I asked Claude for a list of books that everyone should read. After an initial proposal, I updated the following list with some of the books that I would like to read. I’ll try to include links to my notes.

If you have any recommendations, please get in touch

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh — Anonymous (c. 2100 BC). The oldest surviving great story: a king’s search for immortality and the meaning of friendship and loss.
2. The Iliad — Homer. Achilles’ rage during the Trojan War; a meditation on glory, honour, and the cost of violence.
3. The Odyssey — Homer. Odysseus’s ten-year journey home, the model for every adventure story since.
4. Oedipus Rex — Sophocles. The Greek tragedy of a man who cannot escape fate or the truth about himself.
5. The Histories — Herodotus. The first work of history: the Greco-Persian Wars, full of travel, myth and curiosity.
6. The Republic — Plato. Socratic dialogues on justice, the ideal state and the famous allegory of the cave.
7. Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle. A practical guide to virtue, character and what it means to live well.
8. The Art of War — Sun Tzu. Concise ancient Chinese strategy, still read in business and politics.
9. Tao Te Ching — Laozi. Short, paradoxical verses on simplicity, balance and flowing with nature.
10. The Analects — Confucius. Sayings on ethics, family, government and self-cultivation that shaped East Asia.
11. The Bhagavad Gita — Anonymous. A warrior’s dialogue with Krishna on duty, action and the nature of the self.
12. Meditations — Marcus Aurelius. A Roman emperor’s private Stoic notes on calm, duty and mortality.
13. The Aeneid — Virgil. Rome’s founding epic, following Aeneas from the ruins of Troy to Italy.
14. Confessions — Saint Augustine. The first great autobiography: a restless soul’s search for meaning.
15. One Thousand and One Nights — Anonymous. Scheherazade’s nested tales, including Sinbad and Aladdin.
16. The Tale of Genji — Murasaki Shikibu. Often called the first novel; court life and love in Heian Japan.
17. The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri. A journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, rich in imagery and ideas.
18. The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer. Pilgrims swap bawdy, pious and funny stories — a portrait of medieval England.
19. The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli. A blunt handbook on how to gain and keep power.
20. Essays — Michel de Montaigne. The birth of the personal essay: curious, honest reflections on being human.
21. Novum Organum — Francis Bacon. A call to build knowledge on observation and experiment; the blueprint of the scientific method.
22. Hamlet — William Shakespeare. The prince of indecision, grief and revenge — the most quoted play ever written.
23. King Lear — William Shakespeare. An ageing king divides his kingdom and loses everything; tragedy at its most devastating.
24. Discourse on the Method — René Descartes. “I think, therefore I am”: the starting point of modern philosophy and scientific doubt.
25. Paradise Lost — John Milton. The epic retelling of the Fall, with Satan as its unforgettable antihero.
26. Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift. A voyage satire that skewers politics, science and human pride.
27. Candide — Voltaire. A fast, savage satire of blind optimism: “we must cultivate our garden."
28. The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith. The foundation of modern economics and the idea of the invisible hand.
29. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy in a witty comedy of manners and misjudgment.
30. Frankenstein — Mary Shelley. The first science-fiction novel: a creator, his creature and responsibility.
31. Faust — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A scholar sells his soul for knowledge and experience.
32. Democracy in America — Alexis de Tocqueville. A French aristocrat’s sharp analysis of democracy’s strengths and dangers.
33. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo. Redemption, justice and revolution through the life of Jean Valjean.
34. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë. An orphaned governess insists on her independence and dignity.
35. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë. A wild, obsessive love that poisons two generations on the Yorkshire moors.
36. Moby-Dick — Herman Melville. Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for the white whale; an epic about everything.
37. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert. A provincial wife’s romantic dreams collide with dull reality.
38. Walden — Henry David Thoreau. Two years of simple living in the woods, and what they teach about living deliberately.
39. On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin. The theory of evolution by natural selection, which changed how we see life.
40. On Liberty — John Stuart Mill. The classic defence of free speech and individual freedom against the “tyranny of the majority.”
41. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens. Pip’s rise from orphan to gentleman, and the lessons of ambition and loyalty.
42. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky. A student commits murder and is consumed by guilt.
43. The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger. Holden Caulfield’s lost weekend in New York; the classic voice of teenage alienation.
44. The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas. A man wrongly imprisoned escapes, finds a fortune and takes elaborate revenge.
