THE WORLD CANON
The following is a list of important writings from around the world ranging from antiquity to the present day.
Full disclaimer that I have not read all (or even many) of these texts, and the list will change as I read through them myself.
You can see what I am reading on Goodreads, if you are so inclined.
Each work will be listed with its approximate year of publishing using the Holocene Era dating system, which region of the world it comes from, where one can read it, and its topic.
I feel as though this does not need to be said but this page is a constant work in progress.
Region key:
The List
ca. 8500-9000 HE - Rigveda - SAs - Vedic Hymns
ca. 9200 HE - Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey - EU - Greek Myth
-700 - -601
Yajnavalkya - Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
-600 - -501
Vaiśeṣika Sūtra
Nyāya Sūtras
Cārvāka
Rāmāyaṇa
-500 - -401
Confucius: Analects
Katha Upanishad
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripedes
Aristophanes
Herodotus: Histories
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Plato: Dialogues (all)
Hippocrates: Works
Mundaka Upanishad
Zengzi: Great Learning
Zisi: Doctrine of the Mean
-400 - -301
Mencius: Mengzi
Laozi: Daode Jing
Mozi: Mozi
Sun Tzu: The Art of War
Aristotle: Works
Saṃyukta Nikāya
The Shorter Exhortation to Māluṅkya Cūḷa Māluṅkyovāda Sutta
Discourse on the Parable of the Water-Snake
Discourse to Vacchagotta on Fire
Abhaya Sutta: To Prince Abhaya
Potthapada Sutta: About Potthapada
Tevijja Sutta
Discourse with Assalāyana
Discourse to the Layman Sigāla
Samaññaphala Sutta
-300 - -201
Zuang Zhou: Zuangzi
Han Fei: Hanfeizi
Xunzi: Xunzi
Vyāsa - Mahābhārata
Euclid: Elements
Archimedes
Apollonius of Perga
Purva Mimamsa
Dhammapada
Upajjhatthana Sutta
Kalama Sutta
Maha-nidana Sutta
-200 - -101
The Old Testament
-100 - -1
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Virgil: Works
Satipatthana Sutta
Mahatanhasankhaya Sutta
Madhupindika Sutta
0-99
Nicomachus
Plutarch: Parallel Lives
Tacitus
8 - Ovid: Metamorphoses
100-199
Galen: Works
Yoga Sutras of Patañjali
Epictetus: Discourses
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Ptolemy: Works
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna
Lotus Sutra
Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra
Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad
200-299
Plotinus - Enneads
Corpus Hermeticum
300-399
The New Testament
Augustine of Hippo: Works
The Avesta
400-499
Kalidasa: The Recognition of Śhakuntala, Kumārasambhava
500-599
600-699
Quran
Talmud
700-799
800-899
Ānandavardhana: Dhvanyāloka
Diamond Sutra
Platform Sutra
Kūkai: Works
al-Kindi: Works
al-Rāzī: Works
Ariwara no Narihira: Ise Monogatari (after 850)
ca. 10800-10900 HE Tattva-kaumudi - SAs -
900-999
Abhinavagupta: Locana
al-Farabi: Works
Abu Sulayman Sijistani: Works
Yahya ibn Adi: Works
Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus: Works
935 - Ki no Tsurayki: Tosa Nikki
1000-1099
Zhou Dunyi: Taiji Tu Shuo
The Tale of Genji
Sei Shōnagon: The Pillow Book
al-Ghazali: Works
Ibn Sina: Works
Torikaebaya Monogatari
1100-1199
Jayadeva: Gita Govinda
Zhu Xi: Works
Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi: Works
Ibn Rushd: Works
Ibn Tufail: Works
Ibn Bajja: Works
Moses ben Maimon: Works
1200-1299
Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
Kamo no Chōmei: Hōjōki
Dogen: Shōbōgenzō
Moses de León: Zohar
1300-1399
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde
The Tale of the Heike
Kenkō: Tsurezuregusa
Shi Nai’an: The Water Margin
Luo Guanzhong: Romance of the Three Kingdoms
1400-1499
Francesco Colonna: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Wang Yang-ming: Inquiry on the Great Learning, Instructions for Practical Living
1500-1599
Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Michel de Montaigne: Essays
William Shakespeare: Works
William Harvey: Works
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Francis Bacon: Works
John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
Erasmus: In Praise of Folly
Wu Cheng’en: Journey to the West
Tang Xianzu: The Peony Pavilion
1600-1699
Johannes Kepler: Works
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
William Gilbert: De Magnete
Galileo Galilei: Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences, Works
René Descartes: Works
Baruch Spinoza: Ethics
John Milton: Works
Blaise Pascal: Works
Isaac Newton: Works
Christiaan Huygens: Works
John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration, Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Matsuo Bashō: Works
Molière: Works
Jean Racine: Works
Pierre Corneille: Works
