Skip to content
MasterTheBook

Catalog roadmap

The books we plan to build next.

86 public-domain titles are queued for a full study guide — retrieval questions, concept cards, and the five-stage Transfer Ladder. Tell us which ones you want first and that decides the order.

These are planned, not purchasable. Nothing below has a study guide yet and we commit to no dates — a title moves up because readers asked for it, not because a calendar said so.

See the titles you can study todaySee what you’d actually retain — no card required

FAQ

Questions about the roadmap.

Is there a MasterTheBook study guide for the books on this roadmap?
Not yet. All 86 titles listed here are planned across 5 topics: none has a study guide built, none is purchasable, and none carries a committed date. A title moves up because readers asked for it, not because a calendar said so. The 16 titles with finished guides are in the live catalog instead.
How does a title move from this roadmap into the catalog?
Reader demand sets the order. A title moves up because readers asked for it, not because a calendar said so. Each planned title has its own notify signup, and asking for one is the signal that moves it up. When a title is built it leaves this page and appears in the catalog with a finished guide behind it.
What does a title get when its guide is finally built?
A finished guide turns a book into practice: retrieval questions you answer from memory before seeing the text again, a confidence rating on each one so calibration errors surface, and an adaptive spaced review schedule that returns sooner to the concepts you keep missing. Work climbs the Transfer Ladder — recall, explain, recognize, apply, critique — so you end up able to use the idea, not just recognize it. That is retrieval practice rather than rereading, which held up on delayed tests in Roediger and Karpicke (2006). Nothing on this page has that yet.
Can I buy, preorder, or preview a planned title?
No. A planned title is not for sale, cannot be preordered, and has nothing to preview — no curriculum exists behind it yet. A MasterTheBook subscription covers the titles that already have finished guides, and the free preview needs no card. Signing up for notifications costs nothing and gets you one email when that title ships.

Fiction & Literature

41 planned · 9 you can study now

  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    Arthur Conan Doyle

    Twelve self-contained cases built on observation and inference. Episodic structure makes each one a complete reasoning exercise.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

    Lewis Carroll

    A logician's nonsense, which is a different thing from nonsense. The jokes are mostly about rules being followed too exactly.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Oscar Wilde

    Consequence-free living, made literal. Wilde is funniest exactly where the argument is most damning.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Iliad

    Homer

    Not the war but a quarrel inside it — rage, status, and the cost of both. Pairs directly with the strategy shelf.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Jane Eyre

    Charlotte Brontë

    A narrator who refuses every offer that would cost her her own terms. First-person moral reasoning, sustained for a whole book.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Wuthering Heights

    Emily Brontë

    Told by two unreliable narrators about people who are mostly indefensible. Working out what happened is the reading.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Heart of Darkness

    Joseph Conrad

    A novella about a company, a river, and what authority does when nobody is watching. Short, and deliberately hard to resolve.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    Structured as an investigation, so the famous twist arrives as evidence. Very short, and tighter than its reputation.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Candide

    Voltaire

    Voltaire demolishing the claim that this is the best possible world, one catastrophe at a time. Fast, savage, and very funny.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Gulliver's Travels

    Jonathan Swift

    Four voyages, four societies, four angles on your own. The satire only works if you notice which one is being described.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Robinson Crusoe

    Daniel Defoe

    One man inventorying, building, and accounting his way through isolation. The first novel, and oddly a book about systems.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Treasure Island

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    An adventure narrated by a boy who is repeatedly the only one thinking clearly. Long Silver is the best-drawn opportunist in fiction.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Call of the Wild

    Jack London

    A dog stripped down to what survives. Short, hard, and precise about adaptation under pressure.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • White Fang

    Jack London

    The inverse of The Call of the Wild — wildness moving toward trust. Read as a pair, the two arguments cut against each other.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Scarlet Letter

    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A community's punishment examined over years. Hawthorne is interested in the punishers more than the punished.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Little Women

    Louisa May Alcott

    Four sisters choosing between ambition and obligation, and paying for the choices. Warmer than the canon, no less exacting.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Anne of Green Gables

    L.M. Montgomery

    An orphan who talks her way into belonging. A gentler entry to the shelf that still rewards close attention to character.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Secret Garden

    Frances Hodgson Burnett

    Two difficult children and a walled garden. A quietly structured book about attention restoring people.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

    L. Frank Baum

    A journey to an authority who turns out to be improvising. The concepts are unusually clean to isolate and test.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Peter Pan

    J.M. Barrie

    The novel behind the character, and much sharper than the adaptations — a book about refusing to grow up, and the cost.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

    Jules Verne

    Verne's engineer-captain and his machine, described in loving technical detail. Proto-science-fiction with real engineering nerve.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Around the World in Eighty Days

