Asilomar Readings
The Great Books Council of San Francisco has held an annual weekend at Asilomar since the 1950s. The following is a nearly-complete record of the fiction, nonfiction and theatre readings that have been discussed each year.
2021
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Margaret Edson, Wit
2020
Canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic
2019
C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures
V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street
Albert Camus, The Possessed
2018
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh
2017
John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
2016
Alexander Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers (selections)
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
2015
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade
2014
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
2013
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
William Shakespeare, King Lear
2012
Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
James Joyce, The Dead
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
2011
Plato, Phaedrus
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra
2010
Francis Bacon, The Four Idols of the Mind
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
2009
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Sophocles, Antigone
2008
Niccolo Macchiavelli, Discourses
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Tina Howe, Painting Churches
2007
Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion
Iris Murdoch, The Bell
Nilo Cruz, Anna of the Tropics
2006
Anthony de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Arthur Miller, The Price
2005
E. O. Wilson, Consilience
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl and Rosa
August Wilson, Fences
2004
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance and American Scholar
Franz Kafka, The Trial
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I
2003
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Anton Chekhov, The Sea Gull
2002
Lewis, Amini, Lannon, A General Theory of Love
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
2001
Matt Riley, The Origins of Virtue
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
2000
Aristotle, Ethics (selections)
Jose Saramago, Blindness
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
1999
Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln's Great Speeches
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
1998
Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
Andre Gide, The Immoralist
David Henry Hwang, M Butterfly
1997
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origins of Inequality
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
August Strindberg, Miss Julie
1996
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
Kobo Abe, Woman in the Dunes
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
1995
Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Euripides, The Trojan Women
1994
Sir Thomas More, Utopia
George Eliot, Silas Marner
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
1993
Plato, Protagoras
Honore de Balzac, Eugenie Grandet
Arthur Miller, The Crucible
1991
Brian Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
1990
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
William Faulkner, The Bear
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
1989
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
Eugene O'Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten
1988
Plato, Meno
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo
1987
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism
J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Euripides, The Bacchae
1986
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Archibald MacLeish, J. B.
1985
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
1984
Hannah Arendt, On Violence
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Solider
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
1983
John Dewey, Freedom and Culture
Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
J. Robinson Jeffers, Dear Judas
1982
Carl Jung, Answer to Job
Albert Camus, The Fall
William Shakespeare, King Lear
1981
John Milton, Areopagitica
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Andre Gide, Two Legends: Oedipus and Theseus
1980
Aristotle, Ethics
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Visit
1979
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
John Gardner, Grendel
Honore de Balzac, Le Pere Goriot
William Butler Yeats, On Baile's Strand
1978
Rene Descartes, Meditations
Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor
George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House
1977
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Saul Bellow, Dangling Man
Peter Shaffer, Equus
1976
Anthony de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
1975
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
William Shakespeare, Richard II
1974
Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
James Madison, James Monroe, etc., The Federalist Papers
Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Hans Christian Anderson, The Emperor's New Clothes
William Shakespeare, Othello
1973
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
Alexsander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Albert Camus, Caligula
1972
Epictetus, Enchiridion (The Handbook)
Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died
William Shakespeare, The Seven Ages of Man (from As You Like It)
1971
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground and The Grand Inquisitor
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
1970
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Plato, Theaetetus
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
1969
King James Bible, The Book of Job
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Leroi Jones, Dutchman
1968
Plato, The Republic (Chapters 4 & 5)
B. F. Skinner, Walden II
Sir Thomas More, Utopia
1967
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus
William Shakespeare, Richard III
1966
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
1965
Jose Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy?
Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
1964
Edmund Sinnott, Biology of the Spirit
Plato, Symposium
Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1962
Plato, The Republic (The Cave)
Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values
Jean Racine, Phaedra
Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck