The Essential Classics Reading List: 2200 hours worth of classic literature


Welcome to my version of the ultimate classic lit reading list (in chronological order)!

I’m not saying read these books in this order. Or in any order at all. Or in fact these specific books. But I think this a handy reference to have, so use it as you will. The time (which is in hours) is the time it takes to read the unabridged audiobook or, if it’s a poet listed, the minimum amount of time I’d spend reading their work, based on the lengths of audiobook collections of their poems. Using these times, the list would take about 2200 hours to read through. I put How to Read Literature Like a Professor on top because I personally want to read it before starting on the main list.

Note: If you see something you don’t want on the list or you think there’s something missing, remember this list is biased. I added or removed as I saw fit, using recommendations from the r/books community. Customize it for your own reading adventure. (I got a lot of comments on the OP criticizing my “reading speed” and preference in books. I tried to make the list as well-rounded and diverse as I could.)

THE LIST:

* How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster (2003) - 9:35

* Epic of Gilgamesh, n/a (c. 2100 BCE) - 4:05

* The Iliad, Homer (c. 750 BCE) - 14:00

* The Odyssey, Homer (c. 725 BCE) - 13:00

* Republic, Plato (c. 380 BCE) - 12:00

* Tao Te Ching, Laozi (c. 300 BCE) - 2:00

* The Arabian Nights, Richard F. Burton (1886, originating c. 1300) - 11:00

* Lu You (1125-1210) - 5:00

* Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong (c. 1300 AD) - 25:00 (?)

* The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1320) - 14:38

* The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli (1532) - 4:34

* Faerie Queen, Edmund Spenser (1590) - 33:10

* Journey to the West, Wu Cheng'en (c. 1592) - 10:00 (?)

* Hamlet, William Shakespeare (1609) - 3:00

* Shakespeare's Sonnets, William Shakespeare (1609) - 2:20

* Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (1615) - 36:09

* A Discourse on Method: Meditations on the First Philosophy: Principles of Philosophy, René Descartes (1637) - 
8:00

* Paradise Lost, John Milton (1667) - 9:04

* Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) - 5:00

* Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe (1719) - 10:55

* Candide, Voltaire (1759) - 3:45

* Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1775) - 4:19

* Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813) - 14:12

* Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818) - 8:35

* Don Juan, Lord Byron (1819) - 15:05

* John Keats (1795-1821) - 2:52

* William Blake (1757-1827) - 3:00

* The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni (1827) - 25:00

* Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (1837) - 17:01

* Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol (1842) - 5:00

* The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (1845) - 52:44

* Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847) - 21:47

* Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (1847) - 14:48

* Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) - 3:00

* Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851) - 21:20

* Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) - 18:10

* Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1854) - 10:08

* Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1856) - 13:46

* A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1859) - 14:18

* On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859) - 5:53

* Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev (1862) - 9:16

* Les Miserables, Victor Hugo (1862) - 57:41

* Notes From the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1864) - 4:21

* War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (1867) - 61:08

* Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1869) - 19:00

* Middlemarch, George Eliot (1871) - 31:48

* Around The World In Eighty Days, Jules Verne (1872) - 7:51

* Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1873) - 36:08

* Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy (1874) - 15:47

* Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880) - 37:08

* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) - 3:00

* Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884) - 10:12

* Flatland, Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884) - 3:57

* Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) - 1:00

* The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890) - 6:11

* Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) - 1:00

* The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle (1892) - 13:29

* The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling (1894) - 3:30

* Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899) - 4:17

* Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov (1900) - 2:21

* Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) - 25:00

* Kim, Rudyard Kipling (1901) - 12:00

* The Jungle, Upton Sinclair (1906) - 13:20

* In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (1908) - 21:35, 21:26, 17:31, 19:44, 25:33, 23:11, 28:51, 26:16, 
19:53, 13:20, 18:12

* Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery (1908) - 9:22

* The Wind In the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (1908) - 6:47

* The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot (1922) - 00:30

* Ulysses, James Joyce (1922) - 27:16

* The Trial, Franz Kafka (1925) - 7:45

* The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) - 5:00

* The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1926) - 7:50

* A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929) - 5:01

* All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque (1929) - 6:55

* As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (1930) - 6:55

* Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932) - 8:05

* Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (1936) - 49:07

* Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (1937) - 3:00

* Anthem, Ayn Rand (1938) - 6:30

* Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939) - 21:05

* Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo (1939) - 7:42

* W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) - 1:38

* Native Son, Richard Wright (1940) - 17:50

* The Stranger, Albert Camus (1942) - 3:27

* Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector (1943) - 6:18

* A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (1943) - 14:55

* 1984, George Orwell (1949) - 11:26

* The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (1951) - 1:06

* East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1952) - 25:25

* The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952) - 2:30

* Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953) - 5:01

* Lord of the Rings trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien (1954) - 53:58

* Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954) - 6:35

* The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima (1954) - 5:00

* Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955) - 11:32

* I Can Jump Puddles, Alan Marshall (1955) - 2:41

* On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957) - 11:09

* Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1957) - 63:00

* Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1958) - 6:30

* Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes (1959) - 8:58

* To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960) - 12:17

* Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961) - 20:01

* Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls (1961) - 6:45

* E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) - 1:00

* A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle (1962) - 6:30

* One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey (1962) - 3:19

* Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar (1963) - 8:43

* The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963) - 7:24

* Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut (1963) - 7:11

* Dune, Frank Herbert (1965) - 21:08

* The Magus, John Fowles (1965) - 26:19

* Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih (1966) - 5:00

* Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1966) - 6:00

* Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag (1966) - 11:00

* The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) - 16:51

* One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (1967) - 14:04

* Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion (1968) - 6:57

* Anne Sexton (1928-1974) - 1:00

* Shogun, James Clavell (1975) - 53:32

* Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison (1977) - 15:28

* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,  Douglas Adams (1979) - 5:51

* Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981) - 24:34

* The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985) - 11:00

* Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985) - 11:57

* Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (1985) - 13:10

* It, Stephen King (1986) - 44:57

* Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1987) - 12:12

* A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988) - 6:00

* The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho (1988) - 4:00

* The Eye of the World (book one of The Wheel of Time series), Robert Jordan (1990) - 29:58

* Cloudstreet, Tim Winton (1991) - 12:50

* Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning (1992) - 9:27

* Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño (1996) - 4:43

* Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (1996) - 56:19

* Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh, Mo Yan (2000) - 5:39

* The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003) - 12:06

* No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy (2005) - 7:33

* Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman (2007) - 7:43

* 1Q84, Haruki Murakami (2010) - 46:50

* Maya Angelou (1928-2014) - 2:00

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