Not a /lit/ user by any means, but I must admit that most of these are solid picks. DFW and Pynchon in the top ten might be a surprise to some, given that they have a reputation for being Pretentious Authors(TM), but I always think that anyone who writes off their stuff as big boring books clearly hasn't read either. Gravity's Rainbow is full of insane slapstick and bawdy jokes in between the serious bits about war as a profit-extraction machine... it's no wonder a bunch of internet shitposters are into that.
A quick scan gives me about 49 read. Having said that,<p>a. <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is tough going. I think that about 20 pages is my high water mark there.<p>b. <i>The Phenomenology of Spirit</i> and <i>The Critique of Pure Reason</i> require a lot of preliminary reading. And they are long, and even with the preliminary reading slow going.<p>c. <i>Kapital</i>. I know some pretty tough and motivated readers who tried reading this, and bogged down somewhere in the third book.<p>d. <i>The Bible</i>. I know many people who read in the Bible. I'd be surprised to learn that I know anyone not in the clergy who has read it through.
I did not enjoy Stoner. I read it like 5 years ago and don't remember a lot of the details, but it was set at a college. More <i>Downer</i> than <i>Stoner</i>.
This feels like a list of books that you tell people you read if you want them to think you have taste.<p>Obviously any top list is subjective, but what I think we have here is an aggregate of readers on a forum who are trying to impress each other. A circle jerk.<p>These books are great, but they are pretty standard canon. And the bible? No other religious text?<p>It's fun to compare it with the Goodreads top literary 100, for sure a lot of overlap, but some interesting deviations and substitutions.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/13086.Goodreads_Top_100_Literary_Novels_of_All_Time" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/13086.Goodreads_Top_100_...</a><p>And even more fun to compare it to their top rated of all.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/153860" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/153860</a><p>I guess it shows how you rate things if you don't think anyone is looking or judging you.
Good one!<p>This is like the list of films on Rotten Tomatoes that rate 100%, and are all foreign, art-house shit.<p>And now tell us the list of books that people have actually read before feeling they ought to recommend them.