Where Do I Begin?: Some Lists (pre-1600)

If you are trying to decide which really old classic(s) to read for the upcoming challenge, here are some lists and resources that may help you.

First, here is a (rather incomplete) list I compiled for last year’s Really Old Classics Challenge. I can’t include everything and it is rather skewed towards Western literature, but at least it is a start to get you thinking about which classics you might want to read.

• Gilgamesh
• Egyptian Book of the Dead
• Holy Bible
• The Apocrypha
• Bhagavad-Gita
• Homer Iliad, Odyssey
• Aeschylus Oresteia, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound,
• Sophocles Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
• Euripides Orestes
• Aristophanes
• Herodotus The Histories
• Thucydides  The Peloponnesian Wars
• Plato Dialogues
• Aristotle  Poetics, Ethics
• Plutarch Lives; Moralia
• “Aesop” Fables
• Cicero On the Gods
• Horace Odes
• Virgil Aeneid
• Ovid Metamorphoses
• Juvenal Satires
• Martial Epigrams
• Seneca Tragedies
• Apuleius The Golden Ass
• Saint Augustine City of God; Confessions
• The Koran (Al-Qur’an)
• The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
• The Nibelungen Lied
• Beowulf
• The Poem of the Cid
• Dante The Divine Comedy
• Petrarch Lyric Poems; Selections
• Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron
• Michelangelo Buonarroti Sonnets and Madrigals
• Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince
• Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks
• Benvenuto Cellini Autobiography
• Giordano Bruno The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
• Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde
• Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte D’Arthur
• Sir Thomas More Utopia
• Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene
• Christopher Marlowe Poems and Plays
• The Song of Roland
• Michel de Montaigne Essays
• François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Erasmus In Praise of Folly
• Christine de Pisan The Book of the City of Ladies
• Romances of the Three Kingdoms
• Sun Tzu’s Art of War
• Confucius’s The Analects

Here are some other lists and resources on the web. Please note that not all works are pre-1600 A.D.

• The 35^th Bookworms Carnival: Really Old Classics
• A round-up of blog reviews from last year’s Really Old Classics Challenge
• Great Books of the Western World (Wikipedia entry)
• The Western Canon by Harold Bloom (reading list)
• The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major (reading list)
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (reading list at Wikipedia)