Going through the western canon 2017

start with the greeks

>>8908211
Why do you want to read the Canon? The canon mostly refers to books which reference other books that came before, it doesn't include all good books. The best way to read is to mix in any books that seem interesting to you. Try reading a Great Work then some current non-fiction, some short stories, and some historical non-fiction.

Many people reading Don Quixote stop to read shorter books then read more of Don Quixote.

Just get a foundation and then you can jump off wherever

Foundation:

Early shit:
Homer's Works
Herodotus and Thucydides
Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides
A bit of Plato and Aristotle
Virgil and Ovid and Apuleius
Plutarch
The Bible (the Gospels and other important ones, you can skip leviticus and shit)

Middler shit:

Beowulf
El Cantar de mio Cid
Parzival

Later shit:

The Divine Comedy
Donkey hoytey
The Prince
The Decameron
The Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare

by the way this is a list I just whipped up out of my ass

you don't really need to read chronologically, nor must you force yourself to read something because its canon

don't start a book, pause and read another though, else you'll never get back to the first

>>8908243
This

If you want to start somewhere Don Quixote is good, other than that you can't go wrong with the Iliad. It's the first ever work of western literature and also the greatest. Ripping yarn too.

>>8908243
OP here

I guess I just want some perspective to see how things got to this point. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that thse works have good knowledge within them, right? Of course I'm gonna vary what I read, but a rough guideline wouldn't hurt.

>>8908323
A rough guideline would be something like Homer -> Virgil, the Oresteia by Aeschylus, some Sophocles (Oedipus the King) and maybe Ovid's Metamorphoses to round off classical literature. After that, saving Dante, there's nothing really essential until the Renaissance and Don Quixote.

>>8908323
>I guess I just want some perspective to see how things got to this point.
You might want literary history then. These books will give you perspective and you can learn a lot from them (often in a way that the author didn't intend) but if you are reading a book that you hate reading then you aren't going to learn anything.

You don't need to start with the Greeks, that's the recommendation of pseuds.

>>8908359
he doesn't want literary history

I think he wants to take a ride through some of the books of the ages rather than the development of styles, techniques, etc

in the case he wants to ride the roller coaster, starting with the greeks is the right idea