Well, there's Mortimer Adler's Great Books list which purports to be the essential Western canon.

I used to have a friend who was absolutely obsessed with this list. He bought and cataloged every book on it with the stated intention of reading every one of them straight through in chronological order, supposedly to better absorb the development of Western thought. He wouldn't start reading them until he had acquired them all. Not only that, with the exception of course books, he mostly refused to read anything modern for fear of tainting the experience.

Why yes, he was a pretentious fuckwad. Why ever do you ask?