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21 Books You Don't Have to Read and 21 You Should
This is an interesting idea, but some of the suggestions puzzle me – the “read this instead of this” format suggests some kind of oranges-to-oranges comparison, but Tolkien and Leguin, frex, are doing *really* different things in LoTR and the Earthsea books. Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy I can see both falling into the category of “18th-century satire;” I do consider Shandy a kinder, if equally gritty and absurdist, book, and being slightly less well-known it probably could use the extra recommendation, though telling the reader to only bother with the first half feels a bit like damning with faint praise.
I did like the suggestion that instead of Gravity's Rainbow one should read a later Pynchon that touched on the same thing but with several decades' additional experience...
The other thing is that for a lot of these I’d never actually heard of the book I was “supposed” to read, perhaps because I don’t usually spend a lot of time with these “Must-Read” lists in the first place.
