Benjamin McEvoy

Essays on writing, reading, and life

An Intellectually Ambitious 5-Year Reading Program for You

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My aim with Hardcore Literature is to take you through our vast literary history. Reading and living the great books together. Not with a view to change the world, but to change ourselves for the better.

I’m working on long-form lectures and interactive guides to help you become more well-read and develop a more robust character. We’re talking about lecture series on Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Homer, Aristotle, and much more. 

I’m trying to replicate what it’s like to go wide and deep in an Oxford University Literature Programme. Except better. Because we’re not dragging authors out of their time or reading them through the latest fad political lens. And we’re including everything – works from as many cultures and times and genres as possible. Envision an Arts and Humanities Course that is eminently human.

All of this takes a lot of time, and I’ll be looking to hire and work with a team soon. But, in the meantime, if you’d like to get started with your own self-directed reading program, and seeing as people often ask me for a list of books I think they should read, I’ll attempt to offer you something inconclusive but ambitious here.

A few ideas for tackling this list:

  1. Experiment with following a relatively chronological order. The great books build upon those that came before it. Reading books closer to our current age is kind of like jumping into a conversation about which you know little or nothing. Aristotle is wonderful. But he’s even better when you’ve read some Plato first. 
  2. Follow your own personal interests. There are perhaps 100 books that are worth rereading endlessly for the rest of your life, but they differ from person to person. One might be more drawn to Darwin than Shakespeare. This list offers you the best chance of finding the books that are your unique touchstones of the soul.
  3. This is not a reading challenge that rewards quantity. Don’t try to tick as many of these books off the list as quickly as possible. You don’t speed-read the great books. You live them. If you only read a handful of these great works each year, consider that a success. Seek to understand these works and get as much as possible out of them.

Parting advice before you embark on your journey:

  • Seek difficulty.
  • Try to read books that are over your head.
  • Connect what you read to everything else you’ve read and the conversations you have in day-to-day life.
  • Treat these works like a mirror held up to your self and to nature.

And a favour:

Let me know where you’d like me to focus for developing Hardcore Literature content. I’m currently working on guides to Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Aristotle, along with guides to reading literature in general that offers a smorgasbord of short stories, poems, and plays, whilst reading a couple of big works over the long-term. But let me know what you’d specifically like to see, and where your interest lies because that helps me keep a finger on the pulse of what people are finding valuable.

About this reading list:

I’ve broken it down into a 3-5 year prospective reading program, so those who are ambitious might wish to follow that. This program and the books chosen are heavily influenced by the writings of Mortimer Adler (whose How to Read a Book is indispensable to any intellectual’s thinking) and Harold Bloom, along with inspiration taken from the St. John’s College liberal arts program. Enjoy. All of these books are freely and readily available from Amazon Books here.

If you find this reading list overwhelming (which you should, but also you most intrepid readers should have no problem making a good go of it), then I’ve included my personal favourite books at the end of the list, should you need some direction for where to start.

And a caveat: If you do embark on this reading list, I personally wouldn’t wait to read Shakespeare. I’d space his works out across the entirety of the program. I’d also invest a couple of good poetry anthologies and read from them consistently.

First Year Reading List:

  • Homer:
    • The Iliad 
    • The Odyssey
  • Aeschylus:
    • Prometheus Bound
    • Agamemnon 
    • The Eumenides 
    • The Libation Bearers
  • Euripides:
    • Hippolytus
    • Bacchae 
  • Sophocles:
    • Oedipus the King
    • The Theban Plays
    • Antigone 
  • Aristophanes:
    • Clouds
    • Frogs
    • Lysistrata 
    • The Assemblywomen
  • Plato:
    • The Republic
    • The Symposium
    • Meno
    • The Apology
  • Herodotus:
    • The History
  • Thucydides:
    • The History of the Peloponnesian War
  • Aristotle:
    • Politics
    • Ethics
    • Metaphysics
    • de Anima
    • Rhetoric
    • Poetics
  • Plutarch:
    • The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
  • Epictetus:
    • Discourses 
  • The Old Testament

Second Year Reading List:

  • Marcus Aurelius:
    • Meditations
  • Cicero:
    • The Laws
    • The Republic
  • Virgil:
    • Aeneid
  • Horace:
    • Odes
    • Poetics
    • Satires
  • Ovid:
    • Metamorphoses 
  • Saint Augustine:
    • Confessions
    • City of God
  • Saint Thomas Aquinas:
    • Treatises 
  • Dante:
    • The Divine Comedy
  • Chaucer:
    • Canterbury Tales
    • Troilus and Criseyde 
  • Machiavelli:
    • The Prince
  • Descartes:
    • Discourse
  • The New Testament

Third Year Reading List:

  • Shakespeare:
    • Everything
  • Cervantes:
    • Don Quixote 
  • Montaigne:
    • Essays
  • Thomas Hobbe:
    • Leviathan
  •  Erasmus:
    • Praise of Folly
  • Milton:
    • Paradise Lost
    • Areopagitica 
  • Moliere:
    • The Misanthrope
    • The School for Wives
    • Tartuff 
  • Newton:
    • Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
  • John Locke:
    • Essays
  • David Hume:
    • Enquiry 
  • Voltaire:
    • Candide
  • Samuel Richardson:
    • Clarissa 
  • Daniel Defoe:
    • Robinson Crusoe

Fourth Year Reading List:

  • Rousseau:
    • The Social Contract
  • Adam Smith:
    • Wealth of Nations
  • Edward Gibbon:
    • The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  • Kant:
    • Critiques 
  • Mill:
    • On Liberty
    • Utilitarianism 
  • Kierkegaard:
    • Fear and Trembling
  • Nietzsche:
    • Beyond Good and Evil
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    • The Birth of Tragedy
  • Goethe:
    • Faust
  • Balzac:
    • Cousin Bette
  • Jane Austen:
    • Pride and Prejudice
  • George Eliot:
    • Middlemarch
  • Charles Dickens:
    • Great Expectations
    • Bleak House
  • Herman Melville:
    • Moby Dick
  • Charles Darwin:
    • Origin of Species
  • Karl Marx:
    • Das Kapital
    • Manifesto (with Engels)

Fifth Year Reading List:

  • Tolstoy:
    • Anna Karenina
    • War and Peace
  • Dostoyevsky:
    • Crime and Punishment
    • The Brothers Karamazov
  • Ibsen:
    • A Doll’s House
    • Hedda Gabler 
  • William James:
    • The Principles of Psychology
  • Freud:
    • Selected Works
  • John Dewey:
    • Experience and Education
  • Einstein:
    • Relativity
  • Sir George Frazer:
    • The Golden Bough
  • Joseph Conrad:
    • Heart of Darkness
  • Anton Chekhov
    • Selected Short Stories
    • Uncle Vanya
  • Proust:
    • In Remembrance of Things Past
  • T.S. Eliot
    • The Waste Land
  • Hemingway:
    • The Old Man and the Sea
  • Faulkner:
    • As I Lay Dying

What are Benjamin McEvoy’s favourite books?

My favourite books are always changing, though there are certainly a few volumes that have kept me company over the years, reflecting and directing the course of my life and character. These are the books I would take to a desert island with me and reread constantly:

If I truly were on a desert island, I should think to bring an anthology of poetry, a tabletop book of art, all of Dickens’ novels, and the short stories of Guy de Maupassant too.

Comments

  1. Mike Stonza says

    Great list. I’m actually reading list of “The Thousand Good Books” by John Senior.

    • Ben McEvoy says

      Thanks, Mike! Very nice. That’s a solid list there too, constructed in the same vein!