It started as a small shelf of classics. But my purchasing outpaced the speed of my reading. As the shelves grew, I named them. Books to read before I die.

Sounds morbid. I agree. So’s a bucket list. I don’t have a list of things I’d like to do before I die; nor a list of places I’d like to go.  I have wisdom I’d like to acquire.

I’m worse than a bibliophile. I’m a biblio-perfectionist. I’m re-reading earlier books I’ve read, simply to understand them in the context of newfound wisdom of later books. It’s a curse. So is trying to categorize them, but I’ll try.

In no particular order:

 Fiction

• Gulliver’s Travels
• Tales of Two Cities
• Count of Monte Cristo
• John Carter of Mars
• 8 Cousins
• Rose in Bloom
• Anna Karenina
• 1984 – George Orwell
• Animal Farm- George Orwell
• Dawn – Elie Wiesel
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• Grapes of Wrath
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
• Faust – Goethe
• Out of the Silent Planet – C.S. Lewis
• Perelandra – C.S. Lewis
• That Hideous Strength – C.S. Lewis
• Pierced by a Sword – Bud McFarlane

Poetry/Plays

• Inferno
• Purgatorio
• Paradiso
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare
• Our Town – Thornton Wilder
• State of Fear – Michael Crichton
• The Iliad/Odyssey – Homer
• Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
• Walt Whitman
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Word

• City of God – St. Augustine
• Summa Theologica – St. Thomas Aquinas
• The Sadness of Christ – Thomas More
• Humanae Vitae – Pope Paul VI
• The Rule of St. Benedict
• The Splendor of Truth – Pope John Paul II
• Light and Images – Adrienne von Speyr
• Christian Liberty – Martin Luther
• The Imitation of Christ – Thomas a Kempis
• True Devotion to Mary – St. Louis de Montfort
• I Believe in God – Paul Claudel
• The Spirit of the Liturgy – Cardinal Ratzinger
• The Faith of Our Fathers – James Cardinal Gibbons
• The Rosary: Chain of Hope – Benedict Groeschel
• The Screwtape Letters – C.S. Lewis
• Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
• The Abolition of Man – C.S. Lewis
• The Great Divorce – C.S. Lewis
• Filled with all the Fullness of God – Rev. Thomas McDermott
• Where We Got the Bible – Henry Graham

Wisdom

• How to Read a Book- Mortimer Adler
• The Intellectual Life – Sertillanges
• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
• The Republic – Cicero
• The Servile State – Hilaire Belloc
• Aristotle for Everybody – Mortimer Adler
• The Morality of Everyday Life – Thomas Fleming
• The Crisis of Civilization – Hilaire Belloc
• The Art of Virtue – Benjamin Franklin
• Plato’s Republic
• Socrates Meets Sartre – Peter Kreeft
• Philosophy 101 by Socrates – Peter Kreeft
• The Philosophy of Tolkien – Peter Kreeft
• A Refutation of Moral Relativism – Peter Kreeft
• The Summa of the Summa – Peter Kreeft
• Transformation of Christ – von Hildebrand

History

• The Journals of Lewis and Clark
• The Great Heresies – – Hilaire Belloc
• The Crusades – – Hilaire Belloc
• The Federalist Papers
• Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville

Biography/Autobiography

• Confessions – St. Augustine
• Story of a Soul – St. Therese
• Thomas Jefferson: A Life – Willard Randall
• Benjamin Franklin – Autobiography
• Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
• Story of a Soul – St. Therese of Lisieux

Motivation

• SCORE for Life – Jim Fannin
• The Way to Wealth – Benjamin Franklin
• Woman Today – Josemaria Escriva
• Living the Catechism – Christoph Schonborn
• Full of Grace – Johnette Benkovich
• A Mother’s Rule of Life – Holly Pierlot