Mortimer J. Adler's reading list
Top 10 Mortimer J. Adler's reading list : The Odyssey, The Suppliants, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, The Seven Against Thebes, Electra, A Modest Proposal, The Rape of the Lock, Women of Trachis, Moralia, The Complete Essays
The Odyssey
| Author | Homer |
| ISBN | 0143039954 |
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in The New York Times Review of Books hails as "a distinguished...
| Author | Aeschylus |
| ISBN | 1419184431 |
Let wild youth not accomplish
Its wicked lust; let pride
Be quelled by your abhorrence;
Fulfill for us such wedlock as is right.
Even for those who fly the trampling of battle
There is an altar of refuge from destruction,
Where...
The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
| Author | Aeschylus |
| ISBN | 0140443339 |
In the Oresteia—the only trilogy in Greek drama which survives from antiquity—Aeschylus took as his subject the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos.
Moving from darkness to light, from...
| Author | Aeschylus |
| ISBN | 0486414205 |
The Seven Against Thebes (first...
Electra
| Author | Sophocles |
| ISBN | 1854597566 |
A Modest Proposal
| Author | Jonathan Swift |
| ISBN | 1605977276 |
The Rape of the Lock
| Author | Alexander Pope |
| ISBN | 1557429162 |
I find Pope a fascinating individual. He was a catholic, at a time when legislation was repressive...
Women of Trachis
| Author | Sophocles |
| ISBN | 0195070097 |
| Author | Plutarch |
| ISBN | 1408633515 |
| Author | Michel de Montaigne |
| ISBN | 0140446044 |
In...
Leviathan
| Author | Thomas Hobbes |
| ISBN | 0140431950 |
Written during the chaos of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan asks how, in a world of violence and horror, can we stop ourselves from descending into anarchy? Hobbes' case for a 'common-wealth' under a powerful sovereign...
Philosophical Dictionary
| Author | Voltaire |
It was deliberately planned as a revolutionary book and was duly denounced on all sides and described as 'a deplorable monument of the extent to which inteligence...
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
| Author | Henry Fielding |
| ISBN | 0140436227 |
Don Quixote
| Author | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
| ISBN | 0142437239 |
The Divine Comedy
| Author | Dante Alighieri |
| ISBN | 0679433139 |
De Monarchia (On the Monarchy)
| Author | Dante Alighieri |
Se il latino è Grammatica e il volgare è lingua naturale, il De vulgari eloquentia è una Bibbia ancora illibata, immune ai germi del protestantesimo; scritta in latino per i cattedratici comuni mortali, esalta il volgare come lingua del corpo e dello spirito, eleggendola a idioma dominante...
Vita Nuova
| Author | Dante Alighieri |
| ISBN | 0192839357 |
The Nibelungenlied
| Author | Unknown |
| ISBN | 0140441379 |
Leonardo's Notebooks
| Author | Leonardo da Vinci |
| ISBN | 1579124577 |
Leonardo da Vinci—artist, inventor, and prototypical Renaissance man—is a perennial source of fascination because of his astonishing intellect and boundless...
| Author | Jonathan Swift |
| ISBN | 0141018879 |
| Author | François Rabelais |
| ISBN | 0140445501 |
Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable...
| Author | Samuel Johnson |
| ISBN | 0948807326 |
| Author | Samuel Johnson |
| ISBN | 0192839136 |
Written in one week to defray the cost of his mother's funeral, Johnson's moral tale is a superior example of the prose of its era, and its era—the Age of Enlightenment—is renowned for the quality of its prose. It is true that Candide—written in 1759, the same year as Rasselas--excels Johnson's...
Persian Letters
| Author | Montesquieu |
| ISBN | 0140442812 |
| Author | Alexander Pope |
| ISBN | 1419106406 |
-This is as true now as it was 301 years ago, when it was published. (It both pleases...
| Author | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz |
| ISBN | 0822954494 |
Discourse on Metaphysics
| Author | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz |
| ISBN | 0879757752 |
Ethics
| Author | Baruch Spinoza |
| ISBN | 0140435719 |
| Author | John Locke |
Discourse on Method
| Author | René Descartes |
| ISBN | 0872204227 |
| Author | Plotinus |
| Author | Horace |
| ISBN | 0674996097 |
| Author | Horace |
| ISBN | 0674992148 |
| Author | Nicolaus Copernicus |
| ISBN | 0762420219 |
Praise of Folly
| Author | Erasmus |
| ISBN | 0140446087 |
Folly speaks:
About five hundred years ago, a man named Erasmus decided to publish a book praising me. Unbelievably, no one had this idea before, and none since. Nobody has the time or the inclination—nobody besides Erasmus, that is—to sing my praises, apparently....
Confessions
| Author | Augustine of Hippo |
| ISBN | 0192833723 |
City of God
| Author | Augustine of Hippo |
| ISBN | 0140448942 |
You know, there are two ways of getting answers in the world... there’s getting the world’s answers (and that’s sometimes doublethink) and there’s getting TRANSCENDENTAL answers!
Sub specie aeternitatis, transcendental answers are the...
| Author | Augustine of Hippo |
| ISBN | 0024021504 |
Try anyway. He...
Andromaque
| Author | Jean Racine |
| ISBN | 2070409023 |
Bérénice
| Author | Jean Racine |
Athalie
| Author | Jean Racine |
| ISBN | 2253062286 |
Miraculeusement sauvé du massacre où les siens ont péri, le jeune Joas est secrètement recueilli puis élevé par le grand prêtre Joad et par sa femme. Pour qu’il accède au trône de Juda qui lui était promis, il lui faut échapper à l’infidèle...
| Author | Tacitus |
| ISBN | 0140442413 |
The Histories
| Author | Tacitus |
| ISBN | 0140441506 |
The Annals of Imperial Rome
| Author | Tacitus |
| Author | Martin Luther |
| ISBN | 0800616391 |
Paradise Lost
| Author | John Milton |
| ISBN | 0140424393 |
| Author | John Locke |
| ISBN | 1595478345 |
Second Treatise of Government
| Author | John Locke |
| ISBN | 0915144867 |
In his provocative 15-page introduction to this edition, the late eminent political theorist C. B. Macpherson examines Locke's arguments for limited, conditional...