    Jules Verne

    A wager, a schedule, and constraint after constraint. Structurally, a book about planning under uncertainty.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Time Machine

    H.G. Wells

    Wells extrapolating class division across geological time. Short, and the argument is doing the work.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The War of the Worlds

    H.G. Wells

    An invasion narrated by an ordinary man with bad information. One of the truest accounts of how people behave in a crisis.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Invisible Man

    H.G. Wells

    A scientist who gets what he wanted and is destroyed by having it unaccountably. Power without observation, as an experiment.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Metamorphosis

    Franz Kafka

    A man wakes up transformed and the story concerns itself mainly with his employer. Very short, and about work.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Notes from Underground

    Fyodor Dostoevsky

    A narrator arguing, at length and in bad faith, that reason doesn't govern him. The best short entry to Dostoevsky.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Idiot

    Fyodor Dostoevsky

    A genuinely good man dropped into a society that cannot process him. Dostoevsky testing whether goodness survives contact.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Madame Bovary

    Gustave Flaubert

    A life ruined by expectations formed from novels. Flaubert's sentences are the reason this is still studied line by line.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Count of Monte Cristo

    Alexandre Dumas

    A long, immaculately engineered revenge — and a serious question about whether it was worth the years.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Les Misérables

    Victor Hugo

    Hugo on law, mercy, and a pursuit that outlasts its reason. Enormous, digressive, and cumulative in a way summaries can't carry.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • War and Peace

    Leo Tolstoy

    Tolstoy arguing, through hundreds of characters, that history is not made by the people credited with it.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Anna Karenina

    Leo Tolstoy

    Two marriages run side by side as a controlled comparison. Tolstoy is merciless about what each costs.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Paradise Lost

    John Milton

    Milton giving the antagonist the best arguments on purpose. Ambition and pride, worked out in verse that repays being read aloud.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Hamlet

    William Shakespeare

    A play about deferring a decision, and the reasoning that fills the delay. Built for being questioned out loud.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Macbeth

    William Shakespeare

    The shortest tragedy and the fastest moral collapse. Ambition acted on immediately, then defended after the fact.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • King Lear

    William Shakespeare

    A ruler divides his authority on the basis of flattery. Succession, misjudgement, and the consequences arriving in full.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Othello

    William Shakespeare

    How a competent man is talked into certainty about something false. The most useful play on manipulation and confirmation.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Tempest

    William Shakespeare

    Absolute power on an island, voluntarily set down. Shakespeare's last play, and his quietest argument about authority.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Beowulf

    Anonymous

    The oldest long poem in English: three fights, decades apart, and a hard look at what reputation is for.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Divine Comedy

    Dante Alighieri

    A meticulously ordered afterlife in which every punishment fits its argument. The Inferno alone is a full curriculum.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

Philosophy & Ideas

28 planned · 2 you can study now

  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    Benjamin Franklin

    Franklin's own account of building habits deliberately, including the ledger he kept on himself — a systems book two centuries before the genre.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Self-Reliance

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    One essay on trusting your own judgment against consensus. Short enough to finish in a sitting, dense enough to argue with for years.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Enchiridion

    Epictetus

    The Stoic handbook, compressed to what is and isn't within your control — built for memorisation, which makes it ideal for retrieval practice.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • On the Shortness of Life

    Seneca

    Seneca on where time actually goes. The complaint he answers — too busy to think — is the same one most readers arrive with.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Letters from a Stoic

    Seneca

    Stoicism as correspondence rather than doctrine: each letter is a self-contained argument, which makes the reading naturally sessioned.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Utilitarianism

    John Stuart Mill

    Mill's case that consequences are what moral reasoning is about — and his answers to the objections you'll immediately want to raise.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Walden

    Henry David Thoreau

    Two years of deliberate subtraction, recorded in detail. The counter-argument to a distracted life, written before anyone had invented the distractions.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • As a Man Thinketh

    James Allen

    A short Victorian essay on thought shaping character — the direct ancestor of a whole shelf of modern mindset books.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

    Arnold Bennett

    Bennett's 1908 answer to the reader who says there is no time. Brisk, unsentimental, and uncomfortably still accurate.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Poor Richard's Almanack

    Benjamin Franklin

    Franklin's maxims on thrift, work, and self-command. Aphorisms are the easiest form to recall and the hardest to actually apply.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Tao Te Ching

    Laozi

    Eighty-one short passages on acting through restraint. Terse enough that meaning depends on interpretation — which is where coaching earns its place.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Analects

    Confucius

    Recorded conversations on duty, learning, and how a person in authority should behave. Fragmentary by design, cumulative in effect.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Bhagavad Gita

    Vyasa

    A conversation about duty held on a battlefield, at the moment of refusing to act — the founding text on deciding under conflicting obligations.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Nicomachean Ethics

