This plan takes you through Camus' essential works over twelve months. Each month focuses on one text with suggested pacing, discussion questions, and connections to Assembly philosophy. Start any month. Skip any month. The plan doesn't care about your compliance.
Month 1
The Stranger (L'Étranger)
Short, devastating, the perfect entry point. Meursault kills a man and feels nothing society tells him he should feel. Read it in two sittings.
Ask yourself: When have I felt disconnected from how I was "supposed" to feel?
Month 2
The Myth of Sisyphus
The foundational text. Dense but not long. Read it slowly — a chapter a week. Reread the final section twice. This is where "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" comes from, and the context changes everything.
Ask yourself: What is my response to the absurd — suicide, faith, or revolt?
Month 3
Caligula (play)
A Roman emperor discovers the absurd and responds with nihilistic tyranny — the wrong response, which Camus dramatizes to show why revolt without limits becomes monstrous.
Ask yourself: Where is the line between revolt and destruction?
Months 4–5
The Plague (La Peste)
A city under quarantine. An allegory for resistance, solidarity, and finding purpose in collective suffering. This is Camus at his most compassionate. Take two months — it rewards slow reading.
Ask yourself: Who are the Dr. Rieuxs in my life — the people who show up without being asked?
Month 6
The Fall (La Chute)
Camus' darkest novel. A former lawyer confesses his moral failures to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar. It's a monologue about guilt, hypocrisy, and the impossibility of innocence. Read it in one sitting if you can.
Ask yourself: What am I confessing to the void that I won't say aloud?
Months 7–8
The Rebel (L'Homme Révolté)
Camus' most ambitious work. A philosophical investigation of revolt and revolution — why rebellion is necessary and where it goes wrong. This is the book that ended his friendship with Sartre. Difficult but essential. Take two months.
Ask yourself: How do I revolt without becoming what I revolt against?
Month 9
Exile and the Kingdom (short stories)
Six stories about people caught between belonging and alienation. Less famous than his novels, more personal. "The Guest" is the best short story about moral ambiguity ever written.
Ask yourself: Where do I feel like an exile? Where do I feel at home?
Month 10
Notebooks 1935–1959
Camus' private journals. Raw, unfinished, sometimes contradictory. This is where you see the person behind the philosophy — the doubts, the drafts, the daily struggle to make sense of things he knew couldn't be made sense of.
Ask yourself: What would my notebooks reveal about the gap between my philosophy and my life?
Month 11
Lyrical and Critical Essays
The early essays — "Nuptials," "The Wrong Side and the Right Side," "Return to Tipasa." This is Camus the sensualist: the sun, the sea, the physical world as a source of joy. "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer" comes from here.
Ask yourself: What is my invincible summer?
Month 12
The First Man (unfinished)
The autobiographical novel found in the car wreck that killed Camus. Unfinished, raw, and deeply personal — a man returning to Algeria to find his father's grave and his own origins. The most human thing Camus ever wrote, published thirty years after his death.
Ask yourself: What am I still trying to understand about where I came from?
After twelve months, you'll know Camus better than most philosophy professors. You still won't have answers. That's the point.
365 days of philosophy delivered to your inbox. Join the Assembly and start your daily practice.
Become a Sisyphean →