He quotes: "This list provides a solid, chronological guide to the majority of the most important books ever written:"
| Epic of Gilgamesh | (c. 2000?-1400? BC) | |
| Old Testament | (c. 1400?-300? BC) | |
| Homer | (fl.c. 850? BC) | The Illiad, The Odyssey |
| Hesiod | (fl.c. 700? BC) | Theogony, Works and Days |
| Confucius | (c. 551-479 BC) | The Analects |
| Aeschylus | (c. 525-456 BC) | Tragedies |
| Pindar | (c. 522-446? BC) | Odes |
| Lao-Tzu | (fl.c. 500? BC) | The Tao Te Ching |
| Sophocles | (c. 495-406 BC) | Tragedies |
| Euripides | (c. 485-406 BC) | Tragedies |
| Herodotus | (c. 484-425 BC) | Histories |
| Thucydides | (c. 460-400 BC) | The Peloponnesian Wars |
| Hippocrates | (c. 460-377? BC) | Medical Writings |
| Aristophanes | (c. 448-380 BC) | Comedies |
| Xenophon | (c. 431-354 BC) | Anabasis, Cyropaedia |
| Plato | (c. 427-347 BC) | Dialogues, The Republic, The Laws |
| Bhagavad-Gita | (c. 400 BC) | |
| Sun-Tzu | (c. 400?-320? BC) | The Art of war |
| Aristotle | (c. 384-322 BC) | Works |
| Epicurus | (c. 341-270 BC) | Letters |
| Aesop | (fl.c. 300 BC) | Fables |
| Euclid | (fl.c. 300 BC) | Elements of Geometry |
| Archimedes | (c. 287-212 BC) | Mathematical Writings |
| Apollonius of Perga | (fl.c. 240 BC) | Mathematical Writings |
| Yoga Sutras of Patanjali | (c. 150 BC) | |
| Cicero | (106-43 BC) | Works, Letters |
| Julius Caesar | (100-44 BC) | The Gallic Wars, The Civil Wars |
| Titus Lucretius Carus | (c. 95-55 BC) | On the Nature of Things |
| Virgil | (70-19 BC) | The Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics |
| Horace | (65-8 BC) | Odes, Epodes, Eistles, Art of Poetry, etc. |
| Livy | (59 BC-AD17) | History of Rome |
| Ovid | (43 BC-AD 17) | Metamorphoses, Fasti, Erotic writings |
| Josephus | (c. 38-100) | The Jewish Wars, Antiquities of the Jews |
| Plutarch | (c. 45-120) | Parallel Lives, Moralia |
| New Testament | (c. 45?-95?) | |
| Tacitus | (c. 55-117) | Agricola, Germania, Annals, Histories |
| Epictetus | (c. 60-120) | Discourses, Enchiridion, Golden Sayings |
| Ptolemy | (c. 100-178) | Almagest, Tetrabiblos |
| Marcus Aurelius | (121-180) | Meditations |
| Galen | (129 - c. 210) | On the Natural Faculties, Exhortation to the Study of the Arts, On Diagnosis in Dreams |
| Plotinus | (205-270) | The Enneads |
| Eusebius of Caesarea | (c. 265-339) | Ecclesiastical History |
| St. Augustine of Hippo | (354-430) | Confessions, City of God |
| The Koran | (c. 632) | |
| Beowulf | (c. 725) | |
| Tales from the 1001 Nights | (c. 850?) | |
| Omar Khayym | (1048-1131) | The Rubaiyat |
| The Mabinogion | (c. 1050?) | |
| Peter Abelard | (1079-1142) | Letters of Abelard and Heloise |
| The Song of Roland | (c. 1100) | |
| Moses Maimonides | (1135-1204) | Guide of the Perplexed |
| The Story of the Volsungs | (12th century) | |
| The Nibelungenlied | (c. 1200) | |
| St. Thomas Aquinas | (1225-1274) | Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles |
| The Saga of Burnt Njal | (13th century) | |
| Dante Alighieri | (1265-1321) | The Divine Comedy, On Monarchy, The New Life |
| Francesco Petrarch | (1304-1374) | Sonnets |
| Giovanni Boccaccio | (1313-1375) | The Decameron |
| Geoffrey Chaucer | (c. 1340-1400) | The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde |
| Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | (Late 14th century) | |
| Sir Thomas Malory | (c. 1405-1471) | The Death of Arthur |
| Leonardo da Vinci | (1452-1519) | Notebooks |
| Giovanni Pico della Mrandola | (1463-1494) | The Dignity of Man |
| Nicolo Machiavelli | (1469-1527) | The Prince, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy |
| Desiderius Erasmus | (c. 1469-1536) | In Praise of Folly |
| Nicolaus Copernicus | (1473-1543) | On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Sheres |
| Ludovico Ariosto | (1474-1533) | Orlando Furioso |
| Baldassare Castiglione | (1478-1529) | The Courtier |
| Sir Thomas More | (c. 1478-1535) | Utopia |
| Martin Luther | (1483-1546) | Writings |
| St. Ignatius of Loyola | (1491-1556) | Spiritual Exercises |
