A friend and I started this experiment in April 2007. Keep up with my progress in the sidebar.
Ancient (up to 5th century A.D.), 15 works
1. Iliad, Homer (Fagles translation)
2. Odyssey, Homer
3. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
4. The Clouds, Aristophanes
5. The Republic, Plato
6. Poetics, Aristotle
7. Confessions, Augustine
8. On the Incarnation, Athanasius
9. Metamorphoses, Ovid
10. The Aeneid, Virgil
Middle Ages (5th to 14th century), 18 works
1. Beowulf
2. The Seafarer
3. The Song of Roland
4. Divine Comedy, Dante (Sayers translation)
5. Gawain and the Green Knight
6. Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich
7. Piers Ploughman, Langland
8. Utopia, More
9. The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
10. A Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer
11. The Practice of the Presence of God, Lawrence
Early Modern (14th to 18th century), 18 works
1. Macbeth, Shakespeare
2. As You Like It, Shakespeare
3. Richard III, Shakespeare
4. Volpone, Ben Jonson
5. Paradise Lost, Milton (with Lewis’s preface)
6. Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan
7. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Law
8. The Faerie Queen, Spenser
9. Select Essays of Michel de Montaigne
10. King Lear, Shakespeare
11. Measure for Measure, Shakespeare
12. The Tempest, Shakespeare
13. Doctor Faustus, Marlowe14. The Prince, Machiavelli
15. Pensees, Pascal
16. Introduction to the Devout Life, de Sales
17. Candide, Voltaire
18. Phaedra, Jean Racine
Reason, Romanticism, Naturalism (18th to 1901), 18 works
1. Emma, Austen
2. Pride and Prejudice, Austen
3. Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge
4. The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal
5. Faust, Goethe
6. Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, Gibbon
7. Candide, Voltaire
8. Tom Jones, Fielding
9. The Social Contract, Rousseau
10. Founding Documents, various -Federalist Papers -Articles of Confederation -The Constitution -The Declaration of Independence
11. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo
12. Tristram Shandy, Sterne
13. Life of Johnson, Boswell
14. Pere Goriot, de Balzac
15. The Red and the Black, Stendhal
16. The Ambassadors, James
17. Frankenstein, Shelley
Modernism (late 19th to early 20th), 18 works
1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Neitzsche
2. The Birth of Tragedy, Neitzsche
3. Pygmalion, Shaw
4. A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens
5. Bleak House, Dickens
6. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
7. The Origin of Species, Darwin
8. Essays, Emerson
9. Selected Poems, Yeats
10. A Doll’s House, Ibsen
11. Walden, Thoreau
12. Heart of Darkness, Conrad
13. Civil Disobedience, Thoreau
14. Moby Dick, Melville
15. The Mill on the Floss, Eliot
16. Huckleberry Finn, Twain
17. Jane Eyre, C. Bronte
18. Wuthering Heights, E. Bronte
Post-modernism (early to mid-twentieth), 18 works
1. Dubliners, Joyce
2. Ulysses, Joyce
3. Orthodoxy, Chesterton
4. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston
4. 1984, Orwell
5. The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn
6. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
7. How Should We Then Live?, Schaeffer
8. The Seven-Storey Mountain, Merton
9. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman
10. The Stranger, Camus
11. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
12. This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald
13. The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
14. The Fountainhead, Rand
15. The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
16. All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
17. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin
18. Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys
19. The Wind in the Willows, Grahame
20. A Passage to India, Forster
21. Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner
22. Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez
23. Catch-22, Heller
24. Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf
25. Slaughterhouse-5, Vonnegut
26. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee