Books


Above all else: The Bible (Old and New Testaments)
     2001 English Standard Version (ESV): recommended English translation
     2008 ESV Study Bible: recommended study Bible

1800 BC 
1800? The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia)

800 BC  
700s Homer
     ca 750 The Iliad
     ca 750 The Odyssey

700 BC 
ca 630-570 SapphoPoems

600 BC 
ca 620-564 Aesop
     ca 575 Fables

500 BC 
ca 525-ca 455 Aeschylus 
     472 The Persians
     467 Seven against Thebes
     458 The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
     ??? Prometheus Bound

496-406 Sophocles
     441 Antigone 
     429 Oedipus Rex
     406 Oedipus at Colonus

446-386 Aristophanes
     411 Lysistrata

400 BC 
428-348 Plato
     380 The Republic

ca 430-354 Xenophon
     ca 370 Anabasis (The March of the Ten Thousand)

300 BC  
ca 250 Septuagint

AD 1
70 BC-AD 19 Virgil
     19 Aeneid

300 
381 Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (First Council of Constantinople)

400 
354-430 Augustine
     400 Confessions (trans. Garry Wills, 2008)

400s Patrick
     ca 450 Confession

451 Chalcedonian Formula (Council of Chalcedon)

500 
480-525 Boethius
     525 The Consolation of Philosophy

800 
ca 800 Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney, 2001)

1100 
ca 1100 The Song of Roland
ca 1170 The Poem of the Cid

1200
1225-74 Thomas Aquinas
     1274 Summa Theologica

1300 
ca 1265-1321 Dante Alighieri
     1320 Divine Comedy

ca 1262-ca 1348 Ugolino Brunforte
     ca 1325 Little Flowers of St. Francis

1375? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

1343-1400 Geoffrey Chaucer
     1400 The Canterbury Tales

1400 
1380-1471 Thomas a Kempis
     ca 1425 The Imitation of Christ

1415-71 Thomas Malory
     1485 Le Morte d'Arthur

1500 
1466-1536 Erasmus
     1511 In Praise of Folly

1483-1546 Martin Luther
     1529 Large Catechism

1534-83 Zacharius Ursinus
     1563 The Heidelberg Catechism

1533-92 Michel de Montaigne
     1570-92 Essays

1564-1616 William Shakespeare
     1591 The Taming of the Shrew
     1595 Romeo and Juliet
     1595 A Midsummer Night's Dream
     1599 Julius Caesar
     1601 Hamlet
     1606 King Lear
     1606 Macbeth

1600  
1547-1616 Miguel de Cervantes
     Don Quixote: Part 1 (1605) and Part 2 (1615) (trans. Edith Grossman, 2003)

1611 King James Version of the Bible

1567-1622 Francis de Sales
     1619 Introduction to the Devout Life

1581-1656 James Ussher
     1658 Annals of the World

1588-1679 Thomas Hobbes
     1651 Leviathan

1608-74 John Milton
     1674 Paradise Lost

1628-88 John Bunyan
     1662 "A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan"
     1678 The Pilgrim’s Progress
     1688 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

1700 
1667-1745 Jonathan Swift
     1726 Gulliver's Travels

1707-54 Henry Fielding
     1742 Joseph Andrews

1776 US Declaration of Independence

1729-97 Edmund Burke
     1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France

1791 US Constitution with Bill of Rights

1800 
1775-1817 Jane Austen
     1813 Pride and Prejudice

1797-1851 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
     1818 Frankenstein

1771-1832 Walter Scott
     1820 Ivanhoe

1799-1837 Alexander Pushkin
     1833 Eugene Onegin

1812-70 Charles Dickens
     1839 Oliver Twist
     1850 David Copperfield
     1859  A Tale of Two Cities
1802-70 Alexandre Dumas
     1844 The Three Musketeers

1813-55 Soren Kierkegaard
     1847 Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
     1855 Attack on Christendom

1816-55 Charlotte Brontë
     1847 Jane Eyre

1811-63 William Thackeray
     1848 Vanity Fair

1804-64 Nathaniel Hawthorne
     1850 The Scarlet Letter

1819-91 Herman Melville
     1851 Moby-Dick

1811-96 Harriet Beecher Stowe
     1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin

1819-80 George Eliot
     1861 Silas Marner

1818-83 Ivan Turgenev
     1862 Fathers and Sons

1821-81 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
     1862 The House of the Dead
     1869 The Idiot
     1880 The Brothers Karamozov

1823-86 Mary Chesnut
     1861-65 Mary Chesnut's Civil War (ed. C. Vann Woodward, 1981)

1832-88 Louisa May Alcott
     1868 Little Women

1822-88 Matthew Arnold
     1869 Culture and Anarchy ("Preface," 1875)

1828-1910 Leo Tolstoy
     1869 War and Peace
     1878 Anna Karenina

1835-1910 Mark Twain
     1885 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1860-1904 Anton Chekhov
     1882-1904 Stories
     1901 Three Sisters
     1904 Cherry Orchard

1850-94 Robert Louis Stevenson
     1883 Treasure Island
     1886 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1830-86 Emily Dickinson: Poems

1859-1930 Arthur Conan Doyle
     1892 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1857-1924 Joseph Conrad
     1899 Heart of Darkness

1900 
1865-1936 Rudyard Kipling
     1901 Kim

1866-1943 Beatrix Potter
      1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit

1842-1910 William James
     1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience

