I'll never be able to read every great work

you'd be surprised how far you can get if you start reading instead of posting about it on fourchannel

90% of great works will be slogs anyway. keep an open mind, live in your own time, discover what you like and keep looking for similar stuff instead, it’s much more rewarding than following some strategy guide to world literature

you absolutely can.

Nope, not enough time especially since I'm 23 now and in the decline of my life.

Exactly how many great works are there?

three

I haven't released my novel yet, so zero.

Attached: 1547404609311.gif (554x400, 104.26K)

>web.archive.org/web/20100527090156/http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/readlist.shtml
it takes but a strict four year curriculum to become an erudite patrician.

>you will never be able to read all the works almost forgotten by history

73 and 1.

Old Testament and New Testament have 66 books in them.

it is more clear in this picture
static.wikia.nocookie.net/4chanlit/images/3/3c/1575232581875.png/revision/latest?cb=20200203175435

I read Don Quixote. It was a slog, took me a long time. But now after some time, I just think about it and it was so fucking good. It's so profound and playful.

If you read just 100 pages each day you’ll have read 36,525 pages in one year, 1,095,750 pages in 30 years. Ass-pulling an average page count of great works of 320 pages, that makes 114 great works per year, or 3,424 great works in the 30 years you have until you definitely die in the water wars. Now someone make a list of the top 3500 books ever written. Then get reading.

If I haven't read it then it can't be a great work, can it?
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

>If you read just 100 pages each day
how much time would take to do that? i feel like several hours

716 precisely. Obviously, the average Yea Forumsizen will never read more than any ten from this collection.

33

based

Everyone wants to have read the classics but nobody wants to read them

>you could read the canon in a year or two.
lol. I've bee reading the canon for 5+ years and I probably need another 10 to finish the great part of it. I read almost all Greek works for example, but I haven't read Augustine's City of God, Pascal, Corneille, any TS Eliot play, or much Shelley. There's just a lot of stuff.

>any TS Eliot play
watch cats (2019)

83, see:
openculture.com/2013/11/joseph-brodskys-reading-list-for-having-an-intelligent-conversation.html

>he didn't take the enlightened NEET pill

then get off Yea Forums and read, retard

>69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
dropped
Don't understand why this book is so hyped up. Sure I guess it was good for its time that's about it.

Nobody has enough time to read absolutely every great work. The key is to enjoy the time you have with the ones you do.

It's not a contest. Even one great book read is a victory of itself.

really? I was able to read The World as Will and Representation just fine.

It only takes 4 years

Attached: 1650768184239.png (1819x937, 245.12K)

embarrassing image

Yes, but not for the reason you think.
It's very hard to:
1) acquire enough aesthetic independence that you find your definition (which can also be an "instinct" or a "taste", as it's hard to verbalize in its entirety) of "greatness";
2) to find truly great works, once you have found that definition.
And yet you can't develop a style without those too things.
For me, only 10% of the canon is great, at best.
That is always the case when you have developed aesthetic views of your own, such as happened to me.
St. Augustine, for instance... What a mediocrity! He sounds good, but then again every Latin writer does, because the language is quite beautiful. The prose itself, the meaning, is sentimental, puritanesque, abstract but lacking in good reasoning, so that, having read half of his Confessions, only two or three images remain stuck in my mind. He's overrated. As are Shakespeare, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Proust, all of whom are good but have long moments of mediocrity, not to mention total frauds like Steinbeck, and nearly every single non-poet/novelist/short-story writer/playwright, including Herodotus, a lot of the Bible, Tacitus, Suetonius, Harold Bloom, Hegel, and other stuff that only has historical/academic relevance but little literary merit although it's often grouped as literature by people like you who want to "read the great books" (even though I love some of it, specially Suetonius, but the prose itself is not better than contemporary journalism).

Of course, every single person has a very, well, PERSONAL aesthetic belief, but you can see it in all serious writers. With the exception of non-writers like Bloom, they all had very limited "personal canons". Pound's Paideuma had some 50 authors and he didn't care about the rest. Nabokov thought everyone was second-rate or a non-entity, meaning nothing to him, with but few exceptions. Borges, aged 85 or so, admitted to having read only some 900 books in his life, because he got bored with the rest, which he merely perused. Samuel Johnson thought it stupid to read a book from cover to cover, because not all of it would be worth it. Tolstoy despised nearly every author, including Shakespeare and Dante. Nietzsche had very few authors he truly cared about. Even Cervantes only saved two or three novels from his fictional book burning. I could mention many other examples.
If you aren't a mere follower of opinion, but have aesthetic views of your own, then the number of books which are in accordance with that view is going to be necessarily very small, assuming that your view is detailed and critically developed, which is necessarily the case for a writer. Because, the more detailed it is, the more rigorous, then smaller is the number of books that will fill your requisites.

>my magnus opum will not be know to the public in OP's lifetime
Feel it OP, FEEL IT!

Saudade

That's just a random list with emphasis on things he liked, as any other such list
For instance: no Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Borges, Kafka... Imagine thinking Crashaw is more important than Kafka. He isn't.

Besides the Cannon, the Adler list and this thingy What are some good "must read" lists? No meme images Yea Forums barfed out please.

That's not what it means.
Also, it's an overrated word, 99% of the time it's synonymous with "nostalgia" or "missing you".
Saudades de você = I miss you.
It can be used poetically in other ways too, but most of the time it isn't.

Donald Barthelme's list is way better than any of those, for real, with the main difference being that the books in his list are actually fun to read and well-written.
So are the lists by Borges, Nabokov, William Gass and Ezra Pound.
Adler was not a writer, knew nothing about writing. Neither was Bloom. They selected books based on perceived cultural importance. You can't judge their aesthetic criteria because they didn't write novels/poems of their own, which is the *only* way to discover if you truly sympathize with someone's aesthetics or not. I mean, Bloom did write a novel, but it was so shit he himself pulled it off the market.

My boy. Barthelmes list has a bunch of underrated gems in it especially when it comes to female authors. Bolaño also has a good recommendations in his tips for writers. ignore his shittalking if he mentioned them they were worth reading.

Sturgeon's law, 99% of the "great works" are garbage

Kinda on topic, so I wanted to ask: What should I know before reading Infinite Jest? Don't want to get filtered so easily.
Plus, should I get and read Infinite Jest, Arthur Rimbaud's "Complete Works" or continue Nietzsche with "Beyond Good and Evil" after marathoning Antichrist?

Attached: image_2022-04-23_204649763.png (1661x2560, 2.68M)

1. And it’s called mein kampf

Actually you can. There are fewer truly great books than most people on this board think. But you don't have the time to thoroughly understand them all

TS Eliot is overrated

A how-to guide on plumbing to fix your toilet after you flush 'Jest down the drain

It was the book that got me into literature as a teenager and I knew nothing going into it. You'll be fine there is just a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense at first but it comes together.

what about this one? it is W.H. Auden‘s course syllabus from the University of Michigan

Attached: auden-syllabus2.png (1280x1660, 1.31M)

I'm going to hell though

>Nabokov, Ezra Pound
i didnt find these guys' lists, can you share them with us?

Filtered midwit
>Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Borges, Kafka.
Another midwit

Are you 70 or something? You can read the entire western canon (~150 books) twice in 20 years easily

Read it again if it was so good.