I wasn’t going to make a best books list for philosophy or for classics, but then I received a comment on my last best books list (religion and Christianity) that got me thinking. Philosophy books and classics—genres that I have read a lot of—were included in the very first best books list that I did, the comprehensive one that goes for thousands of titles down the main page. But, since they’re basically the only sub-categories that I didn’t then parse out, I thought it would be easiest for browsers to have them as separate lists.

(I’ve also decided, thanks in part to my writers’ group—full of short story writers who are always chatting about short fiction—that I am going to make a list for short stories and short story collections. I’ll post that in the next few days, and I can’t imagine there will be any more, with the exception of movies, but that’s not a best books list.)

There’s not too much to say about these two lists. Just remember, I am not recommending these books: they are lists compiled from other online lists of books in the genre. I would like to read them, and as I do, you can find links to the reviews by clicking on those titles.

This philosophy list got really long, really quick. It’s so long that I can’t imagine I’ll even get through them all. (I will have some fun times trying, however.) Some of the books are about philosophy, like histories of philosophy, and a handful are anthologies. There are even some novels that popped up on here, and there are several titles that, should you know the genre, you might think, “That’s not even philosophy.” Well, when I get there, hopefully it’ll at least be an interesting read. I was looking for the traditional philosophy books, yes, but I was also looking for more. And I included books from many branches of philosophy, like ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, logic, etc, including practical and modern philosophy. I fear some titles from religion and psychology might have slipped in there. There are most definitely misspellings, repeats, and no end of non-italicizing.

