100 Books that Changed the World

Scott Christianson (1947–2017) was a prize-winning author. His books included 100 Diagrams That Changed the World and Freeing Charles: The Epic Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, and Newsday. Colin Salter is a prolific author of literary history. For Batsford he has written 100 Books that Changed the World, 100 Letters that Changed the World and 100 Speeches that Changed the World. He is the author of a biography of Mark Twain and a history of the books in one family’s three-hundred-year-old library. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, dog and bicycle.

Introduction 10

I Ching 14

The Epic of Gilgamesh 16

Torah 18

The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer 20

Aesop’s Fables 22

The Art of War, Sun Tzu 24

The Analects of Confucius 26

Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana 28

The Republic, Plato 30

Elements of Geometry, Euclid 32

De Architectura, Vitruvius 34

Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder 36

The Quran 38

Arabian Knights 40

The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu 42

The Divine Comedy, Dante 44

The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer 46

Gutenberg Bible 48

The Prince, Machiavelli 50

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Nicolaus Copernicus 52

Lives of the Artists, Vasari 54

The Prophecies, Nostradamus 56

Don Quixote, Cervantes 58

King James Bible 60

Shakespeare’s First Folio 62

Micrographia, Robert Hooke 64

Paradise Lost, John Milton 66

Samuel Pepys’s Diary 68

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton 70

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift 72

Species Plantarum, Carl Linnaeus 74

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary 76

The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole 78

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon 80

The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith 82

Rights of Man, Thomas Paine 84

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft 86

Grimm’s Fairy Tales 88

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 90

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 92

Procedure for Writing Words, Music and Plainsong in dots, Louis Braille 94

Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers 96

The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot 98

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 100

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë 102

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens 104

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 106

Roget’s Thesaurus 108

Walden, Henry David Thoreau 110

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 112

Gray’s Anatomy 114

On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin 116

Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management 118

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo 120

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne 112

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll 124

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky 126

Das Kapital, Karl Marx 128

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 130

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain 132

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde 134

The Time Machine, H.G. Wells 136

The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud 138

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust 140

The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Alfred Wegener 142

Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Albert Einstein 144

Ulysses, James Joyce 146

The Trial, Franz Kafka 148

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz 150

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence 152

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque 154

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes 156

How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie 158

Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care 160

The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank 162

Kinsey Reports 164

1984, George Orwell 166

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir 168

A Book of Mediterranean Food, Elizabeth David 170

The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley 172

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 174

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien 176

On the Road, Jack Kerouac 178

The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss 180

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe 182

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 184

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson 186

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn 188

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan 190

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung 192

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 194

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou 196

Ways of Seeing, John Berger 198

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig 200

A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking 202

The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie 204

Maus, Art Spiegelman 206

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling 208

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty 210

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein 212

Acknowledgements 215

Index 219