Too many books, too little time?
Check out Glyn Hughes's Squashed Philosophers, a site that has brief synopses (with direct excerpts from the original texts) of all the major philosophers, from ancient (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine...) to modern (Satre, Turing, Popper).
Hughes also has a page for Squashed Writers (a.k.a. "All the books you think you ought to have read")...starting with Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars and so far through Kafka's Metamorphosis.