Introduction #
Joseph Brodsky List of 83 Books #
- Bhagavad Gita
- Mahabharata
- Gilgamesh
- The Old Testament
- Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
- Herodotus: Histories
- Sophocles: Plays
- Aeschylus: Plays
- Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)
- Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
- Plato: Dialogues
- Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima
- Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]
- Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics
- Tacitus: Annals
- Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores
- The New Testament
- Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
- Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
- Catullus: Poems
- Horace: Poems
- Epictetus: Discourses
- Aristophanes: Plays
- Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals
- Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica
- Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers
- Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Plotinus: The Enneads
- Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History
- Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy
- Pliny the Younger: Letters
- Byzantine verse romances
- Heraclitus: Fragments
- St. Augustine: Confessions
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
- St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers
- Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince
- Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)
- Franco Sacchetti: Novelle
- Icelandic sagas
- William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)
- François Rabelais
- Francis Bacon
- Martin Luther: Selected Works
- John Calvin: Institutio Christianae religionis
- Michel de Montaigne: Essays
- Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
- René Descartes: Discourses
- Song of Roland
- Beowulf
- Benvenuto Cellini
- Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams
- Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan
- Blaise Pascal: Pensées
- John Milton: Paradise Lost
- John Donne
- Andrew Marvell
- George Herbert
- Richard Crashaw
- Baruch Spinoza: Treatises
- Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
- Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
- Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses
- Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters
- John Locke: Second Treatise on Government
- Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics
- David Hume: Everything
- The Federalist Papers
- Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
- Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments
- Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey
- Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
- Eric Auerbach: Mimesis
- William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico
- Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude
- Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies
- Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power ``
Other Great Texts #
- Hemmingway: Old Man and The Sea
Resources #
Blinderman, I. (2016, November 15). Joseph Brodsky’s List of 83 Books You Should Read to Have an Intelligent Conversation. Open Culture. https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/joseph-brodskys-reading-list-for-having-an-intelligent-conversation.html
Haven, C. (n.d.). Joseph Brodsky’s reading list “to have a basic conversation” – plus the shorter one he gave to me. The Book Haven. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2013/11/joseph-brodskys-reading-list-to-have-a-basic-conversation-plus-the-shorter-one-he-gave-to-me/