GMG's 100 Most Important Books Ever Written!

[Florestan]

Looking over the list, these three seem to be the best choices - really the only choices, IMO.  I'd guess the majority of our ideas of wisdom, human nature, life, our reality, etc. the "Big Ideas" -  have come from one of these books.

Between the Bible and the Divine Comedy there have been Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas (to name but a few of the most important names), to whom Dante is heavily indebted. 

As for Shakespeare, he was born long after Dante's death. 

I'd reformulate your idea as follows: the whole Western literature and philosophy is but a footnote to the Bible and the Greek philosophy. 

[MN Dave]

We only need nine more books. If you haven't chosen three yet, please put on your thinking cap.

[canninator]

Looking over the list, these three seem to be the best choices - really the only choices, IMO.  I'd guess the majority of our ideas of wisdom, human nature, life, our reality, etc. the "Big Ideas" -  have come from one of these books.

No room for science books as important in defining our ideas of life and reality 

[canninator]

We only need nine more books. If you haven't chosen three yet, please put on your thinking cap.

Well Einstein has appeared but I would disagree with the selection, I would have gone for Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Following from that an argument could be made for Wheeler's Gravitation. From the big to the small I could go with Dirac's The Principles of Quantum mechanics. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is hugely influential if flawed. Chomsky and his early work in linguistics maybe? The books by Lister and Pasteur form the foundation of modern medicine. The Trial is taken. There is only one obvious choice left for a book that has profoundly influenced the world as we know it. My vote is for

Harry Potter and the Philosphers Stone (J.K.Rowling)

EDIT: Scratch that, I thought you were asking those who had picked three already, my bad.

[Père Malfait]

Okay, here are two more, to make my three:

L'Étranger, Albert Camus
Der Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

[Philoctetes]

Silence in the Snowy Fields by Robert Bly
Watt by Samuel Beckett

[springrite]

Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet

Lao Zi: Tao De Ching

Rumi's Poetry

[Scarpia]

Looking over the list, these three seem to be the best choices - really the only choices, IMO.  I'd guess the majority of our ideas of wisdom, human nature, life, our reality, etc. the "Big Ideas" -  have come from one of these books.

Maybe you should throw away your computer, and put that wisdom on a nice parchment scroll.

[Todd]

I'd guess the majority of our ideas of wisdom, human nature, life, our reality, etc. the "Big Ideas" -  have come from one of these books.

Nonsense.

[Philoctetes]

Looking over the list, these three seem to be the best choices - really the only choices, IMO.  I'd guess the majority of our ideas of wisdom, human nature, life, our reality, etc. the "Big Ideas" -  have come from one of these books.

I thought that Teresa deleted her account?

[MN Dave]

Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil
Ulysses
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Charles Darwin-On the Origin of Species
Dhammapada - Buddha
Elements (consider it as one book in thirteen volumes) - Euclid
The Bible
Everyone Poops - Taro Gomi
Prose Edda
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
The C Programming Language, Kerninghan and Ritchie (1978)
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy - War and Peace
Dostoevsky 'Crime and Punishment'
Simon Vestdijk, De kellner en de levenden
The Rights of Man:  Thomas Paine
Immanuel Kant "Critique of Pure Reason"
James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock - The Calculus of Consent
Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion
Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
Niccolo Machiavelli - Il Principe
The Communist Manifesto; Marx/Engels
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
The GULAG Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn
The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis
Dostoevsky The Idiot
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Mary Wollstonecraft)
The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
Principia - Isaac Newton
Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo (Galileo Galilei)
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Andreas Vesalius)
PG Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective
Zola, Germinal
Shakespeare's Collected works
Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
"The Master and Margarita", Mikhael Bulgakov
John Ruskin: Modern Painters
The Rupert Bear Annual
Aristotle, Opera Omnia
Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Albert Einstein, Collected Works
Boswell Life of Johnson
Euripides The Bacchae
Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit
Thomas Mann Magic Mountain
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
Edward R. Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
John James Audubon: Birds of America
Divine Comedy - Dante
collected Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Franz Kafka The Trial
Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo
Suetonius: The 12 Caesars
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Nabokov's Pale Fire
To Kill A Mockingbird-Harper Lee
All Creatures Great and Small- James Herriot
Childhood's End - Arthur C Clarke
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Clock without Hands.  Carson McCullers.
William Blake Jerusalem (original illuminated version, not just the text)
Samuel Beckett: Collected Works
Sigmund Freud: Collected Works
Cervantes - Don Quijote
Goethe - Faust
Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-Roald Dahl
Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Koran
Mahābhārata
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys
THE DICTIONARY
The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
St Exupery's 'The Little Prince'
'Great Expectations' by Dickens
Constitution of the United States
Thomas à Kempis - The Imitation of Christ
A Night to Remember - Walter Lord
The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty
Elias Canetti - Auto-da-Fé
Marcel Proust - À la recherche de temps perdu
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Other Poems
L'Étranger, Albert Camus
Der Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
Silence in the Snowy Fields by Robert Bly
Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet
Rumi's Poetry
(96)