45. Middlemarch — George Eliot. A whole English town’s ambitions and failures; perhaps the greatest English novel.
46. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume. A sceptic’s clear-eyed look at what we can really know, from cause and effect to miracles.
47. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott — Walter Scott. The great novelist’s candid diary of his last years, written as he fought to pay off crushing debts.
48. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain. A boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi confront a racist society.
49. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche. A poetic-philosophical work on values, the “Übermensch”, and self-overcoming.
50. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad. A journey up the Congo River into the brutality of colonialism.
51. The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka. A salesman wakes up as a giant insect; alienation in 70 pages.
52. In Search of Lost Time — Marcel Proust. Memory, time and desire, triggered by a madeleine.
53. Ulysses — James Joyce. One day in Dublin, told with radical experimentation; the peak of modernism.
54. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wealth, longing and the hollow American Dream in the Jazz Age.
55. Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf. A single day in London flowing through the minds of its characters.
56. The Trial — Franz Kafka. A man is arrested and prosecuted without ever learning the crime.
57. All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarque. The horror of WWI through a young German soldier.
58. A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf. The classic essay on women, money and creative freedom.
59. The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner. The decline of a Southern family told through fractured voices.
60. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley. A future controlled by pleasure, conditioning and comfort.
61. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck. A family flees the Dust Bowl in search of dignity and work.
62. Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston. A Black woman’s journey to self-discovery in the American South.
63. The Stranger — Albert Camus. An indifferent man, a killing on a beach, and the absurdity of existence.
64. The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. A children’s fable that says the most important things are invisible.
65. Ficciones — Jorge Luis Borges. Labyrinths, infinite libraries and mirrors: short stories that bend reality.
66. The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank. A teenager’s account of hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.
67. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell. Big Brother, surveillance and the destruction of truth.
68. Animal Farm — George Orwell. A farmyard revolution that turns into tyranny; a perfect political allegory.
69. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl. A psychiatrist’s lessons from the concentration camps on finding purpose.
70. The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir. The founding text of modern feminism: “One is not born, but becomes, a woman.”
71. Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison. A Black man’s search for identity in a society that refuses to see him.
72. The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway. An ageing fisherman’s epic struggle with a giant marlin.
73. Lord of the Flies — William Golding. Stranded schoolboys descend into savagery.
74. The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt. How Nazism and Stalinism arose, and how terror and propaganda destroy free societies.
75. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe. An Igbo leader’s world collapses under colonialism; the key African novel.
76. The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs. A passionate attack on top-down planning and a case for lively, mixed streets.
77. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee. Racial injustice in the American South seen through a child’s eyes.
78. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller. The absurd logic of war and bureaucracy, darkly hilarious.
79. Silent Spring — Rachel Carson. The exposé of pesticide damage that launched the modern environmental movement.
80. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn. How science really advances, and where the idea of a “paradigm shift” came from.
81. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin. Two burning, beautifully written essays on race and faith in America.
82. The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X and Alex Haley. A life of crime, prison, faith and political awakening; one of the great American memoirs.
83. The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov. The Devil visits Soviet Moscow in a wild satire.
84. Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut. A soldier unstuck in time relives the bombing of Dresden.
85. Small Is Beautiful — E.F. Schumacher. Economics “as if people mattered”: a case for human-scale work, technology and living.
86. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino. Marco Polo describes imaginary cities to Kublai Khan; a poetic meditation.
87. The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins. Evolution explained from the gene’s point of view.
88. Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison. A man’s search for family roots and identity.
89. The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera. Love, freedom and politics in Prague after 1968.
90. The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood. A theocratic regime strips women of every right.
91. A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking. Black holes, the Big Bang and the nature of time, explained for everyone.
92. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro. An English butler looks back on a life of duty and missed chances.
93. Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond. Why some societies came to dominate others, explained by geography.
94. The Road — Cormac McCarthy. A father and son cross a burned world; love at the end of everything.
95. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman. The mind’s two systems and the biases that shape decisions.
96. My Brilliant Friend — Elena Ferrante. A lifelong friendship between two girls in postwar Naples.
97. Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari. A sweeping history of humankind from the Stone Age to today.
98. Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Love, race and identity between Nigeria, the US and the UK.
99. Educated — Tara Westover. A memoir of growing up in an isolated survivalist family and finding freedom through learning.
100. Factfulness — Hans Rosling. Data-driven proof that the world is better than we think, and why we get it wrong.