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.

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