| Francois Rabelais | (c. 1495-1553) | Gargantua and Pantagruel |
| John Calvin | (1509-1564) | Institutes of the Christian Religion |
| Michel de Montaigne | (1533-1592) | Essays |
| William Gilbert | (1540-1603) | On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies |
| Miguel de Cervantes | (1547-1616) | Don Quixote |
| The Book of Common Prayer | (1549) | |
| Edmund Spenser | (1552-1559) | The Faerie Queen |
| Francis Bacon | (1561-1626) | Advancement of Learning, Essays, New Atlantis, Novum Organum |
| Christopher Marlowe | (1564-1593) | Doctor Faustus, Edward the Second |
| Galileo Galilei | (1564-1642) | Dialoges Concerning Two New Sciences, The Starry Messenger |
| William Shakespeare | (1564-1616) | Plays, Sonnets |
| Johannes Kepler | (1571-1630) | Concerning the Harmonies of the World, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy |
| John Donne | (1572-1631) | Poetry |
| William Harvey | (1578-1657) | On the Circulation of Blood, On the Generation of Animals, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals |
| Thomas Hobes | (1588-1679) | Leviathan |
| Rene Descartes | (1596-1650) | Philosophical Writings |
| John Milton | (1608-1674) | Paradise Lost |
| Blaise Pascal | (1623-1662) | Pensees, Provincial Letters |
| Christian Huygens | (1629-1695) | Treatise on Light |
| Benedict de Sinoza | (1632-1677) | Ethics |
| John Locke | (1632-1704) | Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises on Government |
| Sir Isaac Newton | (1642-1727) | Principia |
| Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz | (1646-1716) | Philosophical Writings |
| Daniel Defoe | (1660-1731) | Robinson Carusoe |
| Jonathan Swift | (1667-1745) | Gulliver's Travels |
| George Berkeley | (1685-1753) | Three Dialogues, Treatise Concerning the Princials of Human Knowledge |
| Alexander Pope | (1688-1744) | Poetry |
| Baron de Montesquieu | (1689-1755) | Persian Letters, Spirit of Laws, Principles of Government |
| Voltaire | (1694-1778) | Candide |
| Benjamin Franklin | (1706-1790) | Autobiography |
| Henry Fielding | (1707-1754) | Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones |
| Samuel Johnson | (1709-1784) | Lives of the oets |
| David Hume | (1711-1776) | An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, A Treatise of Human Nature, Dialogues Concerning natural Religion |
| Jean Jacques Rousseau | (1712-1778) | Confessions, Emile, The Social Contract |
| Laurence Sterne | (1713-1768) | Tristam Shandy |
| Adam Smith | (1723-1790) | Wealth of Nations, Theory of Moral Sentiments |
| Immanuel Kant | (1724-1804) | Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena, etc. |
| Edmund Burke | (1729-1797) | Reflections on the Revolution in France |
| Edward Gibbon | (1737-1795) | Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire |
| Thomas Paine | (1737-1809) | Common Sense, The Rights of Man |
| James Boswell | (1740-1795) | Life of Johnson |
| Thomas Jefferson | (1743-1826) | Writings, Letters |
| Antoine Laurent Lavoisier | (1743-1794) | Elements of Chemistry |
| John Jay | (1745-1829) | James Madison (1751-1836) Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) The Federalist |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | (1749-1832) | Faust |
| William Blake | (1757-1827) | Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, Prophetic Books |
| Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier | (1768-1830) | Analytical Theory of Heat |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegal | (1770-1831) | Phenomenology, Logic, Pilosophy of Right, Philosophy of History |
| William Wordsworth | (1770-1850) | Poetic Writings |
| Sir Walter Scott | (1771-1832) | Ivanhoe |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | (1772-1834) | Poetic Writings |
| Jane Austen | (1775-1817) | Emma, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensabilty |
| Karl von Clausewitz | (1780-1831) | On War |
| Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) | (1783-1842) | The Red and the Black |
