Buckley Program Releases New Recommended Reading Guide

Our Recommended Reading Guide seeks to provide intellectually curious college students with a resource to help them encounter thought and ideas they do not typically engage with in their classrooms. Of course, because of the enduring nature of the below works on non-fiction and fiction, this list is fit for any curious mind.

We asked our students, supporters, and our whole Buckley community for their favorite books and recommendations. We are so grateful for the tremendous response and participation we received!

Please enjoy the Recommended Reading Guide below.

DISCLOSURE: This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, the Buckley Program earns from qualifying purchases.

The Buckley Program Recommended Reading Guide

William F. Buckley, Jr.

• God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1951)
• Up From Liberalism, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1959)
• Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., Chambers and Buckley (1969)
• Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1997)
• Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches, William F. Buckley, Jr. (2001)
• Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversion, and Illuminations: A William F. Buckley, Jr. Omnibus, ed. Roger Kimball and Linda Bridges (2010)

Classics of Conservatism

• The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek (1944)
• Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver (1948)
• Witness, Whittaker Chambers (1952)
• The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk (1953)
• Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman (1962)
• Suicide of the West, James Burnham (1964)
• The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
• The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, George H. Nash (1976)

History of Ideas: Works of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics

• The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu (1748)
• Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke (1790)
• The Federalist Papers (1788)
• Democracy in America (1835)
• The Law, Frederic Bastiat (1850)
• The American Republic: It’s Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny, Orestes Brownson (1866)
• The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, Auberon Herbert (1885)
• Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield (1928)
• The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis (1943)
• Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt (1946)
• Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl (1946)
• The God that Failed, Richard Crossman (1949)
• Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis (1952)
• Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss (1953)
• The Crisis of the House Divided, Harry Jaffa (1959)
• The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek (1960)
• The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, Jacques Ellul (1972)
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick (1974)
• Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman (1979)
• Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine, Robert Conquest (1986)
• The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom (1987)
• Fear No Evil: The Classic Memoir of One Man’s Triumph Over the Police State, Natan Sharansky (1988)
• Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork (1996)
• Controversial Essays, Thomas Sowell (2002)
• The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, Deirdre McClosky (2007)
• The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt (2012)
• The Crisis of Modernity, Augusto Del Noce (Translation 2014)
• Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, Roger Scruton (2015)
• Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell (2015)
• The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (2018)

Past Buckley Program Speakers

• Things That Matter, Charles Krauthhammer (1976)
• Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Christina Hoff Sommers (1994)
• The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, Christina Hoff Sommers (2000)
• A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy, Harvey Mansfield (2001)
• Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, Carlos Eire (2003)
• April 1865: The Month that Saved America, Jay Winik (2006)
• Infidel: My Life, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2006)
• Coming Apart, Charles Murray (2012)
• Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi (2012)
• The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, Yuval Levin (2014)
• Saving Congress From Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering the People, James L. Buckley (2014)
• What Adam Smith Knew: Moral Lessons on Capitalism from its Greatest Champions and Fiercest Opponents, James Otteson (2014)
• World Order, Henry Kissinger (2014)
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance (2016)
• The Assault on American Excellence, Anthony Kronman (2019)
• Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes (2019)
• A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, Yuval Levin (2020)

Fiction

• Henry V, William Shakespeare (1599)
• Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1859)
• Silas Marner, George Eliot (1861)
• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (1865)
• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
• Middlemarch, Geroge Eliot (1872)
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1878)
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884)
• Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Melville (1924)
• The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)
• Man’s Fate, André Malraux (1933)
• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (1937)
• Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1940)
• The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis (1942)
• The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (1943)
• Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945)
• Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
• The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis (1945)
• 1984, George Orwell (1949)
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1952)
• Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1957)
• Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman (1960)
• Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor (1965)
• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981)
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (2014)