American Psycho at #55? Impressive, very nice. Now let's see the list from r/books.
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.
This is a list of books that everyone wants to know but no one wants to read.
Looks like a lot of English teachers browse /lit/ :)
As json https://dpaste.com/HV3HB9QSV
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 Downer than Stoner.
A real RETVRN list. The Unabomber is the giveaway.
I know that reviews are subjective, but I still want to know if the Bible being ranked 10th is too high or too low.
Pretty amazed Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn didn't make it on the list.
Or it's just me being tired and I missed it.
This proves that being early to market has a huge advantage ;)
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/13086.Goodreads_Top_100_...
And even more fun to compare it to their top rated of all.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/153860
I guess it shows how you rate things if you don't think anyone is looking or judging you.
So many meme picks but they couldn't even get My Struggle in the top 100
Pathetic.
Good one!
This is like the list of films on Rotten Tomatoes that rate 100%, and are all foreign, art-house shit.
And now tell us the list of books that people have actually read before feeling they ought to recommend them.
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.