You won’t have read Heidegger until you’ve (also) read Being and Time. There are two routes toward reading B/T: 1) just read the damn thing, or 2) ease into reading the damn thing.

Pre-Preliminary Texts

First, a note on preliminary texts to ease you into easing you into Heidegger. I suggest something along the lines of John Macquarrie’s Existentialism, which contextualizes Heidegger within the larger field of existentialism, or Macquarrie’s Martin Heidegger, from the Makers of Contemporary Theology series, which contextualizes and summarizes Heidegger within the field of Christian theology. Both are very good explanations of Heidegger’s philosophy by one of Heidegger’s better English translators. In general, I find the Routledge Critical Thinkers series excellent introductions to a thinker’s work, and Timothy Clark’s Martin Heidegger does not disappoint. Even something like Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre offers a suitable introductory chapter on Heidegger.

Reading B/T

There are two main translations in English: J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson’s 1962 translation, and J. Stambaugh’s 1996 translation, which was revised in 2010 by D. Schmidt. Read the Macquarrie/Robinson for the classical terminology, or read the revised Stambaugh translation for a more technically accurate translation but less enjoyable to read. (Don’t bother reading the unrevised Stambaugh.)

Supplemental Texts to B/T

If you take the first route and start with B/T (or when you’re ready to read it), then there are a few supplemental texts I would recommend. You don’t need to read all of them. Just choose one or two. They are listed in order of recommendation: 

• Large’s Heidegger’s Being and Time (Indiana Philosophical Guides)
• Gelven’s A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time
• Critchley and Schurmann’s On Heidegger’s Being and Time
• Gorner’s Heidegger’s Being and Time: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts)
• Wrathall’s How to Read Heidegger
• Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time – an exhaustive 600-page book about everything that went into writing B/T; not for the casual reader

Possible Preliminary Texts to Practice Reading Heidegger

After reading B/T–or to ease into reading B/T–I suggest any/all on this list.

Any one of these three very good collections of essays can serve as a good way to develop your reading skills of Heidegger.

• Basic Writings ed. Krell, especially “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “Letter on Humanism” (after reading Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism), “The Question Concerning Technology,” “Building Dwelling Thinking,” and “The Way to Language”
• Poetry, Language, Thought, especially “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Building Dwelling Thinking”
• On the Way To Language trans. Hertz, especially “The Way to Language”

I think these texts can also be read and appreciated before a deep dive into B/T:

• Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Fried and Polt
• Discourse on Thinking, trans. Anderson and Freund
• What Is Philosophy?, which I successfully taught to undergraduates in an introductory philosophy course
• What Is a Thing
• What Is Called Thinking?

Advanced Heidegger

I recommend waiting to read anything from this list until after you’ve read B/T and some of the preliminary texts; you’ll get more out of them if you wait.

• Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)
• Plato’s Sophist
• Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”
• Parmenides
• Identity and Difference
• On Time and Being
• The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
• The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
• Basic Concepts
• Pathmarks
• Off the Beaten Track
• The Heidegger Reader

Critiques of Heidegger Worth Considering

• Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
• Levinas’ Existence and Existents
• Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger
• Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster

I’ve read almost all of these texts listed here, most of them multiple times, so if you have specific questions, please feel free to ask.