How to Start Reading the Great Books

What are the great books, and who decided?

“The great books” usually means works, mostly from the Western tradition, that later writers kept reading, quoting and arguing with: Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato and Aristotle, the Bible, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the major novelists of the nineteenth. The phrase took its modern shape in American universities in the early twentieth century, when John Erskine taught a general honors course at Columbia built around reading whole classics rather than textbooks about them.

Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins carried the idea to the University of Chicago, and in 1952 Encyclopaedia Britannica published Great Books of the Western World, a multi-volume set many families bought and few finished. St. John's College still builds its whole curriculum around reading such books together. Adler's How to Read a Book, first published in 1940, remains a practical companion for anyone starting out.

The idea has fair critics. Early lists were narrow, overwhelmingly European and male, and treated as settled what is really an ongoing argument about what deserves attention. Many modern lists add the Analects of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, The Tale of Genji and Frederick Douglass's Narrative. The useful way to think of the great books is as a conversation across centuries, not a club with fixed membership.

Where to start: short books with big questions

The most common mistake is starting at the top of a chronological list, or with the book everyone calls the most important. People open the Iliad, Aristotle's Metaphysics or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, stall in the first fifty pages and conclude that the great books are not for them. The problem is the order, not the reader.

Pick first books that pass three tests. They should be short enough to finish in a week or two. They should be readable in a good modern translation without constant footnotes. And they should raise a question you will still be turning over when you close them: what a good life is, whether you should obey an unjust law, what you owe your family. A finished short book builds the confidence and background that make the long ones possible.

Plato's Apology takes an evening and shows Socrates defending a whole way of life in court. Sophocles' Antigone is a compact play that stages a collision between family duty and the law of the city. Voltaire's Candide is a fast, savage comedy about optimism. Kafka's The Metamorphosis can be read in one sitting.

A great books reading list for your first year

The list below is a starting point, not a ranking. It mixes periods and forms on purpose, and each book earns its place by being readable and leading somewhere. Swap freely: the right list is the one you finish.

When one of these books grabs you, follow the thread instead of returning to the list. Loving Antigone leads naturally to Oedipus the King; enjoying The Prince leads to Hobbes and the social contract thinkers. That is how the conversation is meant to work. Our guide to studying classic books with an AI tutor covers how to handle the denser books once you reach them.

Read books that answer each other

Great books are easier when you read them as replies. Writers in this tradition read their predecessors closely and often wrote against them, so a pair of books gives you two sides of an argument and sharpens each. Read alone, a book leaves you guessing what it is pushing against. Read as a pair, you can see it.

Some pairings are built into the books. In Frankenstein, the creature finds Paradise Lost in an abandoned bag of books, reads it as a true history and compares himself with both Adam and Satan, so reading Milton first changes Shelley's novel. Virgil's Aeneid deliberately reworks Homer, with a hero who wanders and then fights. Candide mocks a philosophical optimism usually linked to Leibniz, and Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise give opposite pictures of life before government.

Other pairings are thematic. Put Plato's Apology beside Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and ask when a person should refuse the state. Read Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre together and compare what each heroine is allowed to want. Keep a notebook page for each pair, with the shared question at the top and each author's answer underneath.

How to read a great book once you have started

Classics reward a slower way of reading than news or genre fiction. A simple routine, repeated for every book, keeps you moving through difficult stretches without giving up on understanding them.

The routine below is deliberately light. For a fuller system of marking pages, see our guide on how to annotate a book, but the short written recap after each chapter matters more than any marking scheme, because it turns pages read into ideas you can recall.

1. 1Read the editor's introduction after your first pass if the book is a novel or play, so you meet the story fresh; read it first for philosophy, where knowing the argument's shape helps.
2. 2Set one question before each session, such as what Socrates thinks he is really accused of, and read to answer it.
3. 3Read in regular sessions of twenty to forty minutes and stop at a natural break, not mid-scene.
4. 4Mark sparingly: a line in the margin and two or three words of your own beat whole highlighted paragraphs.
5. 5After each chapter, write three sentences from memory: what happened or was argued, what puzzled you, and what to watch for next.
6. 6When a passage stops you completely, mark it, read on a few pages and return; later pages often explain earlier ones.
7. 7Talk about the book with someone, even briefly, before you start the next one.

Build a pace you can keep for a year

Ambition is the usual cause of quitting. A plan to read the Iliad in a weekend tends to end on Monday with the book face down on the table. A plan of fifteen to thirty pages a day, most days, gets you through a long novel in about a month and a dozen substantial books in a year.

Alternate weight. Follow a long or dense book with a short or lively one, and keep a lighter classic going alongside a harder one so there is always something you want to pick up. Give each book a finish date on a calendar rather than a page quota per day, so a slow week does not feel like failure.

Keep a simple record of what you finish: titles, dates and a few lines on each book, so you can see when you have been circling the same century for too long. Our guide on how to remember what you read shows what to write after each book so it stays with you.

Choose the right translation and edition

Much of the canon was not written in English, and the translation you pick changes what you read. Translations from a century ago can be accurate and still feel stiff, with archaic phrasing the original never had. Newer translations aim for contemporary English, sometimes at the cost of the original's strangeness or rhythm. Neither approach is wrong, but a poor match for you can make a living book feel dead.

Before committing, read the first two pages of two translations side by side, in a library or a free preview, and choose the one you would happily keep reading. Look for a short introduction, a few notes rather than many, a map or list of names where the book needs one, and line or section numbers for older works so you can follow references elsewhere. For a worked example, our guide to reading the Odyssey compares close and free verse translations with prose ones.