The selection is balanced between novelists, poets, essayists, playwrights, biographers, and religious and philosophical teachers, from China to India, from the U.S.A. to the U.S.S.R., from England to Morocco, Colombia, Iran ... Translations are evaluated, and guidance is also offered on music, art, and travel, arranged generally speaking in ascending order of the books' complexity and the reader's maturity, from Alice in Wonderland to Immanuel Kant, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Shimazaki Toson.

Suppose you knew someone of fifteen to twenty-five with an inclination for reading: how could you help to direct that inclination, so that by a gradual process it would be possible to absorb, over the next fifty years, most of the masterpieces of the world's literature? It would be difficult to c...