This is a pretty broad question -- the humanities can range anywhere from literature and "critical theory" through history and philosophy to (somewhat) more "ha

This is a pretty broad question -- the humanities can range anywhere from literature and "critical theory" through history and philosophy to (somewhat) more "hard" subjects like sociology and anthropology. Any specific areas are you interested in? Many of these subjects tend not to have, AFAIK, single authoritative textbooks, the way a CS course on algorithms would be likely to use Cormen et al.'s "Introduction to Algorithms" or an OS class would use Silberschatz or Tanenbaum. Those might exist for anthro and the like, but the softer humanities course tend to focus on a subject and read a bunch of selected texts around that subject. E.g. a philosophy class focused on existentialism would read Sartre's stuff, etc. The courses offered and the texts used might vary from semester to semester, even depending on the personal preferences of the instructor. These are the texts you'll tend to find on lists like this one: https://qz.com/602956/these-are-the-books-students-at-the-top-us-colleges-are-required-to-read/ https://qz.com/602956/these-are-the-books-students-at-the-to.... My best general advice would be to look into the course catalog of a top-ranked university for the subjects you're interested in, and then look at the online bookstore for the texts associated with those courses. E.g. here's the course catalog and online bookstore for UC Berkeley: http://guide.berkeley.edu/courses/ http://guide.berkeley.edu/courses/, https://calstudentstore.berkeley.edu/textbooks https://calstudentstore.berkeley.edu/textbooks (you can search the texts by department and course). If you're okay with a more "classical" perspective on the humanities, in the 20th century there were a few different attempts to catalog the "great books"; e.g. the Harvard Classics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics and full-text available in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics?tab=about https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics?tab=about) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor.... Depending on how deep you want to go, the Oxford "Very Short Introductions" series (https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/ https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/) might be of interest. But this obviously aims more for breadth than depth. Good luck!