    Aristotle

    Aristotle's argument that character is built by repetition, not resolve. The oldest serious account of how practice becomes disposition.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Rhetoric

    Aristotle

    The original anatomy of persuasion — what makes an argument land, and how to notice when one is being run on you.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Apology, Crito, and Phaedo

    Plato

    Socrates on trial, in prison, and at the end — three short dialogues that are almost entirely cross-examination.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Symposium

    Plato

    Seven speeches on love at a drinking party, each undercutting the last. The structure alone teaches how to compare competing accounts.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Discourses

    Epictetus

    The lectures behind the Enchiridion — longer, more argumentative, and franker about how hard the practice actually is.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Essays

    Michel de Montaigne

    Montaigne thinking on the page and changing his mind in public. He invented the essay by refusing to pretend he had concluded.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Confessions

    Augustine of Hippo

    The first real autobiography, and still one of the sharpest accounts of memory, habit, and wanting to want something else.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Consolation of Philosophy

    Boethius

    Written while awaiting execution: an argument with Philosophy herself about fortune, loss, and what can't be taken.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Discourse on Method

    René Descartes

    Descartes dismantling everything he believed to find one thing he couldn't doubt — method described from the inside.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

    David Hume

    Hume on what we can actually claim to know from experience. The sceptical toolkit for anyone who has to weigh evidence.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Origin of Species

    Charles Darwin

    Darwin building an enormous case from patient observation, and answering his own objections before his critics could.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Varieties of Religious Experience

    William James

    James studying belief as a psychologist rather than a partisan — a model for examining convictions, including your own.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Pragmatism

    William James

    James's test for an idea: what difference does holding it actually make? A working philosophy for people who have to decide things.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • How We Think

    John Dewey

    Dewey on reflective thought and how it can be taught — the closest thing in the canon to a book about this method.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Nietzsche attacking the foundations of inherited morality. Deliberately difficult, and unrewarding to skim — which is the point.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

Politics & Society

10 planned · 2 you can study now

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

    Frederick Douglass

    Douglass on learning to read as an act of resistance. Brief, controlled, and one of the finest pieces of argument in American prose.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Common Sense

    Thomas Paine

    The pamphlet that argued a colony into a country. A masterclass in making a radical position feel like plain reasoning.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Federalist Papers

    Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

    Institutional design argued in public, in real time. Numbers 10, 51, and 78 are still the clearest writing on how to structure power.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • On Liberty

    John Stuart Mill

    Mill's case for why a society should tolerate opinions it believes are wrong — argued closely enough to be tested rather than quoted.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Civil Disobedience

    Henry David Thoreau

    Thoreau on what you owe a government you think is wrong. Short, absolute, and useful precisely where it overreaches.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Democracy in America

    Alexis de Tocqueville

    An outsider's field study of American institutions and habits. His observations about associations and equality still land uncomfortably.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Crowd

    Gustave Le Bon

    An 1895 account of how groups stop reasoning like individuals — written long before anyone could watch it happen at scale.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Politics

    Aristotle

    Aristotle comparing constitutions to work out which arrangements last. Empirical political theory, before the term existed.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Leviathan

    Thomas Hobbes

    Hobbes building the case for authority from first principles about fear and self-interest. Confronting, and hard to dismiss cleanly.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Social Contract

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    Rousseau's answer to Hobbes: legitimacy comes from consent, not fear. Read together, the two define the argument.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

Finance & Decision-Making

5 planned · 2 you can study now

  • Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

    Charles Mackay

    The original catalogue of manias, written in 1841 and describing every bubble since. Pattern recognition you can actually use.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Wealth of Nations

    Adam Smith

    Where specialisation, prices, and self-interest were first worked out at length. Denser and more qualified than the slogans suggest.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • Acres of Diamonds

    Russell Conwell

    A lecture Conwell gave thousands of times: opportunity is usually nearer than the place you're planning to look for it.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Science of Getting Rich

    Wallace D. Wattles

    A 1910 wealth manual that shaped a century of imitators. Worth studying critically — including where its reasoning doesn't hold.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Gospel of Wealth

    Andrew Carnegie

    Carnegie arguing that large fortunes carry an obligation to give them away, and setting out how. Brief, and unusually specific.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

Strategy & Classics

2 planned · 1 you can study now

  • On War

    Carl von Clausewitz

    Where friction, the fog of war, and centre of gravity come from. The vocabulary half of strategy borrows without attribution.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

  • The Book of Five Rings

    Miyamoto Musashi

    A duellist's late-life notes on timing, distance, and training. Concrete where Sun Tzu is abstract.

    Planned — no study guide built yet, and no date promised.

Available now

Start with a book that’s already built.

Every title in the live catalog has a complete curriculum behind it — including the free preview sample when one is offered. The roadmap decides what comes after.

Browse the live catalogRead the science before you decide