Seoul National University has published a list of 100 recommended classic books from places across the world and through the ages, in a move towards strengthening liberal education and fostering the development of creative and intellectual people.

Approximately 2000 SNU professors each listed one of their book recommendations, which the Book Recommendation Selecting Committee reviewed and finally arrived at a list of the 100 recommended books.
Those 100 books, which are well-balanced with both Eastern and Western classical literary works, will be used as reading materials in liberal education classes.
Since the essay writing portion of the entrance examinations has gained importance, these books have become necessary reading material, leading even high school students who want to enter SNU to read these books.

Korean Literature
1. Selection of Korean Classic Poetry
2. Selection of Yun-ahm's Prose
3. Dreaming of Nine Clouds (Mahn-Jung Kim)
4. Story of Chun-Hyang (Korean Traditional Story)
5. A Recording in Leisure Time (Queen Hun-kyung, King Jung's mother)
6. The Unofficial Historical Story of the Chosun Dynasty (Orally Transmitted)
7. A Heartless (Kwang-Soo Lee)
8. The Three Generations (Sang-Sup Yum)
9. The Scenery of Riverside (Tae-won Park) (The Riverside Scenery)
10. Hometown (Ki-Young Lee)
11. Muddy Stream (Man-sik Chae)
12. The Affairs of People (Kyung-ae Kang)
13. The Complete Works of Ji-yong Jung
14. The Complete Works of Suk Baek's Poetry
15. The Descendants of Kain (Soon-Won Hwang)
16. Land (Kyung-Lee Park)
17. An Open Place (In-Hoon Choi)

Foreign Literature
18. The Selection of Dang(唐) Dynasty's Poetry
19. The Dream of the Red Chamber (Xueqin Cao)
20. A Selection of Noh-Shin's Works
21. Flexible Doll (Wang Meng)
22. The Heart (Natsume Sōseki)
23. Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata)
24. Iliad and Odyssey (Homeros)
25. Metamorphoses (Ovidius)
26. A Selection of Greek Tragedy Dramas
27. The Divine Comedy (Alighieri Dante)
28. The Myths of Greece and Rome
29. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (William Shakespeare)
30. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
31. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
32. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
33. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
34. The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot)
35.Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
36. Du Côté de Chez Swann (Marcel Proust), English Title: Headed for swann's home
37.La condition humaine (André Malraux), English Title: Man’s Fate
38. Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
39. Der Zauberberg: Roman (Thomas Mann)
40. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
41. The Tin Drum (Gunter Grass)
42. Don Quixote (Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel G. Marquez)
44. Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges)
45. Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
46. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
47. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
48. A Selection of Chekhov’s Plays (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov)

East Asian History
49. The Three Kingdoms of Korea (Buddhist priest Il-yeon)
50. Cultivating Original Enlightenment (Won-hyo)
51. A Selection of Toe-Gye's Literary Works (Lee Hwang)
52. A Selection of Yul-Gog's Literary Works (Lee Lee)
53. A Selection of Da-San Literary Works (Ya-Kyong Jung)
54. The Book of Changes
55. The Analects of Confucius
56. Mencius
57. Learning and the Great Moderation
58. The Teachings of the Sages and Sects
59. Chuang-tzu
60. The Ah-ham Confucian Classic
61. A Series of History Books
62. Upanishad

Western History
63. The Histories (Herodotus)
64. The History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
65. The Republic (Plato)
66. Ethica Nicomachea (Aristotle), English Title: The Science of Ethics, by Nikomachos
67. Confessions (St. Augustine)
68. The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli)
69. Discours de la méthode (René Descartes)
70. The Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes)
71. Two Treatises of Government (John Locke)
72. De l'esprit des lois (Montesquieu), English Title: The Spirit of the Laws
73. Émile (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
74. The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
75. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Immanuel Kant)
76. The Federalist Papers (Pauline G. Hamilton)
77. Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)
78. On Liberty (Mill)
79. Capital, Volume One (Karl Marx)
80. On the Genealogy of Morality (Friedrich W. Nietzsche)
81. The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
82. Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Max Weber)
83. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Michel Foucault)
84. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Mahatma Gandhi)
85. Material Civilization and Capitalism (Fernand Braudel)
86. Four-Volume History of the World: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, The Age of Extremes (Eric J. Hobsbawm)
87. Tristes-Tropiques (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
88. The Social History of Art (Arnold Hauser)
89. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Marshall McLuhan)

Scientific Technology
90. The Classics of Science
91. Novum Organum (Bacon)
92. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin)
93. Structure of Scientific Revolution (Thomas S. Kuhn )
94. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas R. Hofstadter)
95. Der Teil und das Ganze, Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (Werner Heisenberg), English Title: The Part and The Whole
96. Entropy: A New World View (Jeremy Rifkin)
97. The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)
98. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (Morris Kline)
99. The Edge of Objectivity (Charles Gillispie)
100. The Same and Not the Same (Ronald Hoffmann)

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