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.
Agreed heavily. I am still mustering up the energy and trying to dedicate time to actually read Infinite Jest. In the meantime, I have been reading DFW’s short stories, and they are fantastic.
I heavily enjoyed the one about playing tennis in midwest, the one about adult industry, and the few other ones I struggle recalling in the moment.
Something about DFW’s writing and train of thought (in his short stories) hits me just right. The musings on how he related certain math concepts to playing tennis in the wind specifically blew me away, as literally nothing about that should be relatable to me (neither from midwest nor play tennis nor have any interest in it), but it feels like it is.
(1) If you're struggling at first, set a goal of just trying to get through the first 200 pages. Things will be confusing at first, especially with the nonlinear-ish plot and, uh... worldbuilding, so it's okay to let some of it wash over you and laugh at the funny parts without totally understanding it all. Things will click later. But there's a scene around 200 pages in that's pretty straightforward and very, very engaging, so if you get that far you're almost guaranteed to get hooked enough to plow through the remaining 800. (Nearly everyone I've given this advice to did end up finishing the book.)
(1a) There's a part about 20 pages in that's verrrrrry dense and slow and hard to get through. ("Where was the woman who said she'd come.") If you can muscle your way through that part, almost everything that follows will feel light and breezy in comparison. The whole book is not like this :P
(2) Not a requirement by any means—I didn't use it on my first read-through—but if you find yourself stopping to Google stuff a lot, the Infinite Jest Wiki is a great resource. They have a spoiler-free page annotations to define some of the more esoteric vocab and explain some of the more niche cultural references. You won't miss a ton by not using it, but there are nice little tidbits.
Reddit is going down in quality for a lot of the smaller subs, smaller subs the mods will literally ban you if your profile or post history doesnt match with their preferences or narrative. Reddit needs to bring a lot of unknown mods under control or share ban statistics for smaller subs and reasons.
A quick scan gives me about 49 read. Having said that,
a. Finnegans Wake is tough going. I think that about 20 pages is my high water mark there.
b. The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Critique of Pure Reason require a lot of preliminary reading. And they are long, and even with the preliminary reading slow going.
c. Kapital. I know some pretty tough and motivated readers who tried reading this, and bogged down somewhere in the third book.
d. The Bible. 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.
Every time a list like this shows up on HN, multiple commenters will show up to say things like this. Do you really have such a hard time believing that other people sincerely have different taste from you/the general population?
If you ask people about their favorite restaurant, some people will give you the name of a high-end steakhouse, others will say Taco Bell. This is just the reality of human difference.
It’s like when people think anyone reading in the park is pretentious and showing off - nooo, it’s just media. I like slow burns of stories, and was riveted by War and Peace just as much as the show Midnight Mass.
But on the other hand I get it, school taught me to hate reading, and it wasn’t until my late 20s that I realized that you could enjoy novels.
I’ll still never enjoy Joyce Ulysses because there’s too much context you need to know, but I get why people who do have all that context love it on a visceral level.
I've actually read close to 20 here. The only one I'd put desperately in that category is the Critique of Pure Reason. Seriously, nobody should be reading that book. Just read a summary or take a class. It is the type of brutal density that would have been much better conveyed if YouTube existed and he could have recorded his ideas as a lecture.
As much as I appreciate your attempt to put the categorical imperative into action, surely major milestones in the history of philosophy don't fall into the set of books that "nobody" should read (assuming that that is a non-empty set to begin with)?
> Just read a summary or take a class
If you take a class on Kantian philosophy, surely the teacher will have read Kant and will ask you to read some Kant?
Maybe an interested reader doesn't need to commit to reading the whole book and can dive into some selections? https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1072226-kritik-der-rei... offers some starting points. e.g. I dug into the quote on the "light dove" on archive.org, and found this following passage that I think is fantastic:
"But it is the usual fate of human reason in Speculation, to make its edifice ready as soon as possible, and then for the first time investigate, whether the foundation has been even well laid. Then all kinds of excuses are sought after in order to console us for its want of fitness, or rather indeed to avoid so late and dangerous an examination."
You cite the categorical imperative, that shows up in the Critique of Practical Reason, which I would happily suggest folks interested in philosophy.
To actually sit down an read the first Critique, though, you'll probably need to know a significant amount of background, and a lot of the conclusions on how the mind work are certainly inaccurate.
Again, the Critique of Pure Reason is (from my understanding in studying if for a year a very long time ago) a unification of empiricism and rationalism, and a rejection of idealism in a period when that was an active fight. This was a period when there were constant concerns about proving the existence of God.
Ultimately it's obviously an important book, but it's just not a very accessible book. If you take a class on it you'll likely be expected to read much of it, if not all, but to say I struggled with it is an understatement.
The thing about RETVRN that's funny is that the definition of what is and is not modernity is very slippery.
Though my initial impression wasn't fair. I overstated the RETVRN aspect. The main vibe of this list is effort justification. One of the main criteria for being ranked near the top is being a doorstopper (The Bible included). Makes reading seem more like an accomplishment you can lord over other people. But maybe that's not fair.
Specifically, ancient Romans often wrote the equivalent of our letter "u" as a "v". So a word like "magnum" would be "magnvm," although modern scholars of classical Latin just write it with a "u" for legibility :P
It’s actually really interesting from a literature perspective. Every other paragraph, you realize some word, phrase, idiom you know originated from that exact paragraph.
Not a Christian but there are parts of the King James that I really like. If you grew up in the west it can connect at a really deep level since so much of our culture is built on it. There are really boring and downright bad parts too. It’s a mess of a book, I like it
You cannot really evaluate/rank the Bible with the same criteria you apply to works created by a single author with clear intent in a limited timespan.
Having said that, ecclesiastes and Song of Songs alone make it top-ten worthy.
This feels like a list of books that you tell people you read if you want them to think you have taste.
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.
These books are great, but they are pretty standard canon. And the bible? No other religious text?
It's fun to compare it with the Goodreads top literary 100, for sure a lot of overlap, but some interesting deviations and substitutions.
I have read 17 books from that list, and 16 of them were totally solid.
The one I didn't like was The Great Gatsby, but it very well might have been my limitations.
Classics are dubbed so for a reason.
I got myself a list of ~180 books prepared by two lit professors and started going through them, along with books recommended in fora with low signal to noise ratio (not Reddit). Best decision re: choice of books ever.
I really enjoyed reading Anna Karenina. Not only for the glimpses of life of 19th century Russia, but also for thoughts and progress of Levin in his spiritual/philosophical quest.
"People" are not a single block of monoculture, and taste varies wildly.
Having been forced to read Moby Dick in high school, it's a great book if you're looking for a How-To guide on repurposing whale parts. That novel has entirely too much blubber and could be cut in half.
Lolita is an amazingly written book and one of the best unreliable narrator books I’ve read. The book literally starts with the protagonist writing from a criminal insane asylum, then the protagonist spends the rest of the book trying to convince you that he isn’t a bad guy, but the author weaves in things throughout the book that pull back the veil and show you the true nature of his “relationship”. It has been memed and remade poorly, with the exact opposite message of the book, in my opinion. But my read of the book was pretty unambiguously negative about Humbert Humbert ‘s actions and was “about” seeing past his smooth talk to the reality of the situation.