1610 - Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng: Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Golden Lotus)
1700-1799
George Berkeley: Works
David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Johnathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Laurence Stern: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Henry Fielding: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu: The Spirit of Law
Jean Jacques Rousseau: A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, A Discourse on Political Economy, The Social Contract
Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations
Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Kant: Works
James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Antoine Lavoisier: Works
Goethe: Works
Voltaire: Candide
Denis Diderot: Rameau’s Nephew
Cao Xueqin: Dream of the Red Chamber
Wu Jingzi: The Scholars
1703 - Chikamatsu Monzaemon: Sonezaki Shinjuu (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki)
1727 - Issai Chozanshi: The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts
1800-1899
John Stuart Mills: Works
Joseph Fourier: Works
Michael Faraday: Works
GWF Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Right
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Charles Darwin: Works
Karl Marx: Das Kapital; Value, Price, & Profit; Wage Labour & Capital; The Communist Manifesto
Leo Tolstoy: War & Peace, Anna Karenina
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
William James: The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism
Sigmund Freud: Works
Søren Kierkegaard: Feat & Trembling
Nietzsche: Beyond Good & Evil
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
Honoré de Balzac: Cousin Bette
Jane Austin: Works
George Eliot: Works
Charles Dickens: Works
Mark Twain: Works
Henrik Ibsen: Works
1900
Herni Bergson: Introduction to Metaphysics
John Dewey: Experience and Education
Alfred North Whitehead: Science and the Modern World
Bertrand Russell: Works
Martin Heidegger: What is Metaphysics?
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Karl Barth: The Word of God and the Word of Man
Jules Henri Poincaré: Works
Max Planck: Works
Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics
Albert Einstein: Works
Arthur Eddington: Works
Niels Bohr: Works
G. H. Hardy: A Mathematician’s Apology
Werner Heisenberg: Physics and Philosophy
Erwin Schrödinger: What Is Life?
Theodosius Dobzhansky: Genetics and the Origin of Species
C. H. Waddington: The Nature of Life
Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
R. H. Tawney: The Acquisitive Society
John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Sir James George Frazer: The Golden Bough
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
Johan Huizinga: The Autumn of the Middle Ages
Claude Lévi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology
Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle
George Bernard Shaw: Saint Joan
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Anton Chekhov: Uncle Vanya
Luigi Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author
Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past: "Swann in Love"
Willa Cather: A Lost Lady
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Virginia Woolf: Works
Franz Kafka: Works
D. H. Lawrence: The Prussian Officer
T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Eugene O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily
Bertolt Brecht: Works
Ernest Hemingway: The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
George Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Congwen Shen: Border Town
1985 - Zhang Xianliang: Half of Man is Woman
1993 - Yu Hua: To Live
1996 - Feng Jicai: Ten Years of Madness
1935 - Xiao Hong: The Field of Life and Death
1942 - Xiao Hong: Tales of Hulan River
Shen Congwen: Works
1960 - Puyi: From Emperor to Citizen
Kenzaburo Oe: Works
Haruki Murakami: Works
Osamu Dazai: Works
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro: Works (A Fool’s Love, The Golden Death)
Akutagawa Ryunosuke: Works
Yukio Mishima: Works
1906 - Natsume Soseki: I Am a Cat
1926 - Edogawa Ranpo: The Strange Tale of Panorama Island
1919 - Yoshiya Nabuko: Flower Tales
Hayashi Fumiko: Works
Enchi Fumiko: Works
1906 - Okakura Kazuko: The Book of Tea
1914 - Natsume Soseki: Kokoro
2000
Yan Galing: Works
2010 - Cheng Nien: Life and Death in Shanghai
2000 - Mohsin Hamid: Moth Smoke
2013 - Mohsin Hamid How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
2006 - Mirza Athar Baig: Ghulam Bagh
2007 - K.C. Kand (ed.) - Masterpieces of Urdu Nazm (compilation)
2008 - Aii: Garin's Uncanny File