I have read dozens of classics. I found a fantastic book: The New Lifetime Reading Plan. It lists and describes hundreds of classic books from a variety of cultures that you should read.
Here is the list. Enjoy.
New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major
Assumes you have read both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.
Part 1.
1. Anonymous ca 2000 BCE The Epic of Gilgamesh
2. Homer ca 800 BCE The Iliad
3. Homer ca 800 BCE The Odyssey
4. Confucius 551-479 BCE The Analects
5. Aeschylus 535-455 BCE The Oresteia
6. Sophocles 496-406 BCE Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
7. Euripides 484-406 BCE Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Woman, Electra, The Bacchae
8. Herodotus ca 484 -425 BCE The Histories
9. Thucydides ca 470-400 BCE The History of the Peloponnesian War
10. Sun Tzu ca 450-380 BCE The Art of War
11. Aristophanes 448-388 BCE Lysistrata, The Clouds, The Birds
12. Plato 428-348 BCE Selected Works : Apology, Crito, Protagoras, Meno, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic
13. Aristotle 384-322 BCE Ethics, Politics, Poetics
14. Mencius ca 400-320 BCE The Book of Mencius
15. Valmiki ca 300 BCE The Ramayana
16. Vyasa ca 200 BCE The Mahabharata
17. Anonymous ca 200 BCE The Bhagavad Gita
18. Sun Ma ChÂ’ien (Sima Qian) ca 145-86 BCE Records of the Grand Historian
19. Lucretius ca 100-50 BCE Of the Nature of Things
20. Virgil 70-19 BCE The Aeneid
21. Marcus Aurelius 122-180 Meditations
Part 2.
22. Saint Augustine 354-430 The Confessions
23. Kalidasa ca 400 The Cloud Messenger, Sakantala
24. Mohammed ca 650 The Koran
25. Hui-neng 648-713 The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
26. Firdausi ca 940-1020 Shah Nameh
27. Sei Shonagon ca 965-1035 The Pillow Book
28. Lady Murasaki ca 976-1015 The Tale of the Genji
29. Omar Khayyam 1048- ? The Rubaiuyat
30. Dante Alighieri 1265-1321 The Divine Comedy
31. Luo Kuan-chung ca 1330-1400 The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
32. Geoffrey Chaucer 1342-1400 The Canterbury Tales
33. Anonymous ca 1500 The Thousand and One Arabian Nights
34. Niccolo Machiavelli 1469-1527 The Prince
35. Francois Rabelais 1483-1553 Gargantua and Pantagruel
36. Wu ChÂ’eng-en 1500-1582 Journey to the West
37. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne 1533-1592 Selected Essays
38. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 1547-1616 Don Quixote
Pat 3.
39. William Shakespeare 1564-1616 Complete Works . especially: The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV 1&2, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Tempest
40. John Donne 1573-1631 Selected Works : Songs and Sonnets, Elegies, First and Second Anniversaries, Holy Sonnets, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, few of the Sermons
41. Anonymous 1618 The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin Ping Mei)
42. Galileo Galilei 1574-1642 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
43. Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679 Leviathan
44. Rene Descartes 1596-1650 Discourse on Method
45. John Milton 1608-1674 Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of ChristÂ’s Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica
46. Moliere 1622-1673 Selected Plays: The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The Would Be Gentleman. also: The Miser, Don Juan, The Imaginary Invalid, The Learned Ladies
47. Blaise Pascal 1623-1662 Thoughts (Penses)
48. John Bunyan 1628-1688 PilgrimÂ’s Progress
49. John Locke 1632-1704 Second Treatise on Government
50. Matsuo Basho 1644-1694 The Narrow Road to the Deep North
51. Daniel Defoe 1660-1731 Robinson Crusoe
52. Jonathan Swift 1667-1745 GulliverÂ’s Travels
53. Voltaire 1694-1778 Candide and other works
54. David Hume 1711-1776 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
55. Henry Fielding 1707-1754 Tom Jones
56. TsÂ’ao Hsueh-chÂ’in 1715-1763 The Dream of the Red Chamber (aka The Story of the Stone)
57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778 Confessions
58. Laurence Sterne 1713-1768 Tristram Shandy
59. James Boswell 1740-1795 The Life of Samuel Johnson
60. Richard B. Morris (Ed.) Basic Documents in American History
61. Clinton Rossiter 1787 The Federalist Papers
Part 4.
62. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832 Faust
63. William Blake 1757-1827 Selected Works
64. William Wordsworth 1770-1850 The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
65. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
66. Jane Austen 1775-1817 Pride and Prejudice, Emma
67. Stendhal 1783-1842 The Red and the Black
68. Honore de Balzac 1799-1850 Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Cousin Bette
69. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882 Selected Works
70. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 The Scarlett Letter, Selected tales
71. Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859 Democracy in America
72. John Stuart Mill 1806-1873 On Liberty, The Subjection of Women
73. Charles Darwin 1809-1882 The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species
74. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol 1809-1852 Dead Souls
75. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 Short Stories and Other Works
76. William Makepeace Thackeray 1811-1863 Vanity Fair
77. Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit
78. Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography
79. Charlotte and Emily Bronte 1816-1855 Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights
80. Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862 Walden, Civil Disobedience
81. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev 1818-1883 Fathers and Sons
82. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels 1818-1883 The Communist Manifest
83. Herman Melville 1819-1891 Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener
84. George Eliot 1819-1880 The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
85. Walt Whitman 1819-1892 Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preaface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass, A Backward Glance OÂ’er Travelled Roads
86. Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880 Madame Bovary
87. Feodor Dostoevsky 1821-1881 Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
88. Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910 War and Peace
89. Henrick Ibsen 1828-1906 Selected Plays : Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken
90. Emily Dickinson 1830-1886 Collected Poems
91. Lewis Carroll 1832-1898 AliceÂ’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
92. Mark Twain 1835-1910 Huckleberry Finn
93. Henry Adams 1838-1918 The Education of Henry Adams
94. Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 The Mayor of Casterbridge
95. William James 1842-1910 The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience
96. Henry James 1843-1916 The Ambassadors
97. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900 Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Geneaology of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works
Part 5.
98. Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 Selected Works including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Civilization and its Discontents
99. George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950 Selected Plays and Prefaces: Androcles and the Lion, Arms and the Man, Candida, The DevilÂ’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Back to Methusela, Saint Joan
100. Joseph Conrad 1857-1924 Nostromo
101. Anton Chekov 1860-1904 Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories
102. Edith Wharton 1862-1937 The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth
103. William Butler Yeats 1965-1939 Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography
104. Natsume Soseki 1867-1916 Kokoro
105. Marcel Proust 1871-1922 Remembrance of Things Past
106. Robert Frost 1874-1963 Collected Poems
107. Thomas Mann 1875-1955 The Magic Mountain
108. E.M. Forster 1879-1970 A Passage to India
109. Lu Hsun 1881-1936 Collected Short Stories
110. James Joyce 1882-1941 Ulysses
111. Virgina Woolf 1882-1941 Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
112. Franz Kafka 1883-1924 The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories
113. D.H. Lawrence 1885-1930 Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
114. Tanizaki Junichiro 1886-1965 The Makioka Sisters
115. Eugene OÂ’Neill 1888-1953 Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long DayÂ’s Journey into Night
116. T.S. Eliot 1888-1965 Collected Poems, Collected Plays
117. Aldous Huxley 1894-1963 Brave New World
118. William Faulkner 1897-1962 The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
119. Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961 Selected Short Stories
120. Kawabata Yasunari 1899-1972 Beauty and Sadness
121. Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986 Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
122. Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977 Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak Memory
123. George Orwell 1903-1950 Animal Farm, 1984
124. R.K. Narayan 1906- The English Teacher, The Vendor of Secrets
125. Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 Waiting for Godot, Endgame, KrappÂ’s Last Tape
126. W.H. Auden 1907-1973 Collected Poems
127. Albert Camus 1913-1960 The Plague, The Stranger
128. Saul Bellow 1915- The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, HumboltÂ’s Gift
129. Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1918- The First Circle, Cancer Ward
130. Thomas Kuhn 1922-1996 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
131. Mishima Yukio 1925-1970 Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
132. Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1928- One Hundred Years of Solitude
133. Chinua Achebe 1930- Things Fall Apart
Further Reading
1. Richard Adams 1920- Watership Down, The Girl in a Swing
2. Kingsley Amis 1922-1995 Lucky Jim
3. Sherwood Anderson 1876-1941 Winesburg Ohio
4. Margaret Atwood 1939- The Handmaids Tale
5. Louis Auchincloss 1917- The Rector of Justin, Collected Stories
6. James Baldwin 1924-1987 GiovanniÂ’s Room, The Fire Next Time
7. John Barth 1930- The Sot-weed Factor
8. Simone De Beauvoir 1908-1986 The Second Sex
9. Paul Bowles 1910- The Sheltering Sky
10. Fernand Braudel 1902-1985 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
11. Berthold Brecht 1898-1956 Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Szechuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle
