What are the 5 to 10 essential books everyone should read to

>>9966480
Add Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Ulysses, the Iliad, and the Odyssey

The fault in our stars

harry potter series

>>9966480
Honestly, drop the Dickens. He's important to Victorian English lit, but he's mid-tier in terms of the broader scope of Literature.

>> The Iliad
>>The Bible
>> Beyond Good and Evil
>> The Illuminatus Trilogy
>>The Bhagavad Gita

>>9966486
MOBY DICK is god-tier. Best writing I've ever experienced desu.

>>9966480
>war and peace
>at least 5 shakespeare plays
>don quixote
>iliad & odyssey
>ulysses
>plato's dialogues
>aristotle's ethics
>at least 10 montaigne essays
>brothers karamazov
>paradise lost
>collection of british romanticism poetry
>goethe's faust

past 10 but so fuck, this is what it takes

>>9966537
should also throw
>the divine comedy
&
>canterbury tales
in

bible
crime and punishment
illiad
odyssey
don quixote
shakespeare
plato
aristotle
faust

Goosebumps.

>>9966544
>>9966543
>>9966537
If you read all this, you would be a bona fide patrician OP.

>>9966529
This is a bit of a retard opinion 2bh. Dickens had an incalculable influence on Western literature, influencing writers as diverse as Kafka, Pessoa, and Tolstoy. He is canonical

>>9966529
More like shit tier

Thus spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
M.Alone (Beckett)
Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
Ada (Nabokov)
Negative Dialectics (Adorno)

>>9966630
>ada over lolita
what did he mean by this

>>9966637
Ada>Lolita

>>9966480
I will limit it to English language.
>King James Bible
>Canterbury Tales
>The Works of Shakespeare

Unpleb yourself.

>Thinking you can stop being a pleb after reading 5 books

Anon... you have to at least read the entire Western Literary Canon before you can maybe, just MAYBE, if you're an especially quick learner with a lot of focus, become a Pseud.

Finnegans wake.

>>9966486
Ulysses is just shitpost shit for pseuds

Add The Recognitions to that list and maybe Proust

Plato (Probably the Republic, but anything is fine desu)
Moby Dick
Hamlet (or another Shakespear play on the same caliber)
Brothers K
The Crying of Lot 49

>>9966940
Who would you pick Pynchon's 2nd worst novel?

>>9966480
If everyone read it how would they stop being plebs? [thinking emoji]

Homer
Thucydides
Plato
Dante
Cervantes
Montaigne
KJV
Shakespeare
Goethe
Proust
>10 authors

>>9966964
why would he pick pynchon at all? he's a fucking retard

>>9966480
winnie the pooh desu

>>9967101
Mind explaining why?

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

>>9967135
>What are the 5 to 10 essential books everyone should read to avoid being a pleb?
how the fuck is reading pynchon going to make you any less of a pleb?
only canonical works should be listed

>>9967005
>KJV
>1 author
Pseud detected

>>9966480
>5 essential books of the entire canon
>2 of them are dickens
wtf is wrong with you, how fucking high school are you? going with others here, read moby dick and the bible. also read some poetry.

Candide
The Bible
Thus Spake Zaraustra
Green Eggs and Ham
Ender's Game

embarrassing thread

>>9966480
This is just my viewpoint so take it with a grain of salt:
There are no reading requirements for not being a pleb. One can read two hundred books and still be a pleb while someone else can be an intellectual after reading one book. The thing is, the distinction isn't really made by WHAT you read, but rather by HOW you read.

If you do not read actively (asking yourself questions, determining the structure of the book etc.) you will never achieve true understanding. The best a passive reading can do is pure memorization of facts. Systems of knowledge build onto this are fragile because 1) they are static because they don't allow to integrate knowledge from other books 2) they can be easily be undermined by simple questioning.

In conclusion just read whatever you want, but read it with attention and interest. Unfortunately if you haven't been educated correctly, you're pretty much screwed from the beginning.

>>9968248
This post is pure fiction. Reading what you want is not the same as reading to abstain from poor taste. Taste is a concept by which preference is measured. For anyone believing that you can simply be less of a pleb by understanding what you read or interpreting the text differently, you are ignoring a critical point of the term. Plebian, as in uncultured, as in devoid of interest in social and cultural matters of the aristocracy.

If you aren't spending a long time trying to understand style and prosaic anatomy, I don't see how changing your pattern of reading or affecting how you read books is going to inspire your ability to be less of a philistine.

>>9967172
And which Canon are you going off of, friend? Because last time I checked...

>>9968119
That's loose, granted, but so what. I suppose some production might have been made to assure the denizens here that that one and perhaps the Homer (a species of oral tradition after all) were exceptions, but figured it wasn't worth it.

>>9966637
Ada is significantly better than Lo. It represents Nabokov at the peak of his aestheticism, and it's his most magical book. The texture puts him in the running for greatest lyrical author of the 20th century

>>9968585
you're taking /lit/ too seriously
have you even read a book?

>two dickens novels, one of them a novel for small children
wew lad.
i do like dickens very much and believe he should be included, but twice?

>>9968647
Yeah which novel would you like to discuss, friend?