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Great Books Challenge

Struck through = already read.

TL;DR : I'm making my way through a mammoth list of Western Canon books.

This challenge comes from Tommy Collison. All credit for the concept list and otherwise lay at his door. I'm merely taking up the challenge. The below snippets are from his site explaining why...

Familiarity with the great works has moral, civic, social, economic, and progress-related benefits. Taken together, they give a fair history of humanity's inventing, improving, and imagining.

You can probably skip 99.9% of all books. You can read them (to borrow Mortimer Adler's idea) for knowledge or for entertainment, but the books that truly matter likely number only in the few hundred, and not more than a thousand. These are the books, as Adler says, that grow with you, as time goes on. These are the books that have much to teach us on philosophy, science, and living a good life. These are great books.

They form the basis of the humanities, and of a classic liberal arts education. Reading them helps you cheat, as it were, and get ideas and wisdom from other people.

This project has two underlying theories: first, everything in life is about communication, and reading great books improves your ability to think, speak, and write. Being able to articulate your position is a necessary element of leadership. Second, these books are, as Jordan Peterson put it, the intellectual ancestors of many of the great ideas today -- ideas like democracy or how to live a good life. One can debate the Bible's veracity, but not its influence.

This project has two inspirations:

The plan:

To read around 150 classic works in the next four years, one year per topic of: antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and modernity. (Each year also has a couple of "wild card" books to avoid burning out.)

The List

Year One

Year Two

Year Three

Year Four

Last updated 2026-08-14