PHILOSOPHY

• A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
• Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder
• Philosophy As a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot
• Aristotle’s Way, Edith Hall
• What Does It All Mean?, Thomas Nagel
• The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Julian Baggini
• Think, Simon Blackburn
• The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer
• Justice, Michael Sandel
• Causing Death and Saving Lives, Jonathan Glover
• The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits
• The Last Days of Socrates, Plato
• Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
• Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, Epictetus
• Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
• Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
• Three Philosophical Dialogues, Anselm of Canterbury
• Selected Writings, Thomas Aquinas
• Meditation on First Philosophy, Renee Descartes
• Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
• The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Republic, Plato
• Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
• World As Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer
• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
• Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Being and Nothing, Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne
• The Dialogues of Plato
• Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
• The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
• A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume
• Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
• The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
• The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Four Agreements, Ruiz and Mills
• The Book of Joy, Dalai Lama and Tutu
• The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
• The Path, Puett and Gross-Loh
• How to Live, Sarah Bakewell
• The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan W. Watts
• The Art of Strategy, Dixit and Nalebuff
• Flow, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi
• Five Dialogues, Plato
• Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi
• An Eternal Golden Braid, Godel, Escher and Bach
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
• The Big Picture, Sean Carroll
• Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
• The Moral Sayings, Publius Syrus
• Fragments, Heraclitus
• Nature and Selected Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer
• The Essential Epicurus, Epicurus
• On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
• Ethics, Benedict de Spinoza
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
• Everything Is F*cked, Mark Manson
• The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
• Reasons and Persons, David Parfit
• The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
• On Liberty, John Mill
• The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant
• Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant
• Logic Primer, Allan and Hand
• Logic, Wilfrid Hodges
• Paradoxes, R.M. Sainsbury
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius
• Analects, Confucius
• Early Greek Philosophy, Heraclitus
• Pensees, Blaise Pascal
• The Gay Science, Friedrich Neitzsche
• 300 Arguments, Sarah Manguso
• Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
• Factfulness, Hans Rosling
• The Veil of Isis, Pierre Hadot
• The Way and the Word, Lloyd and Sivin
• The Lost Age of Reason, Jonardon Ganeri
• Atoms and Alchemy, William Newman
• Native Pragmatism, Scott L. Pratt
• Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett
• Principles of Psychology, William James
• Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Socrates in Love, Armand D’Angor
• The Complete Philosophy Files, Stephen Law
• Basic Writings, Chuang Tzu
• Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
• Diaspora, Greg Egan
• Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
• Early Writings, Karl Marx
• A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick
• If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, G.A. Cohen
• Violence and the Word, Robert Cover
• The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
• Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin
• A Guide to the Good Life, Robert B. Irvine
• Existentialism, David Cooper
• Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Existentialist Reader, Paul S. MacDonald
• Phenemology of Spirit, Hegel
• The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
• Understanding Philosophy of Science, James Ladyman
• Candide, Voltaire
• A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D.M. Armstrong
• Varieties of Meaning, Ruth Garrett Millikan
• A Survey of Metaphysics, E.J. Lowe
• Art, Clive Bell
• Aesthetics, Monroe Beardsley
• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• Moby Dick, Herman Melville
• Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
• The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch
• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
• Mengzi
• Zhuangzi
• The Bodhicaryavatara, Santideva
• Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy Bauermeister
• Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith
• Evil Men, James Dawes
• Down Girl, Kate Manne
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Making Sense of Human Rights, James Nickel
• The Idea of Natural Rights, Brian Tierney
• The Law of Peoples, John Rawls
• On Human Rights, James Griffin
• The Crisis of the European Mind, Paul Hazard
• The Enlightenment in America, Henry May
• Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Dimitri Gutas
• Practical Ethics, Peter Singer
• 80,000 Hours, Benjamin Todd
• Destined for War, Graham Allison
• Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
• Descartes’ Error, Antonio Demasio
• The Really Hard Problem, Owen Flannagan
• The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubormirsky
• The Complete Text, Xunzi
• The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, Solomon and Higgins
• All About Love, Bell Hooks
• The Symposium, Plato
• Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
• Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot
• Heartificial Intelligence, John Havens
• The Technological Singularity, Murray Shanahan
• Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neill
• Moral Machines, Wallach and Allen
• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
• Elbow Room, Daniel C. Dennett
• Four Views of Free Will, Fischer, Kane, Pereboom and Vargas
• In Our Prime, Patricia Cohen
• Moral Questions, Thomas Nagel
• Utilitarianism, For and Against, Smart and Williams
• The Skeptical Feminist, Janet Radcliffe Richards
• The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege
• Naming and Necessity, Saul A. Kripke
• The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt
• The Forest People, Colin M. Turnbull
• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
• Animal Machines, Ruth Harrison
• Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
• In the Name of Eugenics, Daniel Kevles
• The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kuhl
• Eugenic Nation, Alexandra Minna Stern
• Heredity and Hope, Ruth Schwartz Cohen
• Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer
• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
• Killing in War, Jeff McMahan
• A Theory of the Drone, Gregoire Chamayou
• The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
• Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
• The Language of Genes, Steve Jones
• The Ordeal of Integration, Orlando Patterson
• The Ethics of Identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah
• The Annotated Alice, Carroll and Gardner
• The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides
• Winnetou, Karl May
• Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace
• Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle
• Tiny Life, Julian Dibbel
• Lying, Paul J. Griffiths
• How to Think About Weird Things, Schick and Vaughn
• Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
• The Women’s Room, Marilyn French
• The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi
• Wetland, Charlotte Roche
• Pragmatism, William James
• Down and Out in London and Paris, George Orwell
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy ***
• An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison
• Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
• Tweets from Tahrir, Nunns and Idle
• The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David S. Landes
• On Art and Life, John Rushkin
• Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
• The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett
• Fault Lines, Raghuram G. Rajan
• Chavs, Owen Jones
• Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle
• Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel
• How to Use Your Eyes, James Elkins
• An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks
• The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
• Flim-Flam!, James Randi
• The Psychology of Superstition, Gustav Jahoda
• Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer
• Spook, Mary Roach
• The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menard
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
• The Warrior Within, Bruce Lee
• Philosophy in Seven Sentences, Douglas Groothuis
• Seeking Wisdom, Peter Bevelin
• The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
• The Principia, Isaac Newton
• The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley
• Exact Thinking in Demented Times, Karl Sigmund
• Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, Simon Critchley
• Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
• As If, Kwame Anthony Appiah
• The Meaning of Life, Klemke and Cahn
• The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (anthology)
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, George Muntau
• The Nature of Consciousness, Rupert Spira
• The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir
• How Philosophy Works, DK
• The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottleib
• I Am Not a Brain, Markus Gabriel
• The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan W. Watts
• To Fight Against the Age, Rob Rieman
• After the Natural Law, John Lawrence Hill
• Aesthetics II, Dietrich von Hildebrand
• Big Ideas for Curious Minds, Anonymous
• The Coherence of Theism, Richard Swinburne
• Philosophy Here and Now, Lewis Vaughn
• Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sam Chase
• An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, Roy W. Perrett
• A Critical History of Western Philosophy, Stace W.T.
• Wisdom from Ancient Greek Philosophy, George Tanner
• The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant
• The Stone Reader, Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments
• The Critical Thinking Toolkit, Wiley Blackwell
• Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Brownstein and Saul
• Stolen Legacy, George G.M. James
• Phenemology, Dan Zahavi
• Seeing Through the World, Jeremy D. Johnson
• Socrates’ Children, Peter Kreeft

