How to Read a Book Recommended Reading List

Mortimer 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.