The Buckley Institute 2024 Reading List
The Buckley Institute is dedicated to free speech and intellectual diversity on campus. Our nearly 800 Buckley student fellows are committed to hearing challenging perspectives and challenging those perspectives in turn. Only through the give and take of earnest debate and discussion can truth be found.
Confronting dissenting ideas through the written word is a crucial part of the endless pursuit of truth.
The Buckley Institute is pleased to present our 2024 reading list, including recommendations solicited from students, faculty, alumni, and supporters. The list below includes fantastic options spanning the classics to new reads, and topics from free speech and education to economics and politics. Buckley’s staff recommended several of the options below as well.
The list below includes some of the works that have paved the way for the decline in America’s colleges and universities that Buckley works so hard to counteract. The “Counterviews” section of the reading list to will give readers a taste of what Buckley and its hundreds of fellows are up against.
This list is by no means comprehensive. It would be impossible to include every book worth reading on one list. Hopefully, those dedicated to free speech and viewpoint diversity on America’s college campuses will find these works informative and intellectually stimulating.
Fiction
1984 by George Orwell
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dune by Frank Herbert
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Gorgias by Plato
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Richard II by William Shakespeare
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Nonfiction
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
American Covenant by Yuval Levin
Areopagitica by John Milton
Believers, Thinkers, and Founders by Kevin Seamus Hasson
Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater
Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold
De Officiis and Orator by Cicero
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Educated by Tara Westover
Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Learning to Disagree by John Inazu
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Miles Gone By by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Nicomachean Ethics and Politics by Aristotle
Of Boys and Men by Richard V. Reeves
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Race and Economics by Thomas Sowell
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell
The Book of the Courtier by Baldesar Castiglione
The Call of the Tribe by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Conservative Mind by Russel Kirk
The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman
The Meaning of Conservatism by Roger Scruton
The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
Truth by Simon Blackburn
Up from Liberalism by William F. Buckley, Jr.
We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi
Witness by Whittaker Chambers
Essays/Short Works
Counterviews
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire
Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marcuse
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo