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With my reading habits I was surprised that I have read about nine and started (add abandoned) another three.
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10; normally on a list like that I'd score around 20....
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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18.
Software Zen: delete this;
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The list title is incorrect. It should be "Books that I want everyone to think I personally have read, so they will have to show me respect as a smarter man than they".
I'll bet the compiler has read even less than you have.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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17
No more than that because
a) never heard of it
b) feeling barfish just contemplating it
or
c) too busy with better books
Saw the movie "Crash". Can't bear Ballard's writing, so didn't rad the book, but the story was good.
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Why don't they just say "Everyone should read 100 novels"?
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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Don't feel bad. I have a private library of nearly 13,000 volumes -- yes, I've read them all; I'm a novelist as well as a software engineer, and reading widely is a novelist's occupational requirement -- and of the 100 books on the Telegraph's list I've read only 23. But the list contains quite a number of novels I consider garbage, having read snatches of them and tossed them aside with a snort.
What comes to mind in this connection is Ambrose Bierce's definition of a classic: "A book everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read." That applies to quite a number of the most frequently cited "classics," and sometimes for very good reasons!
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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The list is invalid without War and Peace on it.
Although, it did have Hitchhiker's Guide...
"I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."
- Douglas Adams
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Well hardly invalid. It's a list of 100 novels that should be read. It doesn't say anywhere that it's the only 100 novels you should read nor indeed that these are the 'best', 'greatest' or any other superlative you care to mention. It doesn't even claim that the list is any kind of definition of 'literature' as we know it.
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Member 9082365 wrote:
It doesn't say anywhere that it's the only 100 novels you should read nor indeed that these are the 'best', 'greatest' or any other superlative you care to mention.
Though my reply was tongue in cheek, all of the above are implied when the title states I "should" read them.
My intent was to add a different opinion to the mine's-bigger-than-yours conversations by everyone's claim to how many they've read.
Another reason not to take me more seriously, is that I think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the greatest novel of all time - with War and Peace coming in a close second.
"I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."
- Douglas Adams
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I don't think there's any such implication. In fact, on the whole, things you should do are often on the less than enjoyable side. I agree, for example, that one should read Ulysses for an understanding of 'stream of consciousness', the Irish voice, and the beginnings of surrealism and absurdism as the first World War's horrors began to impinge on the universal consciousness and conscience. That doesn't for one second suggest that I think you're likely to find it an enjoyable read or that it's going to be a favourite.
I'm far from sure that the 'greatest novel of all time' is in any way meaningful. I'm happy to agree that HGTTG is the greatest sci-fi pastiche featuring dolphins and white mice as super intelligent beings with a special interest in really hot tea and towels but to suggest that there is any actual point of comparison between it and a translated Russian novel about the the causes and effects of conflict is almost as mad as actually believing that white mice are super intelligent beings and ultimately responsible for everything that constitutes the history on which 'War and Peace' is grounded! At the end of the day (or the beginning or any point in between) just what does 'great' mean in relation to literature? The longest, the funniest, the bizarrest, the most grammatical, best use of the subjunctive ........ ?
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17, plus three on the to-read pile. But mostly when I was a teenager, before I had internet.
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For me, 20. I am not a Philosopher so I never read Proust and partners. At this time I think a must did it, but I do not have enough time because I am reading not Philosophy books but novels (Sci-Fi, mystery...) 
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In what way is Proust philosophy? Certainly it's an exploration of the human condition but that's true of pretty much all good writing and especially so of sci-fi. If any genre can be accused of being 'philosophical' then sci-fi is right up there among the usual suspects!
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Yeah sci-fi is the most philosophical of genres, more so than mainstream literature. Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, etc. Certain works by Kafka, Hesse, Vonnegut, etc. could be considered sci-fi as well.
Many common sci-fi themes such as alien contact, the effects of technology on people, artificial intelligence, and the like are all inherently philosophical.
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In certain way you are right. Every good written book has philosophy inside. When I refer Proust as a Philosopher, I am telling that his books are more aimed to a life philosophy rather than a story by itself. They have a story inside, but every chapter includes many human conditions that, in my point of view, make the reading difficult. The analysis of life has been always a hard matter and if you are looking for a 'soft' reading (as you said, Sci-Fi is not necessarily an easy reading) may be Proust, Sartre and even Kafka are not the kind of writer you are going to give a try. May be you prefer Asimov, Clarke (Sci-Fi) Garcia Marquez (folkloric) Stephen King, Peter Straub (Horror), and many others who write 'easy-to-understand' novels (note the quotes) that are really good written, but in which the analysis of human condition is not the most relevant part.
All the previous, is taking into account that Philosophy as we understand in our time, is referring to the study of human being and not as was understood by the ancient greeks as 'Hunger of Knowledge'.
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I hit 15 only counting the books I finished.
Ulysses is bull s**t on a stick. Get drunk (really drunk), talk into a recorder and you will have made as much readable material. Pseudo-intellectuals sop up this kind for garbage and claim to "so get it" when there is nothing there. Emperor/clothes much?
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30. I think. but some of them are so boring I'm honestly not sure if I read them or not.
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I count 29 of those I've read at least once.
Though I don't agree with some of them as a "must-read" and then omitting some others which I might feel has entertained me much more, taught me some thing interesting, made me think, or any combination.
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11.
No "Confederancy of Dunces"?!?
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Wait, are there developers out there that actually have the time to read...for fun?! 
I don't think I've read anything but technical books for years now. Does watching the film count? I'm at 10 without films, up to 25 with films + theater.
I've never read/seen Wuthering Heights, but saw plenty of Cathy/Heathcliff jokes on Dave Allen at Large, back in the day. Does that count, too? 
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone - Bjarne Stroustrup
The world is going to laugh at you anyway, might as well crack the 1st joke!
My code has no bugs, it runs exactly as it was written.
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11 for sure, a few others I was on the fence about.
However, I've seen the movie for lots of others, so that's pretty much the same thing. 
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Not in most films, it's not! Most of them should include a notice in the credits warning that any similarity between the book and the film is entirely coincidental!
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I've read 41 of them, that's a pretty random list, it seems to be a list of 100 books the author has read that seem impressive enough to include in a list. I was not surprised to see Moby Dick on that list, it's so overrated, what a miserable piece of turgid prose and over-wrought symbolism. It's a book that people only pretend to like because they're supposed to.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance should be on that list, that's most certainly a book everyone should read. Also, if sci-fi is going to be included then something by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula Le Guin should be on that list somewhere.
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Ursula LeGuin is on the list.
Gibson and Clarke should make way for Heinlein and Asimov, IMHO.
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