Take a look at my reading list.

It’s essentially an anthology of world literature—a curated collection of major narrative works. I put it together as a kind of roadmap to the evolution of human storytelling. It begins with some of the earliest surviving texts from over 4,000 years ago and moves all the way to contemporary literature. I intentionally left out autobiographies and lyrical poetry since I wanted to focus strictly on narrative forms.

I also tried to make it as globally representative as possible, including works from both Western and Eastern traditions rather than sticking to just one canon. I don’t have formal academic training in literature, so the list leans heavily toward well-known classics, along with some personal favorites that may not have had a massive impact on world literature but that I think are great (or literature that is just great but is not impactful in the way that it could count and be put in a world literature anthology). That’s also why you’ll notice multiple entries from authors I want to explore more deeply—like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and Virginia Woolf, etc.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Unknown, 2100 BCE
The Tale of Sinuhe, Unknown, 1900 BCE
The Iliad, Homer, 750 BCE
The Odyssey, Homer, 740 BCE
Oresteia, Aeschylus, 458 BCE
Antigone, Sophocles, 441 BCE
Medea, Euripides, 431 BCE
Oedipus the King, Sophocles, 429 BCE
Lysistrata, Aristophanes, 411 BCE
The Recognition of Shakuntala, Kalidasa, 400 BCE
Mahabharata, Vyasa, 399 BCE
The Panchatantra, Vishnu Sharma, 300 BCE
Ramayana, Valmiki, 200 BCE
The Aeneid, Virgil, 19 BCE
Metamorphoses, Ovid, 8 CE
The Golden Ass, Apuleius, 158
One Thousand and One Nights, Unknown, 800
Beowulf, Unknown, 1000
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, 1001
Shahnameh, Ferdowsi, 1010
The Epic of Banu Hilal, Unknown, 1100
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Ibn Tufayl, 1170
Layli and Majnun, Nezami Ganjavi, 1188
Epic of Sundiata, Unknown, 1235
Njal's Saga, Iceland, 1280
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, 1308
Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, 1353
The Water Margin, Shi Naian, 1370
The Tale of the Heike, unknown, 1371
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Guanzhong Luo, 1400
The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan, 1405
Le Morte d'Arthur, Thomas Malory, 1485
Utopia, Thomas More, 1516
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais, 1532
Popol Vuh, Dennis Tedlock, 1552
Lazarillo de Tormes, Unknown, 1554
The Lusiad, Luís Vaz Camões, 1572
Essays, Michel de Montaigne, 1580
Journey to the West, Wu Cheng'en, 1592
The Peony Pavilion, Tang Xianzu, 1598
Hamlet, William Shakespeare, 1600
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
Macbeth, William Shakespeare, 1606
King Lear, William Shakespeare, 1608
Life is a dream, Pedro Calderon de la barca, 1635
Tartuffe, Moliere, 1664
Paradise Lost, John Milton, 1667
Phèdre, Jean Racine, 1677
The Princess of Cleves, Madame de La Fayette, 1678
Oroonoko, Aphra Behn, 1688
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, 1719
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726
Pamela, Samuel Richardson, 1740
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding, 1749
Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin, 1754
Candide, Voltaire, 1759
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, 1759
The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole, 1764
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774
Dangerous Liaison, Pierre Choderlos de laclos, 1782
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, Denis Diderot, 1796
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808
Household Tales, Brothers Grimm, 1812
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1813
Emma, Jane Austen, 1815
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818
The Red and the Black, Stendhal, 1830
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo, 1831
Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin, 1833
Father Goriot, Honoré de Balzac, 1835
A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov, 1840
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol, 1842
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, 1844
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1847
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 1849
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, 1851
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1857
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, 1860
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1860
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, 1862
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, 1862
Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, 1868
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, 1869
A Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert, 1869
Middlemarch, George Eliot, 1871
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, 1877
A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen, 1879
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis, 1881
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, 1881
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1884
short stories, Guy de Maupassant, 1885
Germinal, Émile Zola, 1885
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy, 1886
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 1890
Hunger, Knut Hamsun, 1890
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, 1891
The Time Machine, H. G. Wells, 1895
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy, 1895
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde, 1895
Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad, 1900
The Stories of Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, 1900
Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov, 1901
Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann, 1901
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad, 1904
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov, 1904
Petersburg, Andrei Bely, 1913
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, 1913
Dubliners, James Joyce, 1914
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, 1914
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, 1915
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1916
The True Story Of Ah Q, Lu Xun, 1922
Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
Confessions, Italo Svevo, 1923
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, 1924
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
The Trial, Franz Kafka, 1925
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, 1926
The Castle, Franz Kafka, 1926
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse, 1927
And Quiet Flows The Don, Mikhail Sholokhov, 1928
Orlando, Virginia Woolf, 1928
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, 1928
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, 1929
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, 1929
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930
The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, 1930
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932
Journey to the End of The Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner, 1936
Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, 1937
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, 1937
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939
The Stranger, Albert Camus, 1942
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943
Animal Farm, George Orwell, 1945
Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann, 1947
The Plague, Albert Camus, 1947
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry, 1947
No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai, 1948
Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell, 1949
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger, 1951
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway, 1952
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, 1953
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, 1953
Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 1954
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo, 1955
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin, 1956
The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, 1956
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima, 1956
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, 1957
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, 1958
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass, 1959
The Lord Of The Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, 1959
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960
Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1961
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, 1962
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges, 1962
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, 1963
Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar, 1963
The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector, 1964
Season of Migration to the North, Al-Tayyib Salih, 1966
A Grain of Wheat, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1967
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, 1967
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967
Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov, 1969
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, 1972
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, 1973
Death And The King's Horsemen, Wole Soyinka, 1975
Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, 1980
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, 1980
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, 1981
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa, 1982
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, 1984
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez, 1985
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, 1985
Beloved, Toni Morrison, 1987
Blindness, José Saramago, 1995
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk, 1998
2666, Roberto Bolaño, 2004

Id like to know if any of you thinks some of the pieces added is filler work, that is unimportant and should be removed.. Or if I had missed pieces that should be added