Full-text library

Read at your own pace. Each work has a table of contents and permanent links for returning to a passage or sharing a reading assignment.

1. The Bible

   King James Version. Creation, covenant, prophecy, wisdom, and the life of faith across the Old and New Testaments.

2. The Qur’an

   Translated by Marmaduke Pickthall. Read the 114 surahs in order, following revelation, ethical responsibility, mercy, and judgment.

3. The Odyssey

   Homer · Translated by Samuel Butler. A journey through hospitality, disguise, storytelling, recognition, and the difficult return home.

4. Wuthering Heights

   Emily Brontë. Follow the competing voices that tell the story of attachment, inheritance, injury, and revenge.

5. Hamlet

   William Shakespeare. Read the tragedy through its acts and scenes: grief, performance, uncertainty, and the demands of revenge.

6. Bhagavad Gita

   Translated by Kashinath Trimbak Telang. A dialogue on action, knowledge, devotion, and duty, spoken at the threshold of battle.

7. Romeo and Juliet

   William Shakespeare. Follow the language of desire as private love encounters family hostility, public violence, and chance.

8. The Ramayana

   Valmiki · Translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith. Read Griffith’s verse translation through exile, loyalty, contested duty, and the struggle to return.

9. Frankenstein

   Mary Shelley. Letters and nested narratives trace creation, abandonment, sympathy, and the responsibilities of a maker.

10. Macbeth

    William Shakespeare. Prophecy, ambition, equivocation, and guilt unfold in a tragedy of power and its consequences.

11. Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen. Read through first impressions, revised judgments, and the negotiations of affection, money, and social rank.

12. The Iliad

    Homer · Translated by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers. Follow Achilles’ anger through the competing claims of honor, friendship, grief, and the humanity of an enemy.

13. Don Quixote

    Miguel de Cervantes · Translated by John Ormsby. Read both parts of the novel, where invented identities and inherited stories meet the resistance—and possibilities—of everyday life.

14. The Count of Monte Cristo

    Alexandre Dumas, with Auguste Maquet · Chapman and Hall English edition. Follow imprisonment, reinvention, and revenge as Edmond Dantès confronts the human consequences of acting as providence.

15. Crime and Punishment

    Fyodor Dostoevsky · Translated by Constance Garnett. Read through Raskolnikov’s divided reasoning, the pressure of other lives, and the uncertain passage from confession to renewal.

16. A Christmas Carol

    Charles Dickens. Five staves turn memory, fellow feeling, and imagined futures into a challenge to Scrooge’s understanding of his own life.

17. The Divine Comedy

    Dante Alighieri · Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Travel through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, following the changing relation between desire, judgment, knowledge, and love.

18. Jane Eyre

    Charlotte Brontë. Follow Jane’s account of education, love, and independence as she tests the claims of conscience against authority and desire.

19. Dracula

    Bram Stoker. Journals, letters, and recorded testimony assemble a struggle over bodies, belief, knowledge, and the boundaries of the familiar.

20. Moby-Dick

    Herman Melville. Follow Ishmael through the languages of whaling, Ahab’s pursuit, and the uncertain work of making meaning from experience.

21. A Tale of Two Cities

    Charles Dickens. Read across London and Paris as private injury, revolutionary justice, and the possibility of sacrifice reshape individual lives.

22. Meditations

    Marcus Aurelius · Translated by Meric Casaubon. Read twelve books of self-examination on judgment, mortality, human fellowship, and the responsibilities of daily action.

23. The Art of War

    Sunzi · Translated by Lionel Giles. Read the thirteen chapters alongside Giles’s introduction and commentary, considering preparation, knowledge, deception, and the costs of conflict.

24. Great Expectations

    Charles Dickens. Follow Pip’s changing account of his own life as ambition, shame, loyalty, and gratitude unsettle his ideas of gentility.

25. Les Misérables

    Victor Hugo · Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood. Move through five volumes in which law, conscience, poverty, revolution, and mercy test what people owe one another.

26. War and Peace

    Leo Tolstoy · Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Read the fifteen books and both epilogues as Tolstoy brings domestic experience into conversation with war, historical explanation, and human freedom.

27. Middlemarch

    George Eliot. Follow intersecting lives and partial understandings as marriage, vocation, money, and reform test the reach of sympathy.

28. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Mark Twain. Read Huck’s account of the river journey, where inherited beliefs and accepted conventions collide with friendship and lived experience.

29. Tao Te Ching

    Laozi · Translated by James Legge. Read eighty-one chapters that question the claims of language, ambition, and force, and explore simplicity, receptivity, and action without coercion.

30. The Prince

    Niccolò Machiavelli · Translated by W. K. Marriott. Examine how political necessity, appearances, fortune, and judgment unsettle the relation between successful rule and moral conduct.

31. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

    Mark Twain. Follow the inventions and adventures through which childhood tests the rules, rewards, and moral expectations of the adult world.

32. Cranford

    Elizabeth Gaskell. Read the rituals and quiet crises of a community where class, friendship, loss, and generosity continually revise social conventions.

33. The Scarlet Letter

    Nathaniel Hawthorne. Follow the competing meanings of the scarlet letter as public judgment encounters secrecy, sympathy, and the divided lives of its interpreters.

34. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

    Frederick Douglass. Read the struggle for literacy and freedom alongside Douglass’s examination of power, violence, religious hypocrisy, and the authority to tell one’s own story.

35. Leviathan

    Thomas Hobbes. Move from sensation and language to covenant and sovereignty, asking how fear and reason shape the grounds and limits of political obligation.

36. Walden

    Henry David Thoreau. Read an experiment in deliberate living that questions inherited measures of success through labor, solitude, close observation, and encounters with neighbors.

37. Confessions

    Augustine · Translated by E. B. Pusey. Follow Augustine’s searching account of desire and conversion into questions about memory, time, creation, and the difficulty of knowing oneself.

38. The Importance of Being Earnest

    Oscar Wilde. Read a comedy in which invented identities and verbal reversals expose the performances sustaining respectable society.

39. A Doll’s House

    Henrik Ibsen. Follow Nora’s changing understanding of marriage, duty, and herself as a concealed act of care becomes a crisis of authority and recognition.

40. Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen. Follow Elinor and Marianne as affection, money, secrecy, and disappointed hopes test their different ways of judging the world.

41. The Brothers Karamazov

    Fyodor Dostoevsky · Translated by Constance Garnett. Read the competing voices of a family whose conflicts open questions about faith, freedom, suffering, and responsibility for other lives.

42. Second Treatise of Government

    John Locke. Examine the arguments connecting natural freedom, property, consent, and resistance to the grounds and limits of political authority.

43. The Souls of Black Folk

    W. E. B. Du Bois. Follow the movement between history, argument, personal experience, and song as Du Bois examines the color line and the promises of freedom.

44. The Time Machine

    H. G. Wells. Travel into imagined futures that unsettle familiar assumptions about progress, class, knowledge, and the survival of human feeling.

45. Thus Spake Zarathustra

    Friedrich Nietzsche · Translated by Thomas Common. Read the speeches, encounters, and songs through which Zarathustra tests inherited values and the difficulties of teaching self-overcoming.

46. The Republic

    Plato · Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Follow a dialogue about justice into questions about education, poetry, political power, and the ordering of desire within the soul.

47. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

    Olaudah Equiano. Read an account of enslavement, travel, faith, and purchased freedom that turns personal testimony into a challenge to the slave trade.

48. Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche · Translated by Helen Zimmern; closing poem translated by L. A. Magnus. Question the assumptions behind philosophical systems and moral judgments through Nietzsche’s experiments in argument, aphorism, and perspective.

49. Emma

    Jane Austen. Follow Emma’s confident interpretations as matchmaking and imagined romances expose the limits of her knowledge of others and herself.

50. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2

    Edgar Allan Poe · Raven Edition. Read twenty-two tales that test the boundaries of reason, perception, fear, and self-command, followed by the edition’s notes.

51. On Liberty

    John Stuart Mill. Examine the claims of individual freedom against social authority, and ask what a community loses when disagreement becomes impossible.

52. Oedipus Rex

    Sophocles · Translated by F. Storr. Follow a search for the source of a city’s suffering as Oedipus’s determination to discover the truth turns toward his own identity.

53. Heart of Darkness

    Joseph Conrad. Read Marlow’s account of empire and encounter through the uncertainties of narration, the language of justification, and the thresholds between worlds.

54. On the Origin of Species

    Charles Darwin · Sixth edition, 1872. Follow Darwin’s argument through observation, variation, struggle, and the difficulties that test an explanation of life’s changing forms.

55. The Turn of the Screw

    Henry James. Read a framed narrative in which the governess’s efforts to protect her charges become inseparable from questions about evidence, authority, and interpretation.

56. The Wealth of Nations

    Adam Smith. Move through the five books on labor, capital, economic history, political economy, and public revenue, testing how private interests meet public consequences.

57. Gulliver’s Travels

    Jonathan Swift. Travel through four imagined societies that make familiar customs strange and unsettle Gulliver’s confidence in human reason and his own judgment.

58. The Call of the Wild

    Jack London. Follow Buck through the demands of survival, attachment, and remembered instinct as the boundaries of domestication and wildness shift.

59. The Mysteries of Udolpho

    Ann Radcliffe. Read Emily’s passage through loss, confinement, and uncertain appearances, attending to how landscapes, poems, and partial knowledge shape fear.

60. The Mahabharata

    Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli. Eighteen books with section navigation, edition notes, and documented textual repairs.