My Ambitious Summer Reading List

My addiction to books makes me very susceptible to obsessions with lists of books. I am constantly tweaking and adding to my essential reading list, and I get butterflies in my stomach when I come across a new list of books. I am back from college for the summer, and have a few months (in between working, being social and trying to get into better shape) to read what I please as much as I can. I am currently in the midst of a drama-kick, but I do not know how long that will continue. I have amassed a list of books (all of which I own) that I plan to read. This is, obviously, subject to change, but as of right now, here is the list. It will be quite interesting to see how many of these I actually read, and what else I come across over the summer.


Philosophy

Language Truth and Logic by A.J. Ayer
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus
Rameau’s Nephew by Dennis Diderot
D’Alembert’s Dream by Dennis Diderot
Poetry, Language and Thought by Martin Heidegger
Irrational Man by William Barrett
Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin Classics) by Arthur Schopenhauer
This is Not a Pipe by Michel Foucault
Philosophy in the Boudoir by The Marquis de Sade
The Prince by Niccoló Machiavelli
The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

Literature

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobson
The Immoralist by André Gide
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Ignorance by Milan Kundera
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Life is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
The Plague by Albert Camus
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Dubliners by James Joyce
Gilgamesh
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Miscellaneous

Mythologies by Roland Barthes
Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
A Natural History of Latin by Tore Janson
The End of Faith by Sam Harris
The Greek Way to Western Civilization by Edith Hamilton


Drama

Exiles by James Joyce
Volpone by Ben Johnson
Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Phadra by Jean Racine (Wilbur Translation)
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
The Way of the World by William Congreve
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Alcestis by Euripides
The Persians by Aechylus
Seven Against Thebes by Aeshcylus
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill
The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare
The Second Shepherd’s Play
Electra by Sophocles
Philoctetes by Sophocles
The Mandrake Root by Nicolló Machiavelli
Dulcitius by Hrotswitha of Gandersheim
Timon of Athens by Shakespeare
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Miss Julie by August Strindberg
King John by William Shakespeare
Casina by Plautus
The Mother in Law by Terence
Undecided Arsitophanes
Undecided Henrik Ibsen
Undecided Euripides (more)
Undecided George Bernard Shaw

Already Read

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Women at the Thesmophoria by Aristophanes