Penguin's Great Ideas Series

Introduction

According to the Penguin website, the "Great Ideas" Series intends to be a collection of "books that changed the world". It's a collection of non-fiction books or, many times, part of larger works, that have had an impact on modern civilization. Many of those are public domain, and several have been recorded for Librivox. Here is a list of all of them, with their current status. These could be a source of ideas for any Librivox volunteers who enjoy non-fiction. A brief discussion on the subject and the source for this list in the Librivox Forums here. In the list below the numbering of the books in the Great Ideas series has been kept.

Series 1

Already recorded

1) Seneca - On the Shortness of Life

2) Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

3) St Augustine - Confessions of a Sinner

4) Thomas à Kempis - The Inner Life - part of The Imitation of Christ

5) Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince

6) Michel de Montaigne - On Friendship - Part of Book 1 of Montaigne's Essays

7) Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub

8) Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract

9) Edward Gibbon - The Christians and the Fall of Rome - part of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

10) Thomas Paine - Common Sense

11) Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women

12) William Hazlitt - On the Pleasure of Hating - part of The Plain Speaker

13) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto

14) Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Suffering of the World - part of Studies on Pessimism, by Arthur Schopenhauer

15) John Ruskin - On Art and Life - This is actually made up of two parts of works: one, called "The Nature of Gothic", is chapter six of volume two of 'The Stones of Venice ; the second, "The Work of Iron", is Lecture five of The Two Paths

16) Charles Darwin - On Natural Selection - part of On the Origin of Species

17) Friedrich Nietzsche - Why I Am So Wise - Extracts from Ecce Homo and The Twilight of the Idols

Not PD

18) Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

19) Sigmund Freud - Civilization and its Discontents (published in 1930, probably no PD translation)

20) George Orwell - Why I Write

Series 2

Already recorded

21) Confucius - The First Ten Books - These are the first ten books of the Analects or Sayings of Confucius

22) Sun-tzu - The Art of War and Sun-tzu - The Art of War

23) Plato - The Symposium

24) Lucretius - Sensation and Sex - part of On the Nature of Things

25) Cicero - An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom - part of the Philippics

26) The Revelation of St John the Divine - ASV and TCNT and WEB and the Book of Job ASV and WEB and YLT

27) Marco Polo - Travels In the Land of Kubilai Khan - part of the Travels of Marco Polo

30) Francis Bacon - Of Empire - part of Essays of Francis Bacon

31) Thomas Hobbes - Of Man - part of Leviathan

32) Sir Thomas Browne - Urne-Burial - also known as Hydriotaphia

35) Carl von Clausewitz - On the Nature of War - part of Clausewitz's On War

37) Henry David Thoreau - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For - part of Walden

38) Thorstein Veblen - Conspicuous Consumption - part of Theory of the Leisure Class

PD but not recorded

28) Christine de Pisan - The City of Ladies [Couldn't find PD translation]

29) Baldesar Castiglione - How to Achieve True Greatness - part of The Courtier

33) Voltaire - Miracles and Idolatry - excerpts of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary

34) David Hume - On Suicide - Collections of essays by Hume

36) Søren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling

Not PD

39) Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus

40) Hannah Arendt - Eichmann and the Holocaust

Series 3

Already recorded

41) Plutarch - In Consolation to his Wife - Chapter 5 of Plutarch's Moralia

42) Robert Burton - Some Anatomies of Melancholy - excerpts of The Anatomy of Melancholy

43) Blaise Pascal - Human Happiness - selections from Pensées

44) Adam Smith - The Invisible Hand, part of The Theory of Moral Sentiments

45) Edmund Burke - The Evils of Revolution - part of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

46) Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

48) John Ruskin - The Lamp of Memory - Selection from The Seven Lamps of Architecture

50) Leo Tolstoy - A Confession

51) William Morris - Useful Work versus Useless Toil - part of Signs of change: seven lectures