| Washington Irving | (1783-1859) | Llegend of Sleepy Hollow |
| Constitution of the United States | (1787; effect. 1789) | |
| George Gordon, Lord Byron | (1788-1824) | Poetical Works |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | (1788-1860) | World as Will and Representation, Studies in Pessimism, Essays |
| James Fenimore Cooper | (1789-1851) | Last of the Mohicans |
| Michael Faraday | (1791-1867) | Chemical History of a Candle, Researches in Electricity, The Forces of Matter |
| Percy Bysshe Shelly | (1792-1822) | Poetical Works |
| John Keats | (1795-1821) | Poetical Works |
| Mary Shelly | (1797-1851) | Frankenstein |
| Charles Lyell | (1797-1875) | Principles of Geology |
| Auguste Comte | (1798-1857) | The Positive Philosophy |
| Honore de Balzac | (1799-1850) | Eugenie Grandet, Pere Goriot |
| Alexandre Dumas | (1802-1870) | The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers |
| Victor Hugo | (1802-1885) | The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | (1803-1882) | Essays, Representative Men, Journals |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | (1804-1864) | The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | (1805-1859) | Democracy in America |
| Hns Chrisian Anderson | (1805-1875) | Fairy Tales |
| Elizabeth Barrett Browning | (1806-1859) | Poems |
| John Stuart Mill | (1806-1873) | Autobiography, On Liberty, Representative Government, Utilitarianism, The Subject of Women |
| Edgar Allen Poe | (1809-1849) | Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Poems |
| Nikolai Gogol | (1809-1852) | Dead Souls |
| Abraham Lincoln | (1809-1865) | Speeches |
| Charles Darwin | (1809-1882) | The Decent of Man, The Origin of Species, The Voyage of the Beagle |
| William Makepeace Thackeray | (1811-1863) | Vanity Fair |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | (1811-1896) | Uncle Tom's Cabin |
| Charles Dickens | (1812-1870) | Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, etc. |
| S[oslash]ren Kierkegaard | (1813-1855) | Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Either/Or |
| Claude Bernard | (1813-1878) | Introduction o the Study of Experimental Medicine |
| Charlotte Bront[e-umlaut] | (1816-1855) | Jane Eyre |
| Henry David Thoreau | (1817-1862) | Walden, Civil Disobedience |
| Emily Bront[e-umlaut] | (1818-1848) | Poems |
| Karl Marx | (1818-1883) | The Capitalist Manifesto, Das Kapital |
| George Eliot | (1819-1880) | Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch |
| Herman Melville | (1819-1891) | Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Omoo, Typee, etc. |
| Gustave Flaubert | (1821-1880) | Mademe Bovary |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | (1821-1881) | Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From the Underground, etc. |
| Jules Verne | (1828-1905) | Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Voyage to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, etc. |
| Henrik Ibsen | (1828-1906) | The Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, etc. |
| Leo Tolstoy | (1828-1910) | War and Peace, Anna Karenina |
| Emily Dickinson | (1830-1886) | Poems |
| Louisa May Alcott | (1832-1888) | Little Women, Little Men |
| Lewis Carrol | (1832-1898) | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Snark |
| Mark Twain | (1835-1910) | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, etc. |
| Henry Adams | (1838-1918) | The Education of Henry Adams |
| Thomas Hardy | (1840-1928) | Far From the Maddenng Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Ubervilles |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | (1841-1935) | The Common Law |
| William James | (1842-1910) | Pragmatism, Varieties of Religious Experience, Psychology, etc. |
| Henry James | (1843-1916) | The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, etc. |
| Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche | (1844-1900) | Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Birth of Tragedy, The Will To Power, etc. |
