A good reason not to buy that set is just that it’s never going to have the best translations, which is pretty important if you are actually going to read them.
For example, I’d not recommend Ben Jowett’s Plato anymore, they are good, but old and more difficult to read than newer translations like you can find in John Cooper’s Plato’s Complete Works.
Again with Kant, not the best translation. If you want to actually understand, and not just have a book on your shelf, you want the Oxford edition.
Why Huckfinn over Tom Sawyer in the Twain?
I would have picked Pride and Prejudice over Emma for Austin.
I’d consider Jane Eyre absolutely essential to the canon, and probably also Wuthering Heights, maybe I’m blind but I can’t see them here.
Odd choice for Dickens, he has so many famous titles, Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, yet the one they chose, so odd.
I question the inclusion of The Descent of Man over Voyage of the Beagle in the Darwin volume.
The Marx volume is a massive abridgement, and also a categorically bad translation. Again if you want to read Marx, this isn’t going to help you.
Tolstoy has a significantly abridged War and Peace, nothing else by him. I don’t know the translations but again, dollars t dimes it’s not good.
Dostoevsky, it’s got brothers, but I’d see Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment are clearly worthy of being in the canon.
I don’t know why 900 pages of James’ Principles of Psychology was necessary, lol.
No Chekhov...
To their credit, incredibly comprehensive Freud anthology.
It’s embarrassing they even tried to create one volume for ‘20th century philosophy’ of course dozens of notable absentees. The impossibility of all the 20th century volumes is so laughable.
You could spend all day pointing to absences, where is Balzac, Flaubert, Defoe, Hugo, Wilde, Whitman? Etc.
So yeah, overall, I’m sure it would look really nice in a bourgie house, but it’s not good for actually learning the canon. It’s a futile goal to list the entire western canon here on this thread. Just start. If your pirate bay still works, Search TTC and download a couple lecture courses on the ancient Greeks, that the best you can do before diving in. Get some history, some mythology, some background on Homer, then dive into The Iliad and Odyssey. Read Hesiod, read the Homeric Hymns, read the poets like Sappho, read the tragedies. Read the introductions, translators prefaces and so on, that’s the best you can do.