Skip to content

Reading path

If You Only Read One From Each Tradition

A world tour in twelve books. One work from each major literary tradition, chosen not for what is easiest or most famous but for what is most essential, the single book that unlocks an entire culture of storytelling. This is the shortest path to the widest view of what human beings have written. Twelve traditions. Twelve books. One reader who will never see the world the same way again.

In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.

The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.

The route

  • 1. The OdysseyHomer, 750 BCE
  • 2. The Tale of GenjiMurasaki Shikibu, 1010
  • 3. The Divine ComedyDante Alighieri, 1308
  • 4. Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes, 1605
  • 5. HamletWilliam Shakespeare, 1601
  • 6. Dream of the Red ChamberCao Xueqin, 1791
  • 7. Anna KareninaLeo Tolstoy, 1877
  • 8. One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel García Márquez, 1967
  • 9. Things Fall ApartChinua Achebe, 1958
  • 10. BelovedToni Morrison, 1987
  • 11. The Bhagavad GitaVyasa, 200 BCE
  • 12. The StrangerAlbert Camus, 1942