To read the 50 books of reference of the "Western literary canon" it takes about 56 days a week. Considering a daily reading time of half an hour, to complete the reading of the 50 essential works it takes approximately 2681 days, that is 7 years and 4 months. Quite challenging, but doable. In fact the “List of the best books of all time (GBOATs*)”, includes 10 thousand of them. An algorithm developed it.
Life is short
Arthur Schopenhauer, known for his pessimism, he said: “A necessary condition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: life is short.”
This statement, made in an era when life expectancy was lower, today seems even more true in light of the publishing explosion of the last few centuries.
The German philosopher seemed certain that readers were able to recognize valuable works. Today, however, the existence of a universal literary canon it is increasingly problematic.
The multiplication of critical voices, the openness to new perspectives and the personalization of reading tastes have made it more complex to choose the books to which to dedicate one's precious time.
The idea of a stable literary canon has been questioned and the selection of books seems to be increasingly entrusted to individual taste, without a consolidated and shared external reference.
The proliferation of reading recommendations
Yet, the need to select persists, so much so that reading tips and literary recommendations seem to have acquired a popularity comparable to that of the books themselves.
The influencers of BookTok, TikTok's book-focused space has effectively replaced the literary critics of the past.
Platforms like Goodreads, with millions of users, allow anyone to rate and review books. There are even apps, like Rebind, which use artificial intelligence to facilitate the understanding of classics, offering readers the opportunity to ask experts questions.
Even authoritative magazines such as “The Economist,” dedicate ample space to rankings, reviews and reading recommendations.
The popularity of a content
However, faced with such a vast offer, choosing can be paralyzing. One way to orient yourself is to look for the intersections between the different reading lists and rankings, starting from the assumption that the most frequently cited books are actually the most deserving. It's a bit Google's "PageRank" Principle which evaluates the popularity of a content by the number of links it collects.
This is the approach taken by thegreatestbooks.org. The creator of this site, Shane Sherman, has come across over 300 lists to create a meta-ranking, which he defines, with a pinch of irony, “The Best Books of All Time” (GBOATs).
This ranking, which includes over 10.000 titles, allows you to sort books by author, publication date, language and length, thus facilitating personalized searches.
The ranking is updated in real time, so what you will find today is different from what, for example, the team at “The Economist” found when they dealt with it.
The 500 unmissable books
A good adult reader living in developed countries can manage to complete 11 books a year, dedicating, on average, a quarter of an hour a day to it.
Now let's assume that a more motivated reader dedicates half an hour a day to reading. Well, it will take him a More than 65 years to complete the list of 500 must-read books which Sherman's algorithm compiles in real time.
Let's leave aside the 500 and instead try to roughly estimate the time needed to complete it. the first 50 books on the list. Reading times were calculated based on the length of the respective audiobooks (see below).
It should be noted, however, that people read at different paces and some books require more time than others.
For example, it took one book club 28 years to read James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” (ranked #325 on the GBOAT list), a book that, according to the Italian-language audiobook, can be finished in less than 30 hours.
#1: One Hundred Years of Solitude
The top spot on Sherman's list, as of July 1, 2024, was “One hundred years of solitude”, the masterpiece of magical realism by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is estimated that it will take more than 15 hours of solitary reading to complete.
In second place was “The Great Gatsby”, a short novel about America in the Jazz Age. The book by Francis Scott Fitzgerald It takes just 5 hours and 30 minutes. You can read it on a return trip in AV Rome-Milan sitting inside the carriage with the dedicated silence area.
In third place, however, we find, James Joyce's "Ulysses", published around the same time, which requires a much more sustained commitment. It takes 31 hours to read at a good pace, or, perhaps better, listen to, the stories of Leopold Bloom's day on the streets of Dublin.
Reading for 15 minutes a day, as the average reader does, it will take two months to turn the last page of Joyce's masterpiece. A relief!
A list that reflects a certain culture
A ranking of literary works, by its very nature, is the mirror of a cultural consensus. Yet, some choices seem surprising. The ““Divine Comedy”, an undisputed masterpiece of Italian literature, is only ranked 27th, preceded by works by less important authors. It is the first of the non-fiction works.
The Bible is only in 34th place. Even Shakespeare, with “Hamlet” at 83rd place and the “First Folio” at 126th, seems greatly underrated compared to its influence and contribution to the definition of the Western canon.
Most of the books considered the greatest of all time have been written in English since the 20th century and have a markedly Western center of gravity.
After García Márquez's “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which offers a glimpse into Latin American reality, we have to go down to 51st place to find a book born in a non-Western environment, although still written in English. It is “The Collapse” by Chinua Achebe, set in Nigeria.
Non-fiction makes its appearance at 50th place with “The Diary of Anne Frank”.
Popularity sometimes seems to prevail over depth, as in the case of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone”, which precedes Plato's “The Republic”, a founding book of Western culture.
