Alos, there are so many really good authors no one remembers anymore, so their books never make any “best” lists, despite their brilliance: who remembers Christopher Morely, Olive Higgins Prouty, Douglas Jerrold, Mrs. Gaskell, Tiffany Thayer?
Hell with dead authors! Why not read all the great books coming out today by living authors who could use the money!
Seriously, most of the books you list were read, discussed, boosted, and enjoyed at the time of their writing. That got people to read other books by those same authors as they were published. It’s extremely exciting to read a new book by a great author, which is usually a book that speaks to the current day. It’s just not the same reading Hemingway today as it was when his style changed literature and when his experience of disillusionment after WWI was shared by huge numbers.
Yes, we should all be familiar with authors in the Canon. But if you read them to the exclusion of the great work all around you, that’s when I start making huffing noises about book burnings and library closings. Me, possibly the biggest bookie on the Dope.
Make you a deal. For every book on this list you force your way through, go out and find a new book that looks interesting and read that. When you’re done, see which pile has given you more pleasure, more enlightenment, more value.
Exapno Mapcase asked the obvious, and reasonable question:
There exists in me the suspicion that many books are considered masterpieces simply because they are dense, hard to follow, and been around a while. Sort of like the movies by the director of “Mullholland Drive,” whose name escapes me at the moment. But on the other hand maybe I’m wrong. Could be years of reading the much easier to follow, fun, exciting books of, oh say Wilbur Smith, have kept me from developing the taste and skills to enjoy the truly insightful book.
There are reasons, one assumes, that these books are held in high esteem. Just because I find, at least some of them, to be dense, hard to follow, or just plain dull may well be because I haven’t taken the time to try. There will be several, and as I say that I envision “Ulysses” hanging over my head much the same as Indiana Jones looked at that big round stone ball, that I won’t manage to get through.
But you don’t learn by doing the same things over and over. And what are THEY going to do if I don’t read all of them? Fire me? Fuck’m I’m retired.
But it’s a reasonably worthy goal. And goals are worth having.
Nothing’s wrong with goals. And since you’re doing this for yourself, more power to you.
Course, that doesn’t mean you have to read all 100 in a row… 
Way ahead of you there. For Christmas my son got me the two volume complete set of, “The Far Side.” All 1,400+ cartoons, some never published heretofor. Plus there was a copy of “The Bathroom Reader” under the tree. I can, on occassion, let the brain blisters ease away.
Did I miss Gravity’s Rainboy by Thomas Pynchon?
Probably because that was Gravity’s RainboW.
Sheesh… don’t post whilst drunk.