Seven categories. Five only in each. Works that I love or learned from or influenced me or that I return to regularly.
Biography and Autobiography
Anthony Holden, Tchaikovsky
Robert Massie, Peter the Great
Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small [a veterinarian in Yorkshire]
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself [poetry as autobiography]
Historical Fiction
Mary Renault, The Persian Boy [Alexander the Great, through the eyes of his lover Bagoas]
Robert Harris, Cicero trilogy [Cicero, though the eyes of his scribe Tiro]
Conn Iggulden, Genghis Khan trilogy
Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy [Michelangelo]
David Nevin, Dream West [John Charles Frémont and the far West of the USA], and Eagle’s Cry [James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase]
Literature
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)
Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943)
Elliott Arnold, White Falcon (1958)
History
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation
Gerald Gunderson, The Wealth Creators: An Entrepreneurial History of the United States
W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy
Science
Armand Marie Leroi, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science
Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
James Watson, The Double Helix
Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character
Sherwin Nuland, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine
Philosophy — General
Plato, Apology and Crito
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Philosophy — Technical
David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses [epistemology]
Tara Smith, The Virtuous Egoist [ethics]
Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto [aesthetics]
Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels [philosophy of history]
George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God [philosophy of religion]
Related: Philosophers, Explained by Stephen Hicks