1868-1963 W. E. B. Dubois
     1903 The Souls of Black Folks

1883-1924 Franz Kafka
     1915 The Metamorphosis

1873-1947 Willa Cather
     1913 O Pioneers!
          Loving the Land
     1918 My Antonia
     1927 Death Comes for the Archbishop

1882-1944 Hendrik Willem van Loon
     1921 The Story of Mankind

1882-1941 James Joyce
     1922 Ulysses

1879-1970 E. M. Forster
     1908 A Room with a View
     1924 A Passage to India

1896-1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald
     1925 The Great Gatsby

1891-1940 Mikhail Bulgakov
      1925 A Dog's Heart

1885-1981 Will Durant
     1926 The Story of Philosophy
     1935-75 The Story of Civilization (11 volumes)

1898-1970 Erich Maria Remarque
     1928 All Quiet on the Western Front

1882-1941 Virginia Woolf
     1925 The Common Reader
     1929 A Room of One's Own
     1938 Three Guineas

1899-1961 Ernest Hemingway
     1926 The Sun Also Rises
     1929 A Farewell to Arms
     1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls

1848-1943 Stephen Vincent Benet
     1928 John Brown's Body

1886-1968 Karl Barth
     1931-67 Church Dogmatics (13 volumes)
     1963 Evangelical Theology
           1977 Eberhard Busch: Karl Barth

1894-1963 Aldous Huxley
     1932 Brave New World

1890-1976 Agatha Christie
     1934 Murder on the Orient Express (with Hercule Poirot)
     1971 Nemesis (with Miss Marple)

1906-45 Dietrich Bonhoeffer
     1937 The Cost of Discipleship

1891-1960 Zora Neale Hurston
     1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God

1903-50 George Orwell
     1938 Homage to Catalonia
     1945 Animal Farm
     1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four

1902-68 John Steinbeck
     1939 Grapes of Wrath

1907-73 W. H. Auden
     1940 "Musee des Beaux Arts" (poem in Another Time)

1868-1963 Edith Hamilton
     1942 Mythology
          Sense of Adventure: Jason and his Argonauts

1898-1963 C. S. Lewis
     1942 The Screwtape Letters
     1956 The Last Battle
     1959 "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"

1897-1943 Eric Knight
     1943 Lassie Come-Home

1905-97 Vicktor Frankl
     1946 Man's Search for Meaning

1913-60 Albert Camus
     1947 The Plague

1889-1968 Pitirim Sorokin
     1947 Society, Culture, and Personality
     1957 Social and Cultural Dynamics

1889-1975 Arnold Toynbee
     1950 War and Civilization
     1951 Memoirs of Hadrian

Jacques Ellul (1912-94)
     1951 The Presence of the Kingdom
     1960 The Theological Foundation of Law
     1964 The Technological Society
     1965 Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
     1967 The Political Illusion
     1969 Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective
     1970 The Meaning of the City
     1970 Prayer and Modern Man
     1971 The Judgment of Jonah
     1972 The Politics of God and the Politics of Man
     1973 Hope in Time of Abandonment
     1975 The New Demons
     1976 The Ethics of Freedom
     1977 Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation
     1978 The Betrayal of the West
     1980 The Technological System
     1981 Perspectives on Our Age
     1983 Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World
     1984 Money and Power
     1986 The Subversion of Christianity
     1989 What I Believe
     1990 The Technological Bluff
     1990 Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes
     1991 Anarchy and Christianity

1899-1985 E. B. White
     1952 Charlotte's Web

1920-2012 Ray Bradbury
     1953 Fahrenheit 451

1905-64 Vasily Grossman
     1960 Life and Fate (trans. Robert Chandler, 1985)

1926-2016 Harper Lee
     1960 To Kill a Mockingbird

1874-1963 Robert Frost: Poems

1925-65 Malcolm X
     1965 The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley)

1918-2008 Aleksandr Solzhenitsen
     1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
     1966 The Cancer Ward
     1978 "Harvard Commencement Address"

1927-2004 Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr.
     1968 Christian Doctrine

1922-2007 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
     1969 Slaughterhouse-Five

b. 1936 David Levering Lewis
     1970 King: A Critical Biography

1909-2001 Ernst Gombrich
     1972 The Story of Art

1919-84 Sydney Ahlstrom
     1972 A Religious History of the American People

1936-2002 (aged 85) Christopher Alexander
     1977 A Pattern Language
     1979 The Timeless Way of Building

b. 1929 Milan Kundera
     1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being

1922-94 Philip Hallie
     1979 Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (rev. ed. 1994)

1927-2007 Vernard Eller
     1987 Christian Anarchy
     2003 War and Peace: From Genesis to Revelation

1909-98 Lesslie Newbigin
     1989 The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

1930-1999 Dale Aukerman
     1989 Darkening Valley: A Biblical Perspective on Nuclear War

b. 1952 Jostein Gaarder
     1991 Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy
     1996 The Solitaire Mystery
          You've Got to Be Joking!

1929-2004 Norman Cantor
     1993 The Civilization of the Middle Ages
     1994 The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews

b. 1945 George Hunsinger
     1993 How to Read Karl Barth
     2001 Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth
b. 1937 Lois Lowry
     1994 The Giver

1920-94 Charles BukowskiPoems

2000 
b. 1943 Peter Watson
     2001 The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century
     2005 Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

b. 1942 Garrison Keillor
      2002 Good Poems (editor)

b. 1934 Wendell Berry
     2005 In the Presence of Fear
          Where Our Pleasure Is

b. 1948 Azar Nafisi
     2006 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books