This list is based on The Great Books of the Western World edited by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. There were two editions published (in 1954 and 1990) and this is an amalgamation of the reading plans from both of them.
Most of the links are to the Wikipedia articles for the authors and Project Gutenberg for the texts themselves. You should be aware that all Project Gutenberg offerings are in the public domain, which means they’re old! In most cases, it is what it is — these are old books. But in come cases there are much more recent and more readable translations of books that were not originally written in English. You may want to seek those out.
If you are looking for a group, there are many. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t active anymore.
The Great Conversation Reading Group started Year 1 in January 2025. Looks like this group is dead, too!
- Year One
Plato: Apology, Crito
Aristophanes: Clouds, Lysistrata
Plato: Republic [Book I–II]
Aristotle: Ethics [Book I]
Aristotle: Politics [Book I]
Plutarch: The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans [Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, Lycurgus and Numa Compared, Alexander, Caesar]
New Testament: [The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The Acts of theApostles]
St. Augustine: Confessions [Book I-VIII]
Machiavelli: The Prince
Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel [Book I–II]
Montaigne: Essays [Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received; Of Pedantry; Of the Education of Children; That It Is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity; Of Cannibals; That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends in a Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them; Upon Some Verses of Virgil]
Shakespeare: Hamlet
Locke: Concerning Civil Government [Second Essay]
Rousseau: The Social Contract [Book I–II]
Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [Ch. 15–16]
The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States, The Federalist [Numbers 1-10, 15, 31, 47, 51, 68-71]
Smith: The Wealth of Nations [Introduction—Book I, Ch. 9]
Marx–Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party
Tocqueville: Democracy in America [Vol 1, part II ch 6-8]
Ibsen: The Master Builder
Schrodinger: What is Life?