My List of 100 Books

by Adam Kotsko

Shortly after I left Oxford, I started keeping a list of books I read, just to keep me from using "I think I read x somewhere..." too often. Then, as it became clear that the list was getting very long, I retrospectively decided that I should try to read 100 books in one year, starting from when I began the list, approximately April 10, 2002. Now that I've accomplished this goal, I decided to publish my results. The first book I started was The Faerie Queene; the last book I finished was Things Fall Apart. Aside from that, I can't remember the chronology very well.

  1. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
  2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies
  3. Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle
  4. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
  5. Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
  6. Gunther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth
  7. Walter Brueggemann, Texts that linger, words that explode
  8. Martin Buber, I and Thou
  9. Albert Camus, The Stranger
  10. John Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
  11. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction
  12. Dante, Inferno
  13. Dante, Purgatorio
  14. Dante, Paradiso
  15. Don DeLillo, White Noise
  16. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
  17. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
  18. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas
  19. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
  20. Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity
  21. George Eliot, Adam Bede
  22. George Faludy, Erasmus
  23. William Faulkner, Marble Faun
  24. William Faulkner, Light in August
  25. Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All
  26. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  27. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
  28. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1
  29. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure
  30. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self
  31. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
  32. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
  33. Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion
  34. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
  35. Gilgamesh
  36. Goethe, Faust, part 1
  37. Richard Harland, Superstructuralism
  38. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
  39. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings
  40. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
  41. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference
  42. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking
  43. Joseph Heller, Catch-22
  44. John Hick, Philosophy of Religion
  45. Ben Jonson, Valpone
  46. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
  47. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
  48. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments
  49. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
  50. Jacques Lacan, The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis
  51. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes To Mind
  52. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity
  53. Gerd Lundemann, Heretics
  54. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
  55. John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity
  56. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being
  57. Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts
  58. Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
  59. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
  60. Herman Melville, Billy Budd
  61. Stephen Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself
  62. Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
  63. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory
  64. Moliere, Tartuffe
  65. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
  66. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
  67. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture
  68. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
  69. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
  70. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  71. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
  72. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals
  73. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner
  74. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
  75. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
  76. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
  77. Oxford History of Western Philosophy
  78. Karl Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato
  79. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
  80. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
  81. Albert Schwietzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus
  82. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
  83. Russell Shorto, Saints and Madmen
  84. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
  85. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
  86. John Updike, A Month of Sundays
  87. John Updike, Rabbit, Run
  88. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
  89. Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
  90. Voltaire, Candide
  91. Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
  92. Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology
  93. Bruce Wilkinson, The Prayer of Jabez
  94. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
  95. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
  96. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
  97. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
  98. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
  99. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  100. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus