otaku-ctrl/great-books-global-canon

This repository is not software. It is a curated reading list called The Great Books of the World, put together by a single author, that tries to identify the most significant written works in human history across every major civilization, not just the Western tradition. It is inspired by the mid twentieth century Great Books movement led by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, which the author praises for its idea of engaging seriously with humanity's deepest texts, but criticizes for focusing almost entirely on European works while overlooking the writing of China, India, the Islamic world, Africa, and other regions. To build the list, the author applies seven criteria: durability across generations, the capacity to sustain repeated interpretation, technical mastery of its literary form, engagement with fundamental human problems, demonstrable cultural influence, irreplaceability, and the ability to hold up under critical scrutiny. A work needs to meet at least four of these seven criteria to be included. Rather than ranking texts against each other, the project treats inclusion as clearing a threshold, judged mainly by relying on the accumulated consensus of specialist scholars within each text's own tradition, with the author's personal judgment used only to break ties in unclear cases, which are then flagged as debatable. The canon organizes its roughly 536 entries into twenty nine civilizational tracks, such as Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Islamic, used only as navigational groupings rather than strict categories, since works and ideas move between traditions. The project explicitly states its own limits: it only covers written texts, so it excludes oral traditions, music, film, and visual art, and it treats anything written after 1975 as too recent to judge with historical confidence, keeping more recent works on a separate watchlist rather than in the main canon. The README says the list is intended for any intellectually curious general reader, requiring no specialist background, just literacy and willingness to engage with demanding material. A plain, uncommented index of all entries is provided separately in a file called TL,DR.md for readers who want the list without the accompanying explanation and reasoning.