On Being Well-Read
Because students always want to know what books professors think they should be reading, we polled our University of Oregon faculty asking them for a list of books they wished students had read prior to taking their courses. But James Crosswhite cautions, “One difficulty with making a list of such books is that the best books, even when they are in our hands, are not always available to us. Our minds and our moods and our lives are not always aligned usefully with the angle of vision in these books. On one reading, a book may seem utterly profound and broadly significant. On another, it may seem opaque or even trivial. In addition, many of the best books cannot simply be read; they require teachers to guide you through them.” With those caveats, and realizing that there are many more, here are some of the texts and authors faculty members in various fields recommend for college students.
The Must-Read List
Humanities
Aeschylus, Oresteia
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic
The Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, the David cycle (from 1 Samuel 25 on), Job,
Ecclesiastes, selected Psalms, Matthew, John, Revelations.
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft
E. H. Carr, What is History?
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Addresses:
“The American Scholar”
“The Divinity School Addresses”
“Self-Reliance”
“Circles”
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
William Faulkner, The Bear
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Frank Herbert, Dune
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Homer, The Odyssey
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Lau-Tsu, Tao Te Jing
Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea
The Tombs of Atuan
The Farthest Shore
Tehanu: the Last Book of
Earthsea
Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Inaugural Addresses
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Plato, The Apology
Crito
The Symposium
Phaedrus
The Republic
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
Edward Said, Orientalism
William Shakespeare, The Sonnets
Romeo and Juliet
Hamlet
Ninian Smart, Asian Religions
R. L. Stevenson, Kidnapped
Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
H. D. Thoreau, Walden
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, First Edition
Elie Wiesel, Night Trilogy
Business
Kenneth R. Andrews and Donald K. David, Ethics in Practice: Managing the Moral Corporation
Richard Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute?
Mohamed Zairi, Benchmarking for Best Practice
Journalism
The New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post
Education
Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower
The Bible, esp. Genesis
Jose Antonio Burciaga, Drink Cultura: Chicanismo
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Crace
Savage Inequalities
Alessandro Marizoni, The Betrothed
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary
Music
The Bible, esp. Psalms and The New Testament
Charles Burney, Present State of Music in France and Italy
Cynthia Fox, The Real Figaro
John Rosselli, Music and Musicians in Nineteenth Century Italy
Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music
Languages
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
The Bible, Job, Ecclesiastes, The Gospels, and Revelation
Jorg e Luis Borges, Ficciones
Can Xue, Yellow Mud Street
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Kirk A. Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Greek mythology
Washington Irving, The Alhambra
Lu Hsun (XuN), The True Story of Ah-Q
Irving Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems
Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve
Babel
Red Cavalry
Virgil, Aeneid
Sciences and Mathematics
Ronald Breslow, Chemistry Today and Tomorrow
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Albert Einstein, Relativity
Ernest Eliel, From Cologne to Chapel Hill
R. P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
The Panda’s Thumb
The Flamingo’s Smile
Bernard Jaffe, Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry
Thomas Lewis, Et cetera, Et cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
The Manipulation of Life
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher
F. David Peat, Einstein’s Moon
Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life
Social Sciences
Herbert Asher, Polling and the Public: What Every Citizen Should Know
Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men
Harold Brown, Preparing for the 21st Century
Robert Caro, Means of Assent
Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
Anthony Lewis, Gideon’s Trumpet
Kristen Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Mark Monmonier, How to Live with Maps
Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations
Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action
Edward Sapir, The Psychology of Culture
E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People
Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct
Plato, The Republic
Huston Smith, The Religions of Man
Katie Smith, The Human Farm
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Kenneth Waltz, Theories of International Politics
Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality
Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist
Denis Wood, The Power of Maps
