What are the “Great Books”? There is no one list, but the term is meant to describe a compilation of classics from Western Literature. Some lists are very long, topping hundreds of books, while others limit themselves to as little as 50, but the idea behind all of them is that these are foundational books – read these and you will have a better understanding of some of the key ideas shaping the world today.

A Christian list would look different than a non-Christian, though a Christian list should contain non-Christian books. Placement is as much or more about a book’s influence as it is about its genuine insight, so pivotal infamous books do make their appearances.

So what exactly might be on such a list? Here is an example:

1. The Unaborted Socrates by Peter Kreeft
2. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
3. Chosen by God by R.C. Sproul
4. Macbeth by Shakespeare
5. Beowulf
6. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
7. The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
8. The Heidelberg Catechism
9. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
10. Time Will Run Back by Henry Hazlitt
11. The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther
12. The Epic of Gilgamesh
13. Divine Comedy by Dante
14. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
15. Animal Farm by George Orwell
16. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
17. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
18. Christianity and Liberalism by John Gresham Machen
19. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
20. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
21. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
22. Art and the Bible by Francis Schaeffer
23. Desiring God by John Piper
24. Aesop’s Fables by, well, Aesop
25. Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
26. City of God by Augustine
27. Here I Stand by Roland Bainton
28. The Prince by Machiavelli
29. 1984 by George Orwell
30. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
31. 95 Theses by Martin Luther
32. Knowing God by J.I. Packer
33. The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoevsky
34. The Giver by Lois Lowry
35. The Republic by Plato
36. The Koran by Mohammad
37. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
38. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
39. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
40. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
41. The Odyssey by Homer
42. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
43. The Westminster Confession of Faith
44. Competent to Counsel by Jay Adams
45. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
46. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
47. Hamlet by Shakespeare
48. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
49. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
50. Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin