Volumes

The Reading Room is organised into shelves. Each shelf collects texts around a single thread: philosophy, science, personal development, the inner life. Here's what's on them.

Shelf I

The Stoic Shelf

Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca. The texts that started it all for Volumes.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius
❦
Volumes ed.

The Enchiridion

Epictetus
✦
Volumes ed.

Letters from a Stoic

Seneca
❀
Volumes ed.

Discourses (selections)

Epictetus
✧
Volumes ed.

Shelf II

Foundations of Thought

The arguments that shaped how power, freedom and rights are understood.

The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli
❦
Volumes ed.

The Art of War

Sun Tzu
✦
Volumes ed.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft
❀
Volumes ed.

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill
✧
Volumes ed.

Shelf III

The Scientific Mind

Writing that changed what we thought we knew.

On the Origin of Species (selections)

Charles Darwin
❦
Volumes ed.

The Descent of Man (selections)

Charles Darwin
✦
Volumes ed.

Relativity: The Special and General Theory

Albert Einstein
❀
Volumes ed.

Shelf IV

The Inner Life

Texts about paying attention to how you live.

Walden

Henry David Thoreau
❦
Volumes ed.

Self-Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson
✦
Volumes ed.

The Dhammapada

Buddhist anthology
❀
Volumes ed.

Tao Te Ching

Lao Tzu
✧
Volumes ed.

Shelf V

The Practice

Practical personal development, not platitudes.

The Science of Getting Rich

Wallace D. Wattles
❦
Volumes ed.

New shelves and new texts get added when they're ready, not when a calendar says so.

Editorial policy

Why these, and not others?

Every text in the Reading Room is read end-to-end before it's added. Comprehension questions are written by hand, not generated. We pick texts that reward slow reading, that hold up to a second pass, and that don't require you to already know the field.

Suggest a text