I’ve mentioned in previous entries that I wanted to engage in the Great Books firsthand, after getting a lot of it secondhand. The big question was, which Great Books list should I use?

I found a few lists on various sites and one of my first lockdown projects was to compile, de-duplicate, arrange them by date, and assign countries of origin to them. My sources, primarily, were from here, here, and here, and a lot of InfoGalactic.

I have taken it upon myself to read these in chronological order. I tried to get the dates as exact as possible, but where I didn’t have an actual publication date, I would use some significant date from the author’s biography – such as year of death. I will put links to the versions I’ve read as soon as I read them to help mark my progress.

For your edification, please find below the first instalment of the list, which takes us from Gilgamesh to Aquinas. If you find any mistakes, let me know and I will update.

Now to actually start reading them.