good. The book is terrific, and has so much great Lecter dialogue not in the film.
58) - Games People Play - Eric Berne
Comment: The best book ever on transactional analysis. Berne explores units of social interaction (what he calls 'strokes' - how we revert to adult and child modes with ease) and conveys the psychology in the form of social games. Once you've read this, you'll never see your social interactions in the same way again.
59) The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Comment: Worth the purchase price for the fence painting scene alone. I don't think all the storytelling is exhilarating, but it's a must-read, especially when you are young enough to be edified by coming-of-age narratives.
60) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Comment: I don't love its heart, but I love its wit - full of brilliant aphorisms and clever wordplay.
61) Philosophical Investigations - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Comment: Tractatus was a load of tosh. Thankfully Wittgenstein rescued things with Philosophical Investigations - a book that showed he'd thought through his life's work much more meticulously. Private inner experiences, language games - pretty much all the best insights you associate with Wittgenstein are here.
62) The Trial - Franz Kafka
Comment: Another work that we in the modern age hope isn't too prescient. A scary prospect that is, sadly, in some countries, a reality.
63) Look Back in Anger - John Osborne
Comment: Jimmy Porter is one of the great characters in playwriting. Cerebral and angry often makes a wicked drama.
64) The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Comment: His most explicitly Christian novel. A deep and brilliant read, in which goodness and beauty is seen through a saintly character called Prince Myshkin. He is the archetypal meek person that Christ describes in conveying who will inherit the earth, and the wise and pious person the world sees as a fool. Prince Myshkin isn't an idiot in the common sense of the word, of course, but he is portrayed as safe and innocent, which purports to make him someone the world ridicules and ostracises. How myopic they are….and still are!
65) The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse
Comment: This is the best one, but pretty much all the Jeeves and Wooster books are fabulous.
66) 1984 – George Orwell
Comment: Orwell’s abiding misgivings towards the power of authority and the creeping control of the state seem more relevant with every passing decade. The quality of this work isn’t just in its prescience, it’s in how these themes have grown a life of their own – big brother, doublethink, newspeak – and few have been better at excoriating the machinations of undeserved power than Orwell.
67) Candide - Voltaire
Comment: Even though it sends up some of the things I hold most dear, it also lambasts many of the things for which I have the gravest distaste, like uncritical ideas and pliant conformity to leadership. As a man who has a faith, but always feels on the periphery of the mainstream, I can laugh alongside Voltaire. Then again, a lot of what Voltaire would probably call rational free-thinking atheism if he were alive today is to me rather like a group of blind people fighting over a magnifying glass.
68) The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Comment: One of the best books ever about faith and suffering. It has whisky and reverence - two of life's best qualities combined.
69) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Comment: The book that got me into literature in my teens - it was the first great literary work that I ever read. I read this because I loved Apocalypse Now. This was my gateway into the world's greatest novels.
70) Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman
Comment: Not just one of the great books on free market economics, and the pitfalls of heavy state interference – but of human behaviour and united consequences of bad policymaking. Milton Friedman is the natural heir to Bastiat.
A very apt quote:
“Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action. At any moment in time, by imposing uniform standards in housing, or nutrition, or clothing, government could undoubtedly improve the level of living of many individuals; by imposing uniform standards in schooling, road construction, or sanitation, central government could undoubtedly improve the level of performance in many local areas and perhaps even on the average of all communities. But in the process, government would replace progress by stagnation, it would substitute uniform mediocrity for the variety essential for that experimentation which can bring tomorrow's laggards above today's mean.”
What this means is, even if the government can improve a situation in the short term, the longer term starvation of competition means it will eventually be a sub-optimal solution
71) Notes From The Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Comment: Brilliant exposition of how bitter and tortured the world can make a soul, but how courting false utopia and irrational idealism is a malady against the insight we possess if we try.
72) Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould
Comment: Excellent book about the limestone quarry called the Burgess Shale, and what we can learn about it in broader aspects of evolution’s history, especially how much of a knife edge so much of it sits, and how relatively minor differences in what Gould perceives as ‘chance’ outcomes would have yielded a very different trajectory.
73) Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Comment: Hilarious and incisive trawl through the adventurous shenanigans and scandalous adventures. I’ll bet they had some great pub nights. At heart though, this doubles up as an intriguing observation of human nature. Never mind its numerous chapters and teeming cast of misfits and scoundrels, the central character is an attractively unbridled young man of fierce temper and unrestrained sexuality who pursues true love through contemporary Britain in a sequence of scandalous and hilarious adventures
74) Oscar Wilde selected works
Comment: For the whole Wilde experience, you need The Picture of Dorian Gray (his only novel, but a good one), then Penguin Plays (which, as the title suggests, contains all his great plays), and last but not least, the Penguin classics version of De Profundis & Other Writings, in which you'll also find The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which is an attempt to embed charitable elements and self-determination into a rotten system, which may be exacerbated by the folk that we don't understand what we are doing to ourselves. I think Wilde is slightly overrated, but even back on his perch he's still one of the world's finest.
75) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
Comment: A quite marvellous book about exploring deeper meaning and patterns in mathematics and logic. Hofstader is on the side of mind as a primacy, and that its potential, like the Extended Phenotype, transcends the apparatus that hosts it. A really terrific book.
76) The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Comment: Masterly account of children in isolation learning profound and harsh lessons about the nature of their own humanity, and that the problems are mostly within not without. This is one of the first novels I would urge parents to give to their teenage children - it will help prepare them for the stark reality of being human, and thrill them while doing so.
77) On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Comment: Maybe not the best read during lockdown, but hugely evocative and full of great accounts.
78) What's So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew - Phillip Yancey
Comment: Apart from C.S Lewis's works, these are the two books I always recommend as introductions to the Christian faith. There are few non-fiction books that would change your life as much as What's So Amazing About Grace?
79) Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Comment: So many good tales, covering all the big human subjects. One to dip in and out of.
80) Surfaces and Essences - Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
Comment: The best book ever about analogies. And given that analogies are much of our human thought, it's a very important book. A tad repetitive, so should be about 10,000 words shorter, but a fantastic read.
81) Confessions - St Augustine
Comment: The first really great deep examination of a Christian soul. It's easy to get diminishing returns if you read it for too long in one session, so my advice is to read it in small sittings.
82) The Imitation of Christ - Thomas Kempis
Comment: Probably the best ever Bible commentary that isn't officially a Bible commentary
83) Herzog - Saul Bellow
Comment: I used to be like Herzog, forever dreaming up letters that I never sent. Saul Bellow does it wonderfully.
84) The Republic - Plato
Comment: I probably will not be inclined to read this again, but everyone should read it once – it’s a monster of a book, with a breadth of consideration about justice, political rule, and it’s a fascinating look at classical Greece. The Allegory of the cave is one of the greatest and most relevant observations in philosophical history, and while the Theory of Forms has come to grief, the ideation behind has planted seeds that are still as relevant as ever.
85) The Machinery of Freedom – David Friedman
Comment: Friedman makes a good case for libertarianism here. Some of the data is so 1970s-centric that it will feel a bit anachronistic today, by the central message is generally good, and there’s lots of good material in there to help people think like an economist, especially around perverse incentives and the ‘seen and unseen’ effects of policy, as per Bastiat’s wisdom.
86) Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
Comment: One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. It’s a kind of determinism in geographical causality – in other words, how geography plays a huge, often seemingly accidental, part in societal progress and retardation of progress.
87) Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Comment: This is the only book in the list that I haven’t yet finished. I’m working my way through it, a few pages a time in small dips. But I’ve read enough to know how useful this book is – and can recommend it on the grounds that it’s obvious this is one of the most important mainstream behavioural science books. The reason for my small dips – and it is a strange one – is that I quite like treating it as I do my daily meals: it’s easy to get diminishing returns if you overload on material like this, especially as most of it is fairly standard wisdom and has been covered in about 50 works that predate it.
