The 2025 Buckley Summer Reading List is Here
As the summer kicked off, the Buckley Institute called for ideas and recommendations for our 2025 summer reading list. Yalies, faculty, alumni, and supporters submitted their favorite titles spanning the oldies but goodies and those fresh off the press, on topics ranging from foreign policy and economics to philosophy and religion. Our own staff offered a few picks as well.
Among the summer reads, a couple of through lines emerged. Many suggested titles that speak to our current global moment, including warnings concerning the preservation of Western democracy as well as calls to recover America’s founding values. Some called for a return to personal experience in an age of virtual living. Still others highlighted new scholarship on our eponym, William F. Buckley, Jr., published in honor of his centennial this year.
This selection offers a look into what Buckley and its hundreds of fellows are working toward every day at Yale.
Check out the Buckley Institute’s 2025 Summer Reading List!
Classics
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Antigone by Sophocles
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Gawain Poet
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
- Declaration of Independence
- United States Constitution
- Federalist Papers
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
- The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
- Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau
- The Portable Emerson edited by Jeffrey Cramer
- Gorgias by Plato
- On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
- Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
- The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Modern Reads
- American Impresario by Lawrence Perelman
- Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus
- The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska
- On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray
- The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen
- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
- Believe by Ross Douthat
- The Words That Made Us by Akhil Reed Amar
- Doom by Niall Ferguson
- Religion in the University by Nicholas Wolterstorff
- Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
- Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier
- Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein
- Truths by Vivek Ramaswamy
- The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson
- The Arc of the Covenant by Walter Russell Mead
- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker
- Cross Purposes by Jonathan Rauch
- Best Things First by Bjorn Lomborg
- The Man Who Invented Conservatism by Daniel Flynn
- Free Speech by Nadine Strossen
- The End of Race Politics by Coleman Hughes
- American Covenant by Yuval Levin
- Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment by Rick Garnett
- Why We Are Restless by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey
- Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth by Robert P. George
- Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
- The End of Gender by Debra Soh
- Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks
- Liberalism Against Itself by Samuel Moyn