Last year at secondary school, Shakespeare: The Scottish play in fall term; Hamlet in Spring.
After school graduation, Sophocles (in translation): Oedipus Rex.
The last 2 handy since we got Freud's CIVILIZATION & ITS DISCONTENTS in Spring term at College. Had ANTONY & CLEOPATRA, and KING LEAR (seen performed on stage several times since) Fall term in College.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN's "Frodo" leads the list of Heroes (which also includes Chaucer's WIFE OF BATH ) on the "Great" something or other commercial, catch-up spoken books advertisements. Commercial HEROES also includes Aeneas, Odysseus etc. etc.
Yadda yadda wisdom: You have to have read all the major works byk age 20 (Twenty).
Then switch entirely to non-fiction, except what you see in the print, TV or WWW media.
It's (Poetry) all been downhill since Swinburne. It's (All Literature) been down hill since Aeschylus.
Poetry is dead, and the novel ... dying, according to Nobelist I.B. Singer.
Harold Bloom, the Gnostic independent, lists Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, mainly the major majors of Shakespear
Great Books. The (Dr. Eliot's ) Harvard president's four foot high shelves of must-reads. .. include also Goethe's FAUST Part I. The King James's (A.V.) Bible, if you do English Lit.. T.S. Eliot if you do early mod.
And then there's Stendhal and Stendhal Syndrome! CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA versus LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. Bizarre!
You cannot omit the women writers: V. Woolf, the writer of the Odyssey, Sappho.
Nor Nora's James Joyce.
If you list Poe, then you cannot rule out A.C. Doyle's S. Holmes magnum opus