Where to begin?

The Bible would seem a logical place to start. And lucky for me, that happens to be where I started-- at the beginning of Lent, 2009. At that time, I made it through Numbers before petering out. When Lent started in 2010, I took it up again and made great progress (thanks in large part to Eucharistic Adoration at St. Veronica parish in Chantilly.) By the time I moved, I had successfully completed the Historical books (minus Maccabees). It would be useless to try to summarize those books now-- perhaps I'll re-read the Bible at some point, and can fill in the entries then. In any case, all of that was read before I had planned this project.

If I was really going to begin at the beginning, I think the Epic of Gilgamesh would have been the earliest reasonable work of the Western Canon. After a little research, however, I wasn't confident that there was a definitive "Epic of Gilgamesh" that wasn't mostly a later reconstruction. Not worth the effort-- not part of the project.

At some point I purchased Harold Bloom's The Western Canon to use as an overall guide, but it doesn't extend to ancient times. During my used-book purchasing spree at the Fairfax County libraries I came across another Bloom work, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, that seems to cover ancient literature-- enough for my purposes, anyway.  And Bloom starts with a comparison of Job and Ecclesiastes, followed by a comparison of Homer and Plato.

Perfect.  Job it is.