Making the following list, I realized that classics are the genre that I read the most. By far, really. I also realized that it can be a little difficult to define a classic (especially the when about it), and that there are so very many of them. Some of the books below, I was surprised by because I hadn’t heard of them, which begs the question, can they be a classic then? And then there was also the issue of I’m sure I missed some. There were a dozen that crossed my mind as I made the list, and I just popped those on there for you. You could always go to my Recommended Reading page and see what classics I have included there. It is a much shorter list. Also, there are plenty of children’s classics included on the children’s list.

CLASSICS

• • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte ***
  • Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte ***
  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen ***
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  • Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
  • The Odyssey, Homer
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee ***
  • 1984, George Orwell *
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald ***
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
  • Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
  • The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (*)
  • I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith*
  • Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck *
  • Animal Farm, George Orwell *
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
  • The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Duman
  • War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ***
  • Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  • Lorna Doone, R.D. Blackmoore
  • Jamaica Inn, Daphne du Maurier
  • Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
  • The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
  • Moonfleet, J. Meade Falkner
  • Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (*)
  • A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  • Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll *
  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carre
  • Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery ***
  • The Children of the New Forest, Frederick Marryat
  • Heidi, Johanna Spyri
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  • Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury *
  • The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
  • The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
  • Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
  • Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
  • In Cold Blood, Truman Capote *
  • Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
  • Bitter Lemons, Laurence Durrell
  • Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowatt
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
  • Travels with a Donkey, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
  • Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
  • 19 Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
  • Bleak House, Charles Dickens
  • Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte ***
  • Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot
  • Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
  • Scarlet and Black, Stendhal
  • Persuasion, Jane Austen
  • Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  • Tristam Shandy, Laurence Sterne
  • Dracula, Bram Stoker
  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
  • Emma, Jane Austen
  • Eugenie Grandet, Honore de Balzac
  • The Old Wive’s Tale, Arnold Bennett
  • The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
  • The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
  • The Outsider, Albert Camus
  • My Antonia, Willa Cather
  • Stories, Anton Chekov
  • The Awakening, Kate Chopin
  • The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
  • Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  • The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
  • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
  • Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
  • Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli
  • Berlin Alexander-Platz, Alfred Doblin
  • Ulysses, James Joyce
  • The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Adam Bede, George Eliot
  • The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (*)
  • Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
  • The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
  • Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
  • My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin
  • North and South, Elizabeth Gaskill
  • Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
  • New Grub Street, George Gissing
  • The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
  • The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway ***
  • A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
  • On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  • The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  • Going Solo, Roald Dahl
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison
  • Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
  • A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  • The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
  • Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
  • The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
  • Brave New World, Aldous Huxley *
  • The Book of Khalid, Ameen Rihani
  • The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkein ***
  • The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
  • Lolita, Vladimir Nobokov
  • A Wrinkle in Time, in Madeleine L’Engle (*)
  • The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  • Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
  • Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grimm *
  • Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou *
  • A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine l’Engle
  • Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh
  • Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
  • The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
  • West with the Night, Beryl Markham
  • The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
  • Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
  • The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
  • The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
  • The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  • The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith
  • Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
  • A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  • Stoner, John Willaims
  • Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez *(**)
  • The Mambo King Plays Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez ***
  • Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  • The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  • The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
  • Persuasion, Jane Austen
  • The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
  • Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
  • The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  • The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
  • Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann
  • The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse
  • Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  • The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  • Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  • Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  • The Iliad, Homer
  • The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
  • Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope
  • Another Country, James Baldwin
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl *
  • Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
  • Diary of a Nobody, The Grossmiths
  • Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy ***
  • The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni
  • Orland, Virginia Woolf
  • Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  • The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
  • The Art of War, Sun-Tzu
  • The Forsythe Saga, John Galsworthy
  • Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck
  • Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  • Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
  • Staying On, Paul Scott
  • Perfume, Patrick Suskind
  • Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
  • Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac
  • Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
  • A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens *
  • Silas Marner, George Eliot
  • The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
  • The Godfather, Mario Puzo
  • The Castle, Franz Kafka
  • I, Claudius, Robert Graves
  • Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
  • A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
  • The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
  • Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
  • Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
  • A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
  • Heart of Darkness, John Conrad
  • Suite Francaise, Irene Nemerovsky
  • What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
  • White Nights, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Hard Times, Charles Dickens