| Robert Louis Stevenson | (1850-1894) | Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, etc. |
| Oscar Wilde | (1854-1900) | The Importance of Being Earnest, Picture of Dorian Gray, etc. |
| Jules Henri Poincare | (1854-1912) | Science and Hypotheses, Science and Method |
| L. Frank Baum | (1856-1919) | The Wizard of Oz, etc. |
| Sigmund Freud | (1856-1939) | General Introduction to Psychoanalsis, The Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Ego and the Id, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, etc. |
| William Butler Yeats | (1856-1939) | A Vision, Poems, Essays |
| George Bernard Shaw | (1856-1950) | Plays, Introductions |
| Joseph Conrad | (1857-1924) | The Heart of Darkness, etc. |
| Max Planck | (1858-1947) | Origin and Development of Quantum Theory, Where is Science Going?, Scientific Autobiography |
| Henri Bergson | (1859-1941) | Creative Evolution, Matter and Memory, Two Sources of Morality and Religion |
| John Dewey | (1859-1952) | Art As Experience, Democracy and Education, The Quest for Certainty, etc. |
| Anton Chekhov | (1860-1904) | Plays |
| Alfred North Whitehead | (1861-1947) | Process and Reality |
| George Santayana | (1863-1952) | The Life of Reason, Persons and laces, Skepticism and Animal Faith, The Last Puritan |
| Max Weber | (1864-1920) | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, etc. |
| Rudyard Kipling | (1865-1936) | Captains Courageous, The Jungle Book, Kim, Poems |
| H. G. Wells | (1866-1946) | The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, An Outline of History, etc. |
| Vladimir Ilich "Nikolai" Lenin | (1870-1924) | The State and Revolution |
| Stephan Crane | (1871-1900) | The Red Badge of Courage |
| Marcel Proust | (1871-1922) | Rememberance of Things Past |
| Bertrand Russell | (1872-1970) | Human Knowledge; Its Scope and Limits, Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Our Knowledge of the External World, The Problems of Philosophy, etc. |
| Sir Winston Churchill | (1874-1965) | History of the English Speaking Peoples, History of the Second World War, etc. |
| Robert Frost | (1874-1963) | Poetry |
| Thomas Mann | (1875-1955) | The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, etc. |
| Jack London | (1876-1916) | The Sea Wolf, White Fang, Call of the Wild, etc. |
| Hermann Hesse | (1877-1962) | Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund, etc. |
| Albert Einstein | (1879-1955) | Evolution of Physics, Meaning of Relativity, On the Method of Theoretical Physics, etc. |
| Ludwig von Mises | (1881-1973) | Human Action, Socialism, etc. |
| Virginia Woolf | (1882-1941) | To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, etc. |
| James Joyce | (1882-1941) | Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, etc. |
| Franz Kafka | (1883-1924) | Short Stories |
| Oswald Spengler | (1880-1936) | The Decline of the West |
| Arnold Toynbee | (1889-1975) | A Study of History |
| J. R. R. Tolkien | (1892-1973) | The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings |
| Aldous Huxley | (1894-1963) | Brave New World, etc. |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald | (1896-1940) | The Great Gatsby |
| William Faulkner | (1897-1962) | Absalom, Absalom! The Sound and the Fury, etc. |
| Trofim D. Lysenko | (1898-1976) | Heredity and Its Variability |
| Ernest Hemingway | (1899-1961) | A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, etc. |
| Martin Heidegger | (1889-1976) | Being and Time, Introduction to Metaphysics, etc. |
| Vladimir Nabokov | (1899-1977) | Lolita, etc. |
| John Steinbeck | (1902-1968) | The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, etc. |
| George Orwell | (1903-1950) | 1984, Animal Farm, etc. |
| Ayn Rand | (1905-1982) | Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, etc. |
| Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn | (1918-) | The Gulag Archipelago, etc. |
| Gabriel Garcia Marquez | (1928-) | Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundered Years of Solitude |