88) The Analects - Confucius
Comment: One thing I like about The Analects by Confucius is his observation, highly influential for the time, that harmony doesn’t have to be about a homogenous group - it’s often found in marked differences. Rather like how a musical or vocal ensemble has harmony in variety, society needs a variety of skills and specialities and talents to have harmony. His observation about creating harmony from difference to make the world a better place is both telling and prescient.
89) The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
Comment: Here’s something interesting about profound past insights. Their provenance and therefore their influence can get washed up into a cultural norm, whereby people take it for granted to such an extent that due credit is no longer afforded. The Bible is the most extreme case of this: its most important messages have been so readily absorbed into the world’s socio-cultural thinking that they are just taken for granted and they are crassly dismissed as archaic. They are like a concert audience who sits their enjoying the sounds of the symphony while forgetting that there’s an orchestra on stage. We do this with free trade too: the wisdom of Smith, Ricardo, Hayek, and Coase are so culturally ingrained that people enjoy the scent of their flower while trying to break the stork. I think this is also true about Freud, although obviously to a much lesser extent – we take for granted his observations about the unconscious and about the subset elements of personality as competing forces so readily that we now tend to only think of Freud as the flawed psychoanalyst who wasn’t quite so accurate on religion or sex.
90) Proper Study of Mankind - Isaiah Berlin
Comment: Some very good essays. Probably the highlight is The Hedgehog and the Fox - one of the best pieces of non-fiction. I have a chapter on it in one of my books, which I hope you'll get to read one day.
91) The Prince - Machiavelli
Comment: Classic work outlining how to rule a country, especially assuming the base and incorrigible nature of people. This is a book I wish was satire, but seems to me like it isn't, it's just plain old realism.
92) The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper
Comment: Popper's own Kuhnian paradigm shift, using falsification as a criterion of demarcation to draw a sharp line between those theories that are scientific and those that are unscientific, and arguing that all knowledge is only an approximation to the reality. Of course, we are even hotter on falsifiability these days than Popper was - we have out-Poppered Popper. One caveat though, even through a scientific lens, falsifiability has real limits in its utility - after all, "All Xs are Y" is a generalisation which is falsifiable but near-impossible to verify, and "There is a Z" is a singular proposition that can be verified but it's near-impossible to falsify. Falsifiability, therefore, has better utility in generalisations than in specific singular propositions.
93) The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker
Comment: I found this book so valuable - a really important thesis in my lifetime, showing how, in literature, there are only seven ‘storylines’ in the world, and that to the greatest degree all narratives are really variations of these basic seven storylines. The Seven basic plots, according to Booker, are as follows:
1) Overcoming the Monster
2) Rags to Riches
3) The Quest
4) Voyage and Return
5) Comedy
6) Tragedy
7) Rebirth
One minor criticism. Mr. Booker’s analysis is a little too parsimonious for my liking, despite his subsequently adding two further plot types – ‘Rebellion’ and ‘Mystery’. One glaring and obvious omission is the topic of ‘love’, which although containing the potential to be played out in any of the above storylines, was not itself a primary plot in the view of Booker. Another omission is what is often referred to as ‘character study’ or a ‘psychological study’ of a person’s mind – one which involves cutbacks on the external plot, but instead provides a penetrating incursion into the psyche of an individual – an incursion which is so often presented to us with our own selfhood in mind. But this is still an interesting book, and revealing to anyone who hasn't thought along these lines before.
94) Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Comment: Prescient and brilliant - the text is so incisive. Bradbury probably isn't as intelligent as Aldous Huxley, but I think he's a better writer. Check out his Zen in the Art of Writing too - one of the best books I've read on writing.
95) The Cloud of Unknowing - Unknown
Comment: I find a bit samey to read it in large chunks, but it's wonderful for the occasional dip, and usually uplifting and challenging.
96) Freakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
Comment: Packed full of interesting and surprising stuff. One of the most compelling light-hearted commentaries on society and the unexpected things it throws up. What we find in this, and so many other social science books, is that human behaviour, when measured through a societal and statistical study, yields so many important discoveries that are as interesting as the great stuf we make up for entertainment.
Hope you enjoyed!