12. Joseph Brodsky 1940-1996 Forth
13. Pearl S. Buck 1892-1973 The Good Earth
14. Mikhail Bulgakov 1891-1940 The Master and the Margarita
15. Anthony Burgess 1917-1993 A Clockwork Orange
16. Italo Calvino 1923-1985 If on a WinterÂ’s Night a Traveller
17. Truman Capote 1924-1984 Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at TiffanyÂ’s, In Cold Blood
18. Rachel Carson 1907-1964 The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring
19. Willa Cather 1873-1947 My Antonio, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Shadows on the Rock
20. John Cheever 1912-1982 Collected Stories
21. Robertson Davies 1913-1995 The Rebel Angels, WhatÂ’s Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus
22. EL Doctorow 1931- Ragtime
23. Theodore Dreiser 1871-1945 Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy
24. Albert Einstein 1879-1955 The Meaning of Relativity
25. Ralph Ellison 1914-1994 The Invisible Man
26. F. Scott Fitzgerald 1886-1940 This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby
27. Ford Madox Ford 1873-1939 The Good Soldier
28. William Gaddis 1922- The Recognitions, J.R.
29. Federico Garcia Lorca 1898-1936 Collected Poems
30. William Golding 1911-1993 Lord of the Flies, The Spire
31. Robert Graves 1895-1985 I Claudius, Good-Bye to All That
32. Graham Greene 1904-1991 Stamboul Train, The Ministry of Fear, The Quiet American
33. Jaroslav Hasek 1883-1923 The Good Soldier Schweik
34. Joseph Heller 1923- Catch-22
35. John Hersey 1914-1993 The Call, A Bell for Adano, Hiroshima
36. Langston Hughes 1902-1967 Collected Poems
37. John Irving 1942- The World According to Garp
38. Chistopher Isherwood 1904-1986 The Berlin Stories, Chistopher and His Kind
39. James Jones 1921-1977 From Here to Eternity
40. Nikos Kazantzakis 1885-1957 Zorba the Greek
41. Jack Kerouac 1992-1969 On the Road
42. Lao She 1899-1966 Xiang the Camel, Rickshaw
43. Philip Larkin 1922-1985 Collected Poems
44. John LeCarre 1931- The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
45. Calude Levi-Strauss 1908- Tristes Tropiques, Structural Anthropology, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology
46. Sinclair Lewis 1885-1951 Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth
47. David Lodge 1935- Changing Places, Small World
48. Norman Mailer 1923- The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night, The ExecutionerÂ’s Song
49. Andre Malraux 1901-1976 ManÂ’s Fate
50. Mary McCarthy 1912-1989 The Group
51. Carson McCullers 1917-1967 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
52. Margaret Mead 1901-1978 Coming of Age in Somoa
53. Arthur Miller 1915- Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
54. Toni Morrison 1931- Song of Solomon
55. Iris Murdoch 1919- A Severed Head, Sandcastle
56. Robert Musil 1880-1942 The Man Without Qualities
57. Flannery OÂ’Connor 1925-1964 Complete Stories
58. John OÂ’Hara 1905-1970 Appointment at Samarra, Butterfield 8, Collected Stories
59. Jose Ortega Y Gasset 1883-1955 The Revolt of the Masses
60. Boris Pasternak 1890-1960 Doctor Zhivago
61. Georges Perec 1936-1982 Life, A UserÂ’s Manual
62. Harold Pinter 1930- The Caretaker
63. Robert Pirsig 1928- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
64. Ezra Pound 1885-1972 Personae
65. Anthony Powell 1905- A Dance to the Music of Time, A Question of Upbringing
66. Pramoedya Ananta Toer 1925- This Earth and Mankind. Child of All Nations, Footsteps, House of Glass
67. V.S. Pritchett 1900-1997 Complete Collected Stories
68. Barbara Pym 1913-1980 Excellent Women, An Unsuitable Attachment
69. Thomas Pynchon 1937 GravityÂ’s Rainbow
70. Erich Maria Remarque 1898-1970 All Quiet on the Western Front
71. Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926 Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus
72. Ole Edvart Rolvaag 1896-1931 Giants in the Earth
73. Philip Roth 1933- Goodbye Columbus, PortnoyÂ’s Complaint
74. Anatoli Rybakov 1911- Children of Arbat
75. JD Salinger 1919- Catcher in the Rye
76. Jean-Paul Sartre 1905-1980 Being and Nothingness, No Exit
77. Simon Schama 1945- Citizens
78. Leopold Sedar Senghor 1906- Selected Poems
79. Upton Sinclair 1878-1968 The Jungle
80. Isaac Bashevis Singer 1904-1991 Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, The Magician of Lublin
81. Wole Soyinka 1934- The Interpreters, Death and the KingÂ’s Horsemen
82. Wallace Stegner 1909-1993 The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Angle of Repose
83. John Steinbeck 1902-1968 Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath
84. Wallace Stevens 1879-1955 Harmonium, Collected Poems
85. Lytton Strachey 1880-1932 Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria
86. James Thurber 1894-1961 Is Sex Necessary, My Life and Hard Times
87. JRR Tolkien 1892-1973 The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
88. William Trevor 1928- Collected Stories
89. John Updike 1932- Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest
90. Gore Vidal 1925- Myra Breckenridge, Burr
91. Derek Walcott 1930- Omeros, Collected Poems, Ti-Jean and His Brothers
92. James D Watson 1928- The Double Helix
93. Evelyn Waugh 1903-1966 Scoop, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One
94. Eudora Welty 1909- Collected Stories
95. Rebecca West 1892-1983 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
96. Patrick White 1912-1990 Riders in the Chariot
97. Thornton Wilder 1897-1975 Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
98. Tenessee Williams 1911-1983 The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire
99. William Carlos Williams 1883-1963 Collected Poems
100. Richard Wright 1908-1960 Native Son, Black Boy