100 Most Influential Books

[Penalt]

I feel like such a schmuck.

I read a grand total of 3 and a half of the 100. Time to renew that ole library card I guess. Anyway, so the rest can show off your education, here is the full list.
In no order that I can tell anyway:

The I Ching
The Old Testament
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
The Upanishads
The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu
The Avesta
Analects, Confucius
History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
Works, Hippocrates
Works, Aristotle
History, Herodotus
The Republic, Plato
Elements, Euclid
The Dhammapada
Aeneid, Virgil
On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius
Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria
The New Testament
Lives, Plutarch
Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus
The Gospel of Truth
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus
Enneads, Plotinus
Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
The Koran
Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
The Kabbalah
Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus
Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare
Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
Discourse on Method, René Descartes
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Pensées, Blaise Pascal
Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza
Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley
The New Science, Giambattista Vico
A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.
A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
Common Sense, Thomas Paine
An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin
An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus
Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte
On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz
Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
"Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
First Principles, Herbert Spencer
"Experiments with Plant Hybrids," Gregor Mendel
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
Pragmatism, William James
Relativity, Albert Einstein
The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto
Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung
I and Thou, Martin Buber
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner


I've read the old and new testament, 1984 and the Illiad.

 

[Wrong Element]

I feel like such a schmuck.

I read a grand total of 3 and a half of the 100. Time to renew that ole library card I guess. Anyway, so the rest can show off your education, here is the full list.
In no order that I can tell anyway:

As far as the philosophers and scientists go, it's more important to be familiar with the ideas than it is to have read the original material. One can be a great geneticist without ever having read Mendel, I would think.

And I would hope you could get partial credit if you haven't read (or seen performed) everything in the Shakespeare canon.

 

[restlessnights]

Am I the only one who read that as "The Road to Smurfdom"?

 

[Raidho]

Impressive list. I've read bits and pieces of several of them, but never the full work, wth the exception of Locke's Human Understanding essay. I did a paper on it last spring.

I've started the Republic but never finished it; I kept getting side tracked. Maybe I should get back to it.

It makes me want to put my own list together. I'd have to add Ayn Rand to the list.

 

[Raidho]

Am I the only one who read that as "The Road to Smurfdom"?

No. No, you are not.

 

[HeavyStick]

I don't see the Kama Sutra on the list.

 

[MinkSoul]

Any idea how many of these are on-line?

 

[MechaBlade]

hey, I've read some of those.

I feel like such a schmuck.

I read a grand total of 3 and a half of the 100. Time to renew that ole library card I guess. Anyway, so the rest can show off your education, here is the full list.
In no order that I can tell anyway:

I think it might be in chronological order.

I don't see the Kama Sutra on the list.

None of my erotica is there neither.

 

[MechaBlade]

Any idea how many of these are on-line?

Probably 95%.

 

[NorthernPA4U]

I feel like such a schmuck.

I read a grand total of 3 and a half of the 100. Time to renew that ole library card I guess.

I doubt if yours is that uncommon. I think it would be someone extermely well-read to have finished more than 20% of those. Most of these that I have read I haven't read since college. My list:

The Old Testament
Aeneid, Virgil
The New Testament
Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (not plural)
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
Common Sense, Thomas Paine
An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

I've read parts of several others, but don't believe I've read the whole thing of any of them. Though Sartre ... I know I had to translate some of this in college ... geeze I'm getting old.
[/QUOTE]

 

[Hester]

i've read about 1/3 of that list, mostly in school.

 

[LadyFunkenstein]

Not including "Works, Hippocrates" and the like (a cheat in my opinion) I have read 8 on the list, and quasi-read another 4 at least.

Who's list is it, and what is meant by influential? I'd love to see it in order of supposed influence.

Obviously it is very Western. A true World List - put together by people from every continent - would be very exciting if accompanied by a synopsis.

 

[cheesysusie]

I've read 29 of them. That's a little embarrassing.

 

[Hester]

As far as the philosophers and scientists go, it's more important to be familiar with the ideas than it is to have read the original material. One can be a great geneticist without ever having read Mendel, I would think.

And I would hope you could get partial credit if you haven't read (or seen performed) everything in the Shakespeare canon.

here's mendel in case you want to read his paper.

http://www.mendelweb.org/CollText/homepage.html

 

[hurricane64]

Where's the Stephen King???

Horrors...

 

[Equinoxe]

I am actually somewhat surprised at how many of those I have read. A remarkable number of them.

I think it might be in chronological order.

Not quite. It does seem to be organised with the earlier works first, though not exactly chronologically.

 

[LadyFunkenstein]

Hahahaa on me. I Googled, should have recognized this list. I used to work for the publisher when this book was published. It features a synopsis for each title, and why the author ranked it as such.

If I remember correctly, The Koran is #1.

And rightly so.

 

[LadyFunkenstein]

http://www.amazon.com/Most-Influential-Books-Ever-Written/dp/0806520000

 

[Adrenaline]

Yes, I had to read quite a few of those for school. And others like Candide, Don Quixote, Meditations etc. are in my tottering TBR stacks. But I really don't take these sorts of list seriously, so it's neither here nor there. They're good for blog memes.

 

[EternalWinter]

I just kind of scanned the list, but Candide, The Communist Manifesto, The Prince, And 1984 jumped out at me as ones I've read.

Oh, and half of War and Peace.

I'm a quitter.

 

[Pseudomoniker]

Footnote: Ishmael actually wrote 3 of those books. Even though his name doesn't appear on them as the author.

Carry on.

 

[Xander]

Why is "Mein Kampf" not in there. Since it seems that the super conservatives are adopting the same Idieoligies as Adolf Hitler did in this Book.

 

[MNGuy]

What, read all that and miss porn?

I have read a couple completely, and parts of a few.

Are you trying to shame me into running down to the library and checking them out.



At least if I did that, somewhere there would be an electronic record, implying I read them.