100 Books that Changed the World

Introduction 10 I Ching 14 The Epic of Gilgamesh 16 Torah 18 The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer 20 Aesop’s Fables 22 The Art of War, Sun Tzu 24 The Analects of Confucius 26 Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana 28 The Republic, Plato 30 Elements of Geometry, Euclid 32 De Architectura, Vitruvius 34 Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder 36 The Quran 38 Arabian Knights 40 The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu 42 The Divine Comedy, Dante 44 The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer 46 Gutenberg Bible 48 The Prince, Machiavelli 50 On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Nicolaus Copernicus 52 Lives of the Artists, Vasari 54 The Prophecies, Nostradamus 56 Don Quixote, Cervantes 58 King James Bible 60 Shakespeare’s First Folio 62 Micrographia, Robert Hooke 64 Paradise Lost, John Milton 66 Samuel Pepys’s Diary 68 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton 70 Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift 72 Species Plantarum, Carl Linnaeus 74 Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary 76 The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole 78 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon 80 The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith 82 Rights of Man, Thomas Paine 84 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft 86 Grimm’s Fairy Tales 88 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 90 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 92 Procedure for Writing Words, Music and Plainsong in dots, Louis Braille 94 Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers 96 The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot 98 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 100 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë 102 David Copperfield, Charles Dickens 104 Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 106 Roget’s Thesaurus 108 Walden, Henry David Thoreau 110 Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 112 Gray’s Anatomy 114 On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin 116 Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management 118 Les Miserables, Victor Hugo 120 Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne 112 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll 124 Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky 126 Das Kapital, Karl Marx 128 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 130 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain 132 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde 134 The Time Machine, H.G. Wells 136 The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud 138 Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust 140 The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Alfred Wegener 142 Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Albert Einstein 144 Ulysses, James Joyce 146 The Trial, Franz Kafka 148 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz 150 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence 152 All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque 154 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes 156 How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie 158 Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care 160 The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank 162 Kinsey Reports 164 1984, George Orwell 166 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir 168 A Book of Mediterranean Food, Elizabeth David 170 The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley 172 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 174 The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien 176 On the Road, Jack Kerouac 178 The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss 180 Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe 182 To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 184 Silent Spring, Rachel Carson 186 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn 188 The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan 190 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung 192 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 194 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou 196 Ways of Seeing, John Berger 198 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig 200 A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking 202 The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie 204 Maus, Art Spiegelman 206 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling 208 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty 210 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein 212 Acknowledgements 215 Index 219