Updated in 2016 (see the list in Portuguese)
Fiction:
Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
The Pilgrim’s Progress -John Bunyan
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Wolfe
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Stranger – Albert Camus
1984 – George Orwell
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Possession – A.S. Byatt
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Autobiography
Augustine – The Confessions
Margery Kempe – The Book of Margery Kempe
Michel De Montaigne – Essays
Teresa Of Avila – The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
Rene Descartes – Meditations
John Bunyan – Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
Mary Rowlandson – The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
Jean Jacques Rousseau – Confessions
Benjamin Franklin – The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Frederick Douglass – Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery
Friedrich Nietzsche – Ecce Homo
Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf
Mohandas Gandhi – An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth
Gertrude Stein – Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Thomas Merton – Seven Storey Mountain
C.S. Lewis – Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life
Malcolm X – The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
May Sarton – Journal of a Solitude
Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago
Charles W. Colson – Born Again
Richard Rodriguez – Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriguez
Jill Ker Conway – The Road from Coorain
Elie Wiesel – All Rivers Run to the Sea
History/Politics
Herodotus – The Histories
Thucydides – The Peloponnesian War
Plato – The Republic
Plutarch – Lives
Augustine – The City of God
Bede – The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Niccolo Machiavelli – The Prince
Sir Thomas More – Utopia
John Locke – The True End of Civil Government
David Hume – The History of England, Volume V
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract
Thomas Paine – Common Sense
Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Alexis De Tocqueville – Democracy in America
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Communist Manifesto
Jacob Burckhardt – Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
W.E.B. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk
Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
Lytton Strachey – Queen Victoria
George Orwell – The Road to Wigan Pier
Perry Miller – The New England Mind
John Kenneth Galbraith – The Great Crash
Cornelius Ryan – The Longest Day
Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique
Eugene D. Genovese – Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Barbara Tuchman – A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – All the President’s Men
James McPherson – Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich – A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
Francis Fukuyama – End of History and the last Man
Drama
Aeschylus – Agamemnon
Sophocles – Oedipus the King
Euripides – Medea
Aristophanes – The Birds
Aristotle – Poetics
Everyman (14th Century)
Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus
William Shakespeare – Richard III
William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare – Hamlet
Moliere – Tartuffe
William Congreve – The Way of the World
Oliver Goldsmith – She Stoops to Conquer
Richard Brinsley Sheridan – The School for Scandal
Henrik Ibsen – A Doll’s House
Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Ernest
Anton Chekhov – The Cherry Orchard
George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan
T.S. Eliot – Murder in the Cathedral
Thornton Wilder – Our Town
Eugene O’Neill – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Jean Paul Sartre – No Exit
Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire
Arthur Miller – Death of a Salesman
Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
Robert Bolt – A Man for All Seasons
Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Peter Shaffer – Equus
Poetry
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Homer – The Iliad and the Odyssey
Greek Lyricists
Horace – The Odes
Beowulf
Dante Alighieri – Inferno
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales
William Shakespeare – Sonnets
John Donne
King James Bible – Psalms
John Milton – Paradise Lost
William Blake – Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Williams Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rossetti
Gerald Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
W.H. Auden
Science
Hippocrates – On Airs, Waters and Places
Aristotle – Physics
Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
Nicolaus Copernicus – Commentariolus
Francis Bacon – Novum Organum
Galileo Galilie – Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
Robert Hooke – Micrographia
Isaac Newton – excerpts from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Georges Cuvier – Preliminary Discourse
Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species
Gregor Mendel – Experiments in Plant Hybridization
Alfred Wegener – The Origin of Continents and Oceans
Albert Einstein – The General Theory of Relativity
Max Planck – The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
Julian Huxley – Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
Erwin Schrodinger – What is Life?
Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
Desmond Morris- The Naked Ape
James D. Watson – The Double Helix
Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene
Steven Weinberg – The First Three Minutes:
A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe
E. O. Wilson- On Human Nature
James Lovelock – Gaia
Stephen Jay Gould – The Mismeasure of Man
James Gleick – Chaos: Making a New Science
Stephen Hawking – A Brief History of Time
Walter Alvarez – T. Rex and the Crater of Doom