Great Books Ladder · Free, age 8 to adult

Climb the Great Conversation, one book at a time

Every rung is one of the great books, in the order of the 60-volume Great Books of the Western World: Homer, Plato, Euclid, Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin and the rest. Each has a path for young readers, a full lesson for teens and adults, and a going-deeper path, with short excerpts from public-domain translations, questions to talk over as a family, and practice that checks your answers. No sign-up, nothing to pay.

Start here See every rung

Start here

Three short rungs for the whole family before the first book.

Rung 1How to Read a Great BookHow to choose a book, read it more than once, ask it questions, mark it up, talk about it, and come back to it. Rung 2The Great ConversationWhy people read the great books together, where the idea came from, the case against a fixed list, and how this ladder works. Rung 3The Syntopicon and Mortimer AdlerWho Mortimer Adler was, how his index of great ideas works across the whole set, his other books, and our own idea index.

The ladder, era by era

191 rungs, one for each work (or part of a long work) in the 60 volumes of Great Books of the Western World, 2nd edition (1990). 32 are ready; the rest are being written, science books first. The small number on each rung is its volume.

  • ready to read and practice
  • on the way

The Greeks

32 rungs · 8 ready

Volumes 3 to 10: Homer, the Athenian playwrights, Herodotus and Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid and Archimedes, from about 750 to 212 BC.

Epic and Drama

The First Historians

Plato

Aristotle

Medicine and Mathematics

Rome and Late Antiquity

15 rungs · 4 ready

Volumes 9 to 16: Lucretius, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Nicomachus, Ptolemy, Galen and Augustine, from about 55 BC to AD 430.

Roman Poets

Lives and Histories

Stoics and Plotinus

Numbers, Stars and Medicine

Augustine

The Middle Ages

8 rungs

Volumes 17 to 19: Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales.

Thomas Aquinas

Dante and Chaucer

Renaissance and Reformation

18 rungs · 1 ready

Volumes 15 and 20 to 27: Erasmus, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Montaigne, Calvin, Copernicus, Shakespeare and Cervantes, from 1511 to 1616.

Humanists

Reformation

A New Sky

Shakespeare

Cervantes

The Age of Reason

24 rungs · 14 ready

The 17th century, volumes 15 and 21 to 32: Gilbert, Kepler, Bacon, Harvey, Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Pascal, Milton, Molière, Racine, Huygens and Newton.

The New Science

Philosophers

Pascal

Poets and Playwrights

Newton and Huygens

The Enlightenment

20 rungs · 1 ready

The 18th century, volumes 33 to 42: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, the American founding papers, Gibbon, Boswell and Lavoisier.

Philosophers

Satire

Laws, Society and Wealth

History and a Life

Chemistry

The 19th Century

23 rungs · 1 ready

Volumes 40 to 53: Hegel, Mill, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Faraday, Darwin, William James, and the great novelists from Goethe and Austen to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Twain.

Philosophers

Society and History

Science

Novels and Plays

The 20th Century

48 rungs

Volumes 54 to 60: Freud, then one rung for each author of the six 20th-century volumes, in philosophy and religion, natural science, social science and imaginative literature.

Freud

Philosophy and Religion

Natural Science

Social Science

Imaginative Literature

Your set, volume by volume

Show all 60 volumes and their rungs

For families

  • Three paths on every rung. Children of about 8 to 12 take the young readers' path, with a story or an activity; teens and parents take the full lesson; anyone curious can go deeper.
  • Read aloud together. Many of these books were written to be heard. Ten or fifteen minutes after dinner is enough.
  • Talk it over. Each rung ends with questions for the family. There are no wrong opinions, only reasons to give.
  • Let kids climb on their own. The practice is short and checks answers, so older children can work alone and show you their progress.
  • A note for parents appears on rungs with mature parts (war in Homer, some plays, Freud), with suggestions for what to read with younger children.

Start with How to Read a Great Book; it has a sample family week.

A Great Books year Coming

A second, shorter ladder is on the way: a path you can finish in one year, about 40 XP a day, paired with the fifteen-minute Harvard Classics reading for the same day. Until then, climb this ladder at your own pace.

Harvard Classics Daily

The site's fifteen-minutes-a-day reading, from Charles W. Eliot's 1909 Five Foot Shelf. 55 rungs here link to the days that read the same author: Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Pascal, Harvey, Darwin, Adam Smith, Milton and more.

Great Ideas index

Follow one idea, like justice, courage or motion, through every rung that takes it up. It is our own index, inspired by Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon, and it grows as rungs are built.

Open the ideas index

Your progress

Practice on every rung earns XP and comes back for reviews, saved in this browser with all the other ladders. See your progress · Practice now.

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