I have been trying to go down the route of quality over quantity...

I have been trying to go down the route of quality over quantity, and I am currently trying to pare down my list to something like 25 books to read and read again until I have understood them to their fullest for the rest of my life. I am still trying to establish which books these are, the true masterpieces in literature, without peer, all of them.

What would you consider essential literature for a list like this? Remember, I want absolute superiority, not variety. Many books from one time period or culture are fine.

Ovid's Metamorphoses should be on that list.

Montaigne's Essays, a must

Hamlet would be essential, better still the complete works of Shakespeare since that counts as one book.

Divine Comedy as well

King James Bible

King James Bible, any shit by Homer, Paradise Loft

Don Quixote

Sounds good. so far I have

Tom Jones
Don Quixote
The Divine Comedy
Ovid's Metamorphoses
Ulysses
Moby Dick
Gargantua & Pantagruel
The Recognitions (maybe)
Petersburg
War & Peace (maybe)

just for a few of them. I'm open to suggestions, but I would just like to see what would be on some of your lists, if you were trying to cut it down to the very essentials.

well if ur gonna go 20th century: In Search Of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and Gravity's Rainbow

also add Faust 1 & 2

The Canterbury Tales

samefag

as funny as it is to say, i doubt i could ever read in search of lost time, especially devote my life to such a gigantic series of novels, all by one author. I have my doubts about Magic Mountain, but only because of my bad experience with the germans in the past. Gravity's Rainbow, I haven't read yet, so it could easily belong. Forgive me if i'm giving plebbish excuses to some of these ideas.

that seems like cheating, but hamlet would be his most essential, you think?

Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman by Richard P. Feynman, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Catch 22 by Joseph Keller, Lady Chatterlay's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, George Orwell's complete discography, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, The Killing Joke (batman comic) The Nigger Problem by Bill Davis, Gone Gift by Stephanie Meyer, The Stranger by Albert Camus, How To Read a Book by Adler & Doren, Ariel and the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, The Kitchen Diaries 3 by Nigel Slater

cool a high school pseud's reading list!

is this your personal list?

Pop sci prankster shit

All you need from Feynman is the los alamos chapters

Start with the greeks, keep reading the greeks and don't stop reading the greeks

Marley and Me by John Grogan

I guess I should have expected this, it's basically a "3 books on a desert island" scenario, I just wonder what some of you would be unable to genuinely do without.

I wouldn't be able to do without your gorgeous mother. 8----> - - .

that's sweet, i'll have to let her know you said that.

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Prometheus Unbound

it has a few dings and scratches but its still one of the holy books of the world

It's a wonderful poem, but I've encountered only few who have read it. I like this tangent, however: read also the Cenci!