[Sergeant Rock]

Joseph Campbell The Masks of God (four volumes)


Sarge

[Scarpia]

Whitman, Leaves of Grass?

[MN Dave]

Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil
Ulysses
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Charles Darwin-On the Origin of Species
Dhammapada - Buddha
Elements (consider it as one book in thirteen volumes) - Euclid
The Bible
Everyone Poops - Taro Gomi
Prose Edda
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
The C Programming Language, Kerninghan and Ritchie (1978)
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy - War and Peace
Dostoevsky 'Crime and Punishment'
Simon Vestdijk, De kellner en de levenden
The Rights of Man:  Thomas Paine
Immanuel Kant "Critique of Pure Reason"
James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock - The Calculus of Consent
Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion
Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
Niccolo Machiavelli - Il Principe
The Communist Manifesto; Marx/Engels
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
The GULAG Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn
The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis
Dostoevsky The Idiot
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Mary Wollstonecraft)
The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
Principia - Isaac Newton
Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo (Galileo Galilei)
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Andreas Vesalius)
PG Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective
Zola, Germinal
Shakespeare's Collected works
Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
"The Master and Margarita", Mikhael Bulgakov
John Ruskin: Modern Painters
The Rupert Bear Annual
Aristotle, Opera Omnia
Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Albert Einstein, Collected Works
Boswell Life of Johnson
Euripides The Bacchae
Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit
Thomas Mann Magic Mountain
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
Edward R. Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
John James Audubon: Birds of America
Divine Comedy - Dante
collected Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Franz Kafka The Trial
Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo
Suetonius: The 12 Caesars
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Nabokov's Pale Fire
To Kill A Mockingbird-Harper Lee
All Creatures Great and Small- James Herriot
Childhood's End - Arthur C Clarke
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Clock without Hands.  Carson McCullers.
William Blake Jerusalem (original illuminated version, not just the text)
Samuel Beckett: Collected Works
Sigmund Freud: Collected Works
Cervantes - Don Quijote
Goethe - Faust
Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-Roald Dahl
Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Koran
Mahābhārata
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys
THE DICTIONARY
The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
St Exupery's 'The Little Prince'
'Great Expectations' by Dickens
Constitution of the United States
Thomas à Kempis - The Imitation of Christ
A Night to Remember - Walter Lord
The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty
Elias Canetti - Auto-da-Fé
Marcel Proust - À la recherche de temps perdu
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Other Poems
L'Étranger, Albert Camus
Der Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
Silence in the Snowy Fields by Robert Bly
Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet
Rumi's Poetry
Joseph Campbell The Masks of God
(97)

[MN Dave]

Whitman, Leaves of Grass?

You've already picked three. 

[Scarpia]

You've already picked three. 

Oooops.

[MN Dave]

Oooops.

Nice suggestion though. My wife has that book in our library. I've never read it. 

[Scarpia]

Nice suggestion though. My wife has that book in our library. I've never read it. 

I think he may have single handedly invented the genre of navel-gazing.

[Drasko]

my 2nd and 3rd picks

Milankovic - Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem
Chekhov - The Three Sisters

[MN Dave]

ONE MORE TO GO!