Vintage reading: from Plato to Bradbury : a personal tour of some of the world's best books

On everyone's list of literary classics: Look homeward, angel / Thomas Wolfe The portrait of a lady / Henry James As I lay dying / William Faulkner Wuthering heights / Emily Brontë Kim / Rudyard Kipling Alice's adventures in wonderland / Lewis Carroll Justine / Lawrence Durrell Oliver Twist / Charles Dickens Pride and prejudice / Jane Austen A passage to India / E. M. Forster My Ántonia / Willa Cather Madame Bovary / Gustave Flaubert On many a list for burning (Heretics, subversives, demagogues): Stories / Dorothy Parker The prince / Niccolo Machiavelli The Devil's dictionary / Ambrose Bierce Mein Kampf / Adolf Hitler Nana / Emile Zola Ten days that shook the world / John Reed Native sons / Richard Wright Books that shaped the western world: Essays / Montaigne Dialogues / Plato The wealth of nations / Plato An essay on the principle of population / Thomas Malthus

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire / Edward Gibbon

The origin of species / Charles Darwin

The histories / Herodotus

The Federalist Papers / Hamilton, Madison, Jay

The annals of imperial Rome / Tacitus

The Peloponnesian War / Thucydides

Democracy in America / Alexis de Tocqueville

Making hard work easy (The great popularizers): Only yesterday / Frederick Lewis Allen

Microbe hunters / Paul de Kruif

Selected works / Cicero

Coming of age in Samoa / Margaret Mead

The outermost house / Henry Beston

The amiable Baltimoreans / Francis F. Beirne

What to listen for in music / Aaron Copland

Gods, graves, and scholars / C.W. Ceram

The stress of life / Hans Selye

The Greek way / Edith Hamilton

Not Robinson Crusoe, not Brave new world: A journal of the plague year / Daniel Defoe

The doors of perception / Aldous Huxley

Elective affinities / John Wolfgang von Goethe

Homage to Catalonia / George Orwell

Civilization and its discontents / Sigmund Freud

Arrowsmith / Sinclair Lewis

Roughing it / Mark Twain

Lighter fare (Good reads, best sellers): A study in scarlet / Arthur Conan Doyle

The song of Hiawatha / H.W. Longfellow

The rise of David Levinsky / Abraham Cahan

Java head / Joseph Hergesheimer

Mr. Pottermack's oversight / R. Austin Freeman

A bell for Adano / John Hersey

The Martian chronicles / Ray Bradbury

Gentleman's agreement / Laura Z. Hobson

"But I know what I like": The ten books of architecture / Vitruvius

The lives of the most eminent Italian architects, painters, and sculptors / Giorgio Vasari

The seven lamps of architecture /John Ruskin

The nude: a study in ideal form / Kenneth Clark

The elements of style / Strunk and White

One-of-a-kinds: A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf

The American language / H.L. Mencken

The little prince / Antoine de Saint Éxupery

The education of Henry Adams

Flatland / Edwin A. Abbott

Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neal Hurston

A mathematician's apology / Godfrey H. Hardy

My life / Isadora Duncan

The structure of scientific revolutions / Thomas Kuhn

The realm of the spirit (Holy and human): Gilgamesh: Babylonian epic

Confessions / Saint Augustine

The Golem / Gustav Meyrink

The razor's edge / W. Somerset Maugham

The seven storey mountain / Thomas Merton

Death be not proud / John Gunther

Ecclesiastes: Old Testament

Lost horizon / James Hilton

The Bhagavad Gita: Sanskrit poem

Night / Elie Wiesel

The varieties of religious experience / William James.