PD but not recorded

47) Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death

49) Friedrich Nietzsche - Man Alone with Himself - part of Human, all too human IN PROGRESS

52) Frederick Jackson Turner - The Significance of the Frontier in American History - Part of The Frontier in American History IN PROGRESS

53) Marcel Proust - Days of Reading - Contains an essay called John Ruskin, one essay called Days of Reading, Swann explained by Proust and extracts from 'Against Saint-Beuve'

54) Leon Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe - This book has collected speeches and writings from 1915 to 1940

55) Sigmund Freud - The Future of an Illusion

Not PD

56) Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

57) George Orwell - Books v. Cigarettes

58) Albert Camus - The Fastidious Assassins

59) Frantz Fanon - Concerning Violence

60) Michel Foucault - The Spectacle of the Scaffold

Series 4

Already recorded

61) Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching; also in German Daodejing

63) Thomas More - Utopia

64) Michel de Montaigne - On Solitude - Part of Book 1 of Montaigne's Essays

65) William Shakespeare - On Power: Hamlet, Act III Scene 3; Richard II, Act III, Scene 2; Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3; The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 2; Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 1; Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene 2 and a bunch of other miscellaneous parts of plays. Plays by Shakespeare here

68) Immanuel Kant - An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?' (in Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 001)

70) Thomas de Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater

72) Abraham Lincoln - The Gettysburg Address Five Versions available

74) Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Grand Inquisitor also available in German

75) William James - On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings - Selections from "Talks to Teachers on Psychology" (in progress) and Pragmatism and "The Meaning of Truth"

76) Robert Louis Stevenson - An Apology for Idlers - part of Essays by R.L. Stevenson

77) W.E.B. Du Bois - Of the Dawn of Freedom - part of The Souls of Black Folk

PD but not recorded

62) Various - Writings from the Zen Masters - In this book there are three books: The Gateless Gate, by Mumon Huikai Wumen (text here), Ten Bulls and Zen Stories

66) John Locke - Of the Abuse of Words - part of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [IN PROGRESS]

67) Samuel Johnson - Consolation in the Face of Death - Collection of writings by Johnson. Text of his complete works here

69) Joseph de Maistre - The Executioner - Selections from the first, second and seventh night of "Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg", or "The Saint Petersburg Dialogues"

71) Arthur Schopenhauer - The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion - Collection of essays by Schopenhauer, some of which are here

73) Karl Marx - Revolution and War] - Anthology of works by Marx published in the New York Tribune between 1853 and 1862. Texts here

Not PD

78) Virginia Woolf - Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

79) George Orwell -Decline of the English Murder

80) John Berger - Why Look at Animals?

Series 5 and final

Already recorded

82) Epictetus - Of Human Freedom - part of Epictetus' Aphorisms

84) Rene Descartes - Meditations

86) John Stuart Mill - On Liberty

87) Charles Darwin - Hosts of Living Forms - part of the Origin of Species

88) Charles Dickens - Night Walks - part of The Uncommercial Traveler

89) Charles Mackay - Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions (Volume 1 of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)

91) George Eliot - Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (in Nonfiction Collection 016)

92) Charles Baudelaire - The Painter of Modern Life

94) Theodore Herzl - The Jewish State also in Hebrew

97) Winston Churchill - We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End - Collection of speeches by Churchill, I couldn't acces which ones exactly. We have some in catalog.

PD but not recorded

81) Chuang Tzu - The Tao of Nature - Part of the Zhuangzi

83) Niccolo Machiavelli - On Conspiracies - part of the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius.

85) Giacomo Leopardi - Dialogue Between Fashion and Death - part of the Zibaldone

90) Jacob Burckhardt - The State as a Work of Art - part of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.

93) Sigmund Freud - The Wolfman - probably the text known as "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis".

95) Rabindranath Tagore - Nationalism

96) Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Imperialism

Not PD

98) Jorge Luis Borges - The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise

99) George Orwell - Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

100) Chinua Achebe - An Image of Africa