Steven's List

I struggled a bit over this list because I don't focus on a particular genre of literature. So I consulted various sources for those works that are most basic to world literature as a whole. My Fill-in-the-Gaps list consisted exclusively of prose fiction, included no re-reads, and was limited to one work per author. It included many works that would be considered "basic," but many modern ones as well. This list does not duplicate any of the FITG entries, but focuses on older works that have had an indelible impact on modern literature. I've included some works that I read in college or earlier that need to be revisited. The chances are slim to none that I will ever finish this list, but even just sampling some of the collections should be worthwhile.

Epic Verse to Re-Read

1 Beowulf
2 Homer - The Iliad
3 Homer - The Odyssey
4 Virgil - The Aeneid

Major Works in Verse

5 Byron, George Gordon, Lord - Don Juan
6 Camoes, Luis Vaz de - Lusiads
7 Chaucer, Geoffrey - Canterbury Tales
8 Ovid - Metamorphoses
9 Pushkin, Alexander - Eugene Onegin
10 The Bhagavad Gita
11 The Bible
12 The Niebelunenlied
13 The Quran
14 The Poem of the Cid
15 The Song of Roland
16 Valmiki - The Ramayana

Poetry Collections

17 Blake, William - Complete Poetry
18 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - Complete Poems
19 Dickinson, Emily - Collected Poems
20 Donne, John - Complete Poems
21 Frost, Robert - The Poetry of Robert Frost
22 Horace - Odes
23 Keats, John - Poems
24 Ovid - The Arts of Love
25 Pindar - Odes
26 Rilke, Rainer Maria - Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
27 Sappho - Poems
28 Shelley, Percy Bysshe - Poetical Works of Shelley
29 Stevens, Wallace - Collected Poems
30 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord - Idylls of the King
31 Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
32 Yeats, William Butler - Collected Poems

Shakespeare to Re-Read

33 Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
34 Shakespeare, William - King Lear
35 Shakespeare, William - Macbeth

Plays

36 Aeschylus - Complete Tragedies
37 Beckett, Samuel - Krapp's Last Tape
38 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro - Life is a Dream
39 Corneille, Pierre - Cid, The
40 Euripides - Complete Tragedies
41 Ibsen, Henrik - Hedda Gabler
42 Ibsen, Henrik - The Master Builder
43 Ibsen, Henrik - Peer Gynt
44 Ibsen, Henrik - When We Dead Awaken
45 Jonson, Ben - Volpone
46 Marlowe, Christopher - Doctor Faustus
47 Miller, Arthur - Death of a Salesman
48 Moliere - Don Juan
49 Moliere - Imaginary Invalid
50 Moliere - The Miser
51 Moliere - School for Wives
52 O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
53 O'Neill, Eugene - The Iceman Cometh
54 Pirandello, Luigi - Six Characters in Search of an Author
55 Racine, Jean Baptiste - Phedre
56 Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
57 Shaw, George Bernard - Back to Methuselah
58 Shaw, George Bernard - Heartbreak House
59 Shaw, George Bernard - Major Barbara
60 Sophocles - Complete Tragedies
61 Strindberg, August - Miss Julie
62 Wilde, Oscar - The Importance of Being Earnest
63 Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
64 Williams, Tennessee - A Streetcar Named Desire

Non-Fiction

65 Adams, Henry - Education of Henry Adams, The
66 Augustine, Saint - Confessions
67 Beauvoir, Simone de - The Second Sex
68 Boswell, James - The Life of Samuel Johnson
69 Confucius - The Analects
70 Darwin, Charles - The Origin of the Species
71 Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Essential Writings
72 Freud, Sigmund - Interpretation of Dreams, The
73 Gibbon, Edward - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
74 Hobbes, Thomas - Leviathan
75 James, William - The Varieties of Religious Experience
76 Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
77 Milton, John - Areopagitica
78 Montaigne, Michel de - Essays
79 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm - Basic Writings
80 Pascal, Blaise - Pensees
81 Paz, Octavio - Labyrinth of Solitude
82 Plato - Symposium and Phaedo
83 Plutarch - Parallel Lives
84 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques - Confessions
85 Sun-Tzu - The Art of War
86 Tacitus - The Annals

Novels to Re-Read

87 Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
88 Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
89 Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
90 Twain, Mark - Huckleberry Finn
91 Voltaire - Candide

Novels

92 Balzac, Honore de - Cousin Bette
93 Balzac, Honore de - A Harlot High and Low
94 Conrad, Joseph - Under Western Eyes
95 Dickens, Charles - Hard Times
96 Dickens, Charles - Little Dorrit
97 Diderot, Denis - Rameau's Nephew
98 Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Possessed, The
99 Gide, Andre - Immoralist, The
100 Hardy, Thomas - Far from the Madding Crowd
101 Malory, Thomas - Le Morte d'Arthur
102 Woolf, Virginia - Waves, The
103 Zola, Emile - L'Assommoir
104 Zola, Emile - Nana
105 Zola, Emile - Thérèse Raquin

Short Story Collections

106 Borges, Jorge Luis - Ficciones
107 Cheever, John - The Stories of John Cheever
108 Chekhov, Anton - Stories and Short Novels (trans Pevear & Volokhonsky)
109 Faulkner, William - Collected Stories
110 Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Twice-Told Tales
111 Hemingway, Ernest - Complete Short Stories
112 James, Henry - Collected Stories and Short Novels
113 Kafka, Franz - Complete Short Stories
114 Mann, Thomas - Collected Stories
115 Maupassant, Guy de - Short Stories
116 Melville, Hermann - Complete Short Fiction
117 O'Connor, Flannery - Complete Stories
118 Poe, Edgar Allan - Complete Tales
119 Porter, Katherine Anne - Collected Stories
120 Pushkin, Alexander - Complete Stories
121 Thousand and One Nights - Thousand and One Nights
122 Tolstoy, Leo - The Collected Short Fiction
123 Turgenev, Ivan - A Sportsman's Notebook
124 Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories