The programs
Nine reading lists, from four-year college curricula to the published canons that shaped them. Each page keeps the program's own order.
- St. John's CollegeFour-year college curriculum · St. John's College (Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico)St. John's College is a small liberal arts college with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since 1937 every undergraduate has followed the same four-year, all-required curriculum (the "Program"), with no majors, no lectures as the main mode of teaching, and no textbooks: students read primary works in roughly chronological order and discuss them in classes of about fifteen to twenty led by tutors. The seminar, which meets twice a week in the evening for all four years, is the heart of the Program; it is supported by tutorials in language (Greek, then French), mathematics, and music, and by a laboratory sequence in the natural sciences.
The list below is the seminar reading list only, in the order the books are read during the 2025-26 academic year on the Annapolis campus. Freshman year is devoted to the Greeks; sophomore year moves from the Bible and Rome through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; junior year covers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; senior year the nineteenth and twentieth. Tutorial and laboratory readings (Euclid, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and the like) are omitted, as are the elective preceptorial readings of the junior and senior fall. The Santa Fe seminar list differs in a few places (for example Santa Fe sophomores read Maimonides and freshmen read Prometheus Bound).131 works
4 years - Columbia University Core CurriculumFour-year college curriculum · Columbia College, Columbia UniversityThe Core Curriculum is the set of common courses required of every undergraduate at Columbia College in New York. Its two year-long seminars are the oldest and best known: Contemporary Civilization, begun in 1919 as a course on the causes of the First World War and now taken in the sophomore year, and Literature Humanities, begun in 1937 and taken in the first year. Each meets four hours a week in sections of about twenty-two students led by instructors drawn from many departments. Both syllabi are fixed for all sections and revised periodically by faculty committees; instructors add one text of their own choosing each semester.
The lists below give the two current required syllabi in the order the works are read, Fall then Spring. Where the syllabus offers a choice ("either The Prince or the Discourses"), both options are listed with a note. The "Instructor's Choice" slots are not works and are omitted. Readings marked with an asterisk on Columbia's pages are supplied to students as excerpts in the course readers.92 works
2 courses - Great Books of the Western WorldPublished series · Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Great Books of the Western World is a 60-volume anthology published by Encyclopædia Britannica, first in 1952 (54 volumes, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler) and in a revised second edition in 1990 (60 volumes, edited by Adler with Clifton Fadiman and Philip W. Goetz). The set grew out of the Great Books seminars at the University of Chicago and Columbia, and was chosen on three criteria: continuing relevance, rewarding re-reading, and participation in "the great conversation" about the ideas indexed in the Syntopicon.
This file follows the 1990 second edition. Volumes 1 and 2 are the Syntopicon, Adler's two-volume index to 102 "Great Ideas" (his introductory essay The Great Conversation was issued as a separate unnumbered volume). Volumes 3 to 54 are arranged chronologically by the first author in each volume and labelled by author; volumes 55 to 60 are the twentieth-century additions, labelled by subject. The 1990 edition dropped Apollonius, Fielding, Sterne and Fourier, added Calvin, Erasmus, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Diderot, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Balzac, Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Twain and Ibsen, and updated many translations. The Bible is deliberately omitted. Very large collected volumes (the Greek dramatists, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Shakespeare, Freud) list the major works individually and roll the remainder into a note.254 works
60 volumes - The Harvard ClassicsPublished series · P. F. Collier & SonThe Harvard Classics, popularly known as "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books", is a 51-volume anthology of classic works compiled and edited by Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University, with William A. Neilson as assistant editor, and published by P. F. Collier & Son in 1909-10. Eliot had claimed that a liberal education could be had by reading fifteen minutes a day from a collection of books that would fit on a five-foot shelf; Collier challenged him to make the selection.
