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The New Lifetime Reading Plan

A chronological list by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major.

Note: They purposely omit The Bible, as they assume everyone has already read it. If you wanted to include this in your plan, simply place it between Aurelius’ Meditations and St Augustine’s Confessions.

Pages: Pages: 1 3 4
1. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics)
by Anonymous
  
2. The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Homer
  
3. The Odyssey
by Homer
  
4.
?
 Analects of Confucius
by Confucius
  
5. Aeschylus I: Oresteia (The Complete Greek Tragedies)
by Aeschylus
  
6.
?
 SOPHOCLES I
by David Grene
  
7. The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides I (The Complete Greek Tragedies)
by Euripides
  
8. The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides III (The Complete Greek Tragedies)
by Euripides
  
9. The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides V
by Euripides
  
10. The Histories (Penguin Classics)
by Herodotus
  
11.
?
 The History of the Peloponnesian War (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (B&N Classics Trade Paper)
by Thucydides
  
12. The Art of War (Shambhala Classics)
by Sun Tzu
  
13. Four Plays by Aristophanes: The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata (Meridian Classics)
by Aristophanes
  
14. Plato Complete Works
by Plato
  
15. The Basic Works of Aristotle (Modern Library Classics)
by Aristotle
  
16. The Book of Mencius (Wisdom of the East Series)  
17. Ramayana
by William Buck
  
18. Mahabharata
by William Buck
  
19. The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics)
by Anonymous
  
20.
?
 Records of the Grand Historian of China: Translated From the Shih Chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien
by Burton Watson
  
21. On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) (Philosophical Classics)
by Titus Lucretius Carus
  
22. The Aeneid: Virgil
by Virgil
  
23. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
by Marcus Aurelius
  
24. Confessions, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio)
by Augustine of Hippo
  
25.
?
 Cloud Messenger Translated from the Sanskrit Megha
by Kalidasa
  
26. The Recognition of Sakuntala: A Play in Seven Acts (Oxford World's Classics)
by Kalidasa
  
27. The Koran (Penguin Classics)
by Anonymous
  
28. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch  
29. Shah Nameh or The Persian Poet Firdausi  
30. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
by Sei Shonagon
  
31. The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Murasaki Shikibu
  
32. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam  
33. The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno (Penguin Classics)
by Dante Alighieri
  
34. Purgatorio (Penguin Classics)
by Alighieri Dante
  
35.
?
 The Divine Comedy III:Paradise (Penguin Classics)
by Dante
  
36. The Romance of Three Kingdoms, Vol. 2
by Guanzhong Luo
  
37. The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics)
by Geoffrey Chaucer
  
38. Tales from the Thousand and One Nights (Penguin Classics)
by Anonymous
  
39. The Prince (Penguin Classics)
by Niccolo Machiavelli
  
40. Gargantua and Pantagruel (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
by Francois Rabelais
  
41. Journey to the West (4-Volume Boxed Set)
by Cheng'en Wu
  
42. Montaigne: Essays
by Michel de Montaigne
  
43. Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  
44. The Riverside Shakespeare
by William Shakespeare
  
45. The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne (Modern Library Classics)
by John Donne
  
46. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei: Vol. 1, The Gathering
by David Tod Roy
  
47. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, "Chin P'ing Mei": Volume Two: The Rivals (Princeton Library of Asian Translations)
by David Tod Roy
  
48. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei, Volume Three: The Aphrodisiac (Princeton Library of Asian Translations)
by David Tod Roy
  
49.
?
 Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems
by Galileo Galilei
  
50. Leviathan (Penguin Classics)
by Thomas Hobbes
  
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Created by midnight_funeral on May 04, 2006.