Axar.az presents an article "101 Books And Such" by John Samuel Tieman.

I like making lists. It's harmless fun. A former student, Tiffany, asked about my favorite book. I responded with 101 books and essays and poems and such. They are presented in a rough, though not exact, chronological order.

About my prejudices. I am a retired teacher, an historian as well as a poet. My list is geared toward the humanities. I know little about math and science. Many works are chosen as representative of an entire class of literature or thought. Only one work is given for each author. For the sake of narrowing, these works are largely Western. Almost all were penned over seventy-five years ago. Most I have chosen because they are simply good to read. I have selected some because they are culturally important. But mostly I've just chosen what I like.

1. “The Book Of Job”

2. “Gilgamesh”

3. Aeschylus, “The Oresteia Trilogy”

4. Sappho, “The Poems Of Sappho”

5. Sophocles, “Oedipus The King”

6. Thucydides, “History Of The Peloponnesian War”

7. Plato, “The Republic”

8. Cicero, “Philippics”

9. Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

10. Martial, “The Epigrams”

11. Catullus, “The Poetry Of Catullus”

12. Augustine Of Hippo, “Confessions”

13. “The Song of Roland”

14. “Beowulf”

15. The Pearl Poet, “Sir Gawain And The Green Knight”

16. Francois Villon, “The Poems Of Francois Villon”

17. Marco Polo, “The Travels”

18. “The Little Flowers Of St. Francis”

19. Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica”

20. Moses Maimonides, “Guide For The Perplexed”

21. Dante Alighieri, “The Divine Comedy”

22. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales”

23. Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

24. Desiderius Erasmus: “The Praise of Folly”

25. Thomas More, “Utopia”

26. Martin Luther, “The Ninety-Five Theses”

27. François Rabelais, “Gargantua and Pantagruel”

28. John Calvin, “Institutes of the Christian Religion”

29. Michel de Montaigne, “Essays”

30. Miguel de Cervantes, “Don Quixote”

31. William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy Of MacBeth”

32. Christopher Marlowe, “The Tragical History Of Dr. Faustus”

33. Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan”

34. René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy”

35. John Milton, “Paradise Lost”

36. Blaise Pascal, “Pensées”

37. John Locke, “Of Civil Government”

38. Isaac Newton, “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”

39. Daniel Defoe, “Robinson Crusoe”

40. Samuel Pepys, “The Diary Of Samuel Pepys””

41. Voltaire, “Candide”

42. “Declaration of the Rights of Man And Of The Citizen”

43. Samuel Johnson, “Dictionary”

44. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Emile”

45. Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”

46. Immanuel Kant, “Critique Of Pure Reason”

47. Edward Gibbon, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”

48. James Boswell, “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.”

49. Denis Diderot, “The Encyclopedia”

50. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, “The Federalist Papers”

51. Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration Of Independence”

52. Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France”

53. Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman”

54. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Elements Of The Philosophy of Right”

55. John Henry Newman, “Tract 90”

56. Percy Shelley, “Collected Poetical Works”

57. Fredrick Douglass, “Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass”

58. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Essays”

59. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter”

60. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy In America”

61. John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism”

62. Charles Darwin, “The Origin Of Species”

63. Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

64. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”

65. Herman Melville, “Moby-Dick”

66. Walt Whitman, “Leaves Of Grass”

67. Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”

68. Stendhal, “The Red And The Black”

69. Henrik Ibsen, “Hedda Gabler”

70. Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”

71. Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

72. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Collected Works”

73. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

74. Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation Of Dreams”

75. Anna Freud, “The Ego And The Mechanisms Of Defence”

76. George Bernard Shaw, “Major Barbara”

77. John Dewey, “Democracy and Education”

78. Adolf Hitler, “My Struggle”

79. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”

80. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls Of Black Folks”

81. Fredrick Jackson Turner, "The Significance Of The Frontier In American History"

82. George Orwell, “1984”

83. John Maynard Keynes, “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”

84. Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat”

85. Simone de Beauvoir, “The Second Sex”

86. James Joyce, “Ulysses”

87. Franz Kafka, “The Trial”

88. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl And Other Poems”

89. Erik Erikson, “Young Man Luther”

90. Samuel Beckett, “Waiting For Godot”

91. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “One Day In Life Of Ivan Denisovich”

92. Albert Camus, “The Myth Of Sisyphus And Other Essays”

93. Federico Garcia Lorca, “The House Of Bernada Alba”

94. Betty Friedan, “The Feminine Mystique”

95. Pablo Neruda, “Twenty Love Songs And A Song Of Despair”

96. Thomas Merton, “The Seven Story Mountain”

97. William Butler Yeats, “Collected Poems”

98. Tennessee Wiliams, “A Streetcar Named Desire”

99. T. S. Eliot, “Prufrock And Other Observations”

100. Gabriel García Márquez. “One-Hundred Years Of Solitude”

101. Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The 1619 Project “