The volumes are not arranged chronologically or by subject. Single-author volumes sit beside thematic anthologies of essays, prefaces, poetry, drama, sacred writings, voyages and historical documents. Volume 50 holds Eliot's introduction, the Reader's Guide and the indexes; volume 51 holds the Lectures on the Harvard Classics added in 1914. The separate 20-volume Shelf of Fiction (1917) is not included here. For the anthology volumes this file lists the most significant pieces and summarises the rest in a note.191 works
51 volumes - Yale Directed StudiesFour-year college curriculum · Yale UniversityDirected Studies is a selective one-year program for about 125 first-year students at Yale College, founded in 1946. Students take three linked year-long courses, Literature, Philosophy, and Historical and Political Thought, which together make up two-thirds of their first-year schedule. Each course combines a weekly lecture by a Yale faculty member with small discussion sections of about eighteen students, and students write a paper roughly every two weeks. The fall semester in all three courses runs from the ancient Near East and Greece through late antiquity and the Middle Ages; the spring semester runs from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.
The lists below follow the schedules of readings in the three official syllabi, fall then spring, with the assigned selections given in the note. Anthologies and readers on the book list (Early Greek Philosophy, The Stoics Reader, Classical Arabic Philosophy, the Romantic poetry reader) are entered by the works actually assigned from them where the syllabus names them.105 works
3 courses - Basic Program of Liberal Education for AdultsCourse sequence · University of Chicago Graham SchoolThe Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults was founded at the University of Chicago in 1946, in the wake of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler's Great Books work, and is now run by the university's Graham School. It is a four-year, non-credit certificate program for adults with no prerequisites, tests, papers, or grades. Students progress as a cohort, taking one ten-week course in each of the Autumn, Winter, and Spring quarters.
Each course pairs a ninety-minute Seminar, which covers three to five texts, with a ninety-minute Tutorial devoted to the close reading of one or two texts, taught by different instructors and conducted by Socratic discussion. The core sequence below follows the four-year curriculum overview published by the Graham School; seminar and tutorial readings are marked in the notes.58 works
4 years - Thomas Aquinas CollegeFour-year college curriculum · Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, California and Northfield, Massachusetts)Thomas Aquinas College is a Catholic liberal arts college founded in 1971 in Santa Paula, California, with a second campus in Northfield, Massachusetts, opened in 2019. Every student follows the same four-year curriculum, which has no majors, electives, or textbooks: all classes are discussions of primary sources, led by tutors using the Socratic method, and the whole program is ordered toward theology as the highest science, with the works of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas as its backbone.
The curriculum consists of a four-year Seminar in literature, history, and philosophy, plus tutorials in theology (four years), philosophy (three years), mathematics (four years), natural science (four years), language (two years of Latin), and music (one year). The list below gives the Seminar readings for each year first, followed by the theology, philosophy, and principal mathematics and natural science readings, each marked in the note. Laboratory manuals, grammar primers, and collections of scientific papers are omitted.152 works
4 years - Program of Liberal Studies Great Books SeminarsCourse sequence · University of Notre Dame, Program of Liberal StudiesThe Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) is a Great Books major at the University of Notre Dame, founded in 1950 by Otto Bird at the invitation of president John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C. It descends from John Erskine's General Honors course at Columbia and from Mortimer Adler's work at the University of Chicago, and is grounded in a Catholic educational philosophy that values the integration of all forms of knowledge.
At the heart of the major are six Great Books Seminars, taken in sequence over the sophomore, junior, and senior years, in small classes of ten to sixteen students. They begin in Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity and end with works that address contemporary challenges, and are complemented by a required sequence of tutorials in literature, philosophy, theology, political theory, music, history, and the sciences.88 works
6 seminars - How to Read a Book Recommended Reading ListReading list · Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van DorenMortimer Adler's How to Read a Book was first published in 1940 and heavily revised in 1972 with Charles Van Doren. Appendix A of the 1972 edition, "A Recommended Reading List", gives 137 numbered entries in roughly chronological order, each naming an author (or an anonymous work) and one or more recommended works. The authors describe it as a list of books they would choose to take to a desert island, and note that it is confined to the Western tradition because they did not feel competent to judge non-Western books.
Most entries name several works. Here each entry appears as up to four items, one per major work, with the remaining titles named by the authors gathered into the note of the first item for that author.276 works
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