How many books one should read before being considered "well read"?
What authors are mandatory to be called "well read"?
>>7658140
>How many
A fuckton
>Which authors
Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, De Sade, Joyce, Proust, Beckett, Mishima, Woolf, Pynchon, Gaddis, Delillo.
It's a joke because you never become well read
>>7658140
This is an idiotic question but assuming you're actually serious - it's not the number of books, it's the kind of books. And more than that, how deeply you bother to think about and analyze said books. You can read all 128 Sweet Valley High books, 250 Hardy Boys mysteries, and all of the Nancy Drew canon and remain the moron you seem to be. But if you read just one book apiece (or half, or even a quarter of a book apiece) in a wide range of periods across a wide range of genres you can probably pass for being at least decently, if not "well" read... You might try some Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Tacitus, Ovid, Augustine, Boethius, Beowulf poet, Lady Murasaki, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Dante, Machiavelli, Tasso, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Jonson, La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Locke, Milton, Defoe, Richardson, Sade, Fielding, Rousseau, Goethe, Austen, Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Balzac, Hugo, Poe, Dumas, Pushkin, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, Turgenev, Flaubert, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Nietzsche, Melville, Karl Marx, Conrad, Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, Henry James, Stevenson, Walt Whitman, Hamsun, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Mann, Nabokov, Lovecraft, Katharine Mansfield, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Agatha Christie, Steinbeck, Mervyn Peake, Arthur C Clarke, Alfred Bester, Ross Macdonald, Patricia Highsmith, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Flannery O'Connor, Tolkien, Celine, Woolf, Orwell, Bradbury, J G Ballard, Heinlein, Salinger, Pynchon, Ellroy, Didion, Vonnegut, Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, DFW, China Mieville, Stephen King, Bolano, Alan Moore, McCarthy, Kelly Link, Murakami, James Thurber, and hundreds of others.
You can skip existentialist thought entirely, it's a system for posers and failures with a complex about how France was cucked by Nazis and therefore life is meaningless
>>7658887
You'll note of course that certain literary subgenres are not covered in this list at all as being well-read also necessarily implies knowing what material is not worth reading. For this reason, I've declined to include christian romance novels, Warhammer 40K or Star Wars novels, werewolf erotica, and all work by black or feminist writers.
>>7658921
And yet William Gibson and stevo king are on your list.
Western Canon is what you read to become well-read.
>how many
as much as me
>which authors
my favorites
>>7658887
That's wrong. I'm sorry, you're wrong. You simply are. I've read all Agatha Christie and Steven King novels, and I am now well-read, so that number was enough. There's actually no need for all of this boring stuff.
The only words you need to read are the words of our lord. Pick up a bible, and never put it down
you are suppose to develop a taste after reading, that's what separates literature and not-literature
like bloom said the good literature will make you think about literature
who or what is all up to you since it will take all your life and the next one to read everything that's considered good
>>7661884
Gay
Well read means that you have read about a lot of subjects and a lot of authors
If I only read Russian 19th century novelists no matter how many novels I read I won't be well read.
Reading only fiction won't make you well read. Reading only non fiction won't either
Its a relative term
You can be well read within the context of Fantasy, Scifi, Political or Religious texts, etc.
If you want to be well read within the context of Western Literature just look up the big name classics. And the Bible.
I honestly wouldn't worry about it and just focus on reading things you think you'll enjoy and grow from.
>>7661916
So I should just pick up something from the adult book store down the street?
>>7661935
I wont stop you.
>>7658140
What books do you need to have read before reading Ulysses?
As I understand it, Ulysses has lots of references to other authors.
>>7661973
Homer and Shakespeare for 90% of the book and a whole ton of English/ Irish authors for the chapter: Oxen of the Sun. Also, having a knowledge of Irish history/ geography is good.
>>7658921
Much as I have a guilty pleasure for the SW novels, and a few are actually pretty decent, reading them gives you a pretty solid idea of what not to do in writing.
Before you respond with that one Schopenhauer quote some of you are fond of, I don't take much stock in the words of someone who was literally cucked and spent most of his life incredibly bitter because of it.
>>7658887
>Gibson
>King
>Alan Moore
Lmao. Moore is a nutcase, King is a better screenwriter than an actual writer and Gibson is suitable only for nostalgia-fags.
