A Therapeutic Library

INTRODUCTION: On Therapeutic Reading

1. Aristotle – Poetics 

2. Michel de Montaigne – Essays

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Reveries of a Solitary Walker

4. André Malraux – The Voices of Silence 

PART ONE: Philosophy

1. Plato – The Republic

2. Epicurus – Letters

3. Seneca – On the Shortness of Life

4. Abu Ali ibn Sīna (Avicenna) – A Treatise on Love

5. Departmental Committee on the Regulation of Motor Vehicles (UK) – The Highway Code

6. Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Uses and Misuses of History for Life  

7. Judith Kerr – The Tiger Who Came to Tea

8. Iris Murdoch – The Sovereignty of Good 

PART TWO: Politics

1. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince

2. Olaudah Equiano – The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

3. Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

4. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – Facundo – Civilisation and Barbarism

5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto

6. John Ruskin – Unto This Last 

7. Jilly Cooper – Riders

PART THREE: History

1. Ibn Khaldun – Kitāb al-ʻIbar

2. Mwengo, Utendi wa Tambuka

3. Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall – Scotland’s Story

4. Lytton Strachey – Eminent Victorians

INTERMEZZO: A Note on Aesthetics

1. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations (also known as The Golden Book)

2. Léon Brunschvicg – The Inheritance of Words, the Inheritance of Ideas

PART FOUR: Religion                                                         

1. The Upanishads

2. Confucius – Analects

3. The New Testament

4. The Qu’ran

5. J.G. Frazer – The Golden Bough

PART FIVE: Psychology                                                     

1. François de La Rochefoucauld – Maxims

2. Stendhal – On Love

3. Sigmund Freud –Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

4. Richmal Crompton – Just William

5. Dale Carnegie – How to Win Friends and Influence People

6. Anna Freud – The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence

7. Edouard de Pomiane – Cooking in Ten Minutes

8. Merze Tate – The Disarmament Illusion

9. Astrid Lindgren – Pippi Longstocking

10. Melanie Klein – Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963

11. Donald Winnicott – Home is Where We Start From

12. Onjali Q. Raúf – The Boy at the Back of the Class

PART SIX: Memoir                        

1. Sei Shonagon – The Pillow Book

2. Chomei – The Ten Foot Square Hut

3. Frederick Douglass – The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

4. Elizabeth Grant – Memoirs of a Highland Lady

5. Halidé Edib – Memoirs

6. Malcom X – Autobiography

INTERMEZZO: A Note on Titles

1. Benedict Anderson – Imagined Communities

2. Kazuo Ishiguro – An Artist of the Floating World 

3. Irina Ratushinskaya – Grey is the Colour of Hope

4. Hilary Mantel – A Place of Greater Safety  

5. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Notes on Grief

PART SEVEN: Nature and Science                                   

1. Pico della Mirandola – On the Dignity of the Human Condition

2. Charles Darwin – The Descent of Man

3. Ruth Benedict – The Chrysanthemum and the Sword  

4. Carlo Rovelli – Seven Brief Lessons on Physics 

5. An Atlas of the World

PART EIGHT: The Arts and Architecture          

1. Kakuzo Okakura – The Book of Tea

2. Heinrich Wölfflin – Principles of Art History

3. Le Corbusier – The Shining City

4. Marion Milner – On Not Being Able to Paint

5. Dick Bruna – Miffy at the Zoo

6. Kenneth Clark – Civilisation

7. Elizabeth David – An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

PART NINE: Coffee table books

1. Palladio – The Four Books of Architecture

2. The Constitution of the United States of America

3. G.W.F. Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit

4. Mao Tse-tung – Quotations from Chairman Mao

5. James Baldwin – The Devil Finds Work

6. Richard Novic – Alice in Genderland

PART TEN: Essays                                                    

1. Germaine de Staël – Weimar

2. Heinrich Heine – The Gods in Exile

3. Virginia Woolf – How it a Strikes a Contemporary

4. Roland Barthes – Mythologies

5. Isaiah Berlin – Two Concepts of Liberty

6. Anaïs Nin – The Novel of the Future 

7. Martha Nussbaum – ‘Steerforth’s Arm’ 

PART ELEVEN: Fiction 

1. Aesop – Androcles and the Lion

2. Murasaki Shikibu – The Tale of Genji

3. One Thousand and One Nights

4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

5. Jane Austen – Mansfield Park

6. Adam Mickiewicz – Pan Tadeusz

7. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary

8. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time

9. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard

10. René Goscinny – Le Petit Nicolas

PART TWELVE: Poetry 

1. The Mu'Allaqat

2. Matsuo Basho – Haiku

3. Phillis Wheatley – A Hymn to the Evening

4. Charles Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du Mal

5. Francis Thompson – In No Strange Land

6. Rabindranath Tagore – Where The Mind Is Without Fear

7. C.P. Cavafy – Ithaka

8. William Butler Yeats – Sailing to Byzantium

9. W.H. Auden – Lullaby

10. Joan Armatrading – ‘Heaven’

EPILOGUE: The Promise of a Book

1. François Fénelon – The Adventures of Telemachus

2. The Private Journal