Tristram Shandy is a long book but comprehensible and enjoyable. Here are some more good starters for ten -

Joyce's Ulysses;
The Complete Works of Shakespeare;
Memorizing Coleridge's The Rime of The Ancient Mariner;
Reading Gray's Elegy in THE churchyard. 
Simon Crompton's Snob Book of Tailoring.

It took Joyce 17 years to write Finnegans Wake and so I have been reading a page a day for about the same length of time. You would think, would you not, that after 17 years I'd be able to grasp the meaning of the first page! It might as well have begun: ''all they wot said in slithering spokes that he and she did dander therein and enjoyed the hod on the roof of the tin man's house''

If I understand this thread correctly it is to list those books often claimed to have been read by some pseud, (blogger) but rarely have been :

Proust: In Search of Lost Time

Marx: Das Kapital.

Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and its companion book The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time.

On a similar note, books every child should be encouraged to read.

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels.

George Orwell: 1984.

^That's well known and that's why the Beats were a welcome relief from it all.

Culminating in Bukowski - although not a Beat - poetry for the man stuck in the factory, dead-end jobs, or no jobs at all. Literature for the man who didn't go to Ivy league universities, Oxbridge or gain an MBA from Harvard.

Last edited by Dudley Clarke (2013-10-26 05:14:34)

Sometime shortly after reading A Confederacy of Dunces, I picked up a copy of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.  It remains quite unread next to Confederacy on the shelf.