Furthermore, it is surprising that no works by Schopenhauer are among the top 500.
Adjustments to the model
Although Sherman, the compiler of GBOAT, is primarily concerned with data and statistics, he is adjusting his model to accommodate his database the cultural weight of books, a sensible decision indeed.
For example, lists that include only books published in short periods of time are penalized. Lists that rely too much on the judgment of non-experts and those from a single region also lose points. Alongside the most popular books, Sherman has developed a more selective “global literary canon,” which limit each country to three books and fiction literature at 80% of the titles.
However, readers hungry for culture as well as entertainment might want to see more weight given to an approach of the sort found in the “one hundred best books” list of John Lubbock, published in 1887.
The spirit of Lubbock, believed the “godfather” of all best-book lists, is still present in the literature courses programs of some universities.
Homer, Virgil and St. Augustine appear on Lubbock's list and are among the recommended readings for the Literature Humanities course that first-year students at Columbia College are required to take. All authors on this list also appear on the GBOAT.
The right mix
Schopenhauer, in his skepticism towards common taste, argued that avoiding works of excessive popularity was a prerequisite for choosing valuable reading.
While this statement may seem overly snobbish these days, the advice of CS Lewis, author of “The Chronicles of Narnia”, deserves more careful consideration. The writer suggested that alternate reading contemporary works with classics, thus avoiding falling into excessive literary conformism.
A very pertinent piece of advice for those who are dedicated to discovering the “Best Books”.
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List of the 50 best books of all time (GBOATs) with relative reading or listening time in Italian as of July 1, 20024
The hours of reading/listening are in square brackets
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude; Gabriel García Márquez; 1967— [15,5]
2. The Great Gatsby; F Scott Fitzgerald; 1925— [5,3]
3. Ulysses; James Joyce; 1922— [31,7]
4. The Catcher in the Rye; J.D. Salinger, 1951— [8,5]
5. 1984 George Orwell, 1949— [14,0]
6. In search of lost time, Marcel Proust, 1913— [184,6]
7. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955— [13,6]
8. The dark beyond the hedge, Harper Lee, 1960— [11,8]
9. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851— [27,2]
10. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1813— [15,7]
11. Cime tempestose, Emily Brontë, 1847— [15,7]
12. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, 1605— [49,2]
13. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866— [30,8]
14. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, 1877— [45,7]
15. FURORE, John Steinbeck, 1939— [23,4]
16. War and peace, Leo Tolstoy, 1869— [80,8]
17. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien, 1954— [62,5]
18. Paragraph 22, Joseph Heller, 1961— [20,9]
19. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1857— [12,8]
20. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847— [23,6]
21. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, 1929— [11,6]
22. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865— [3,6]
23. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1884— [12,6]
24. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899— [4,9]
25. The divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, 1321— [21,4]
26. Odyssey, Homer, 740 BC, 19,4]
27. Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, 1818— [10,3]
28. The stranger, Albert Camus, 1942— [3,6]
29. The Karamazov brothers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880— [56,5]
30. Big hopes, Charles Dickens, 1860— [18,1]
31. The Holy Bible, , 1400 BC, 104,5]
32. To the lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927— [10,7]
33. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925— [8,1]
34. Iliad, Homer, 740 BC, 13,3]
35. The process, Franz Kafka, 1925— [9,2]
36. On the road, Jack Kerouac, 1957— [6,9]
37. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967— [20,5]
38. The new world, Aldous Huxley, 1932— [14,3]
39. The enchanted mountain, Thomas Mann, 1924— [47,4]
40. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726— [11,7]
41. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 1850— [37,4]
42. I miserabili, Victor Hugo, 1862— [71,4]
43. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, 1936— [42,7]
44. Fiesta (The Sun Will Rise Again), Ernest Hemingway, 1926— [7,5]
45. The red and the black, Stendhal, 1830— [24,2]
46. Passage to India, EM Forster, 1924— [13,5]
47. Slaughterhouse 5 or The Children's Crusade, Kurt Vonnegut, 1969— [7,0]
48. Rebecca the first wife, Daphne du Maurier, 1938— [16,3]
49. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850— [9,3]
50. The diary, Anne Frank, 1947— [9,3]
Total reading or listening time, 1340,3 gold
The reading times for each work in Italian were taken from the Libro Parlato service https://www.libroparlato.org/. The International Center for Talking Books offers books to listen to that are recorded by volunteer readers. These audiobooks, to be streamed or downloaded, are available to anyone who is visually impaired or unable to read in a traditional way. The slightly modified ranking of books is instead taken from the article in “The Economist” below. The source of the magazine is the site thegreatestbooks.org https://thegreatestbooks.org/.
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Source: How long would it take to read the greatest books of all time?, “The Economist”, July 26, 2024
