Reddit, what are some "MUST read" books?

Sigh. I figured you would double down on the ridiculously transparent lie that you read all 100 of those books in high school and did so because they were required. Ok /u/ajsmitty, let's do this.

  1. Your high school required you to read the likes of A Stranger in a Strange Land, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Lolita, A Song of Ice and Fire, A Clockwork Orange? Any school that went over those books would cause an unprecedented uproar due to their "objectionable" content. Graphic, promiscuous sex, pedophilia (!), rape, murder, glorification of drug use.... The list goes on. Of course, this is in a country where people still get upset when kids are asked to read Catcher in the Rye but, yeah, your high school required you to read all of these. Oh, also On the Origin of the Species too. One or two of them? Eh, maybe. Maaaaybe. But all of them? You're a liar.

  2. Your high school required you to read the bible, huh? Any school that did that would create an even bigger uproar because that's pretty much illegal. You're such a liar.

  3. Your high school required you to read the Harry Potter series, Hyperion, Everybody Poops, The Little Prince, Neuromancer, the Foundation series, Contact, The Diamond Age, and Ringworld, huh? There's far, far more important literature in the world, and not nearly enough time to read it, but your high school had a particular penchant for science fiction and thought, no, we should take time out of the other things that we don't have time to teach our students to have them read a bunch of science fiction books. Seriously. You such an obvious fucking liar. How could you seriously expect somebody to believe you?

  4. Your high school required you to read War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Infinite Jest, The Brothers Karamazov, Ishmael, and Notes From Underground, Candide, and Atlas Shrugged, huh? Not your grad school, not your majors western literature program, not your -- lulz -- your university's freshman-level Engilsh program. Nope; your high school. Riiiight. Sure they did, buddy. This is perfectly accessible material to 14-18 year old kids, and you're totally not lying at all.

So, that should pretty much seal it that you're a fucking liar. But wait, what if you try to claim you didn't go to HS in the US despite your post history all but stating you're an American? What if you went to a private school for fucking geniuses? Ok, fine. Let's talk about page count. Here's a list of page counts from the things on that list:

A Song of Ice and Fire: 5216 Harry Potter series: 4224 War and Peace: 1296 The Stand: 1200 Atlas Shrugged: 1088 Infinte Jest: 1079 The Foundation trilogy: ~1000 The Hyperion Cantos: 936 The Count of Monte Cristo: 928 The Brothers Karamazov: 824 The Bible: ~900 American Gods: 624 Collapse: 608 The Autobiography of Malcolm X: 460 Crime and Punishment: 448

That's 20,831 pages from 15% of the list. Now, according to Google, most books in English have somewhere in the neighborhood of 250-300 words per page. For the sake of the argument, let's lowball it; let's say 200. Now, 20,831 pages times 200 words per page comes out to be 4,166,200 words in just these 15 items from the list.

That's a lot of words. I wonder how long it took you to read that many words.

According to Google, the average American can read somewhere around 300 words per minute. But if you read all those books, you're clearly a fast reader. Let's say you can do double what an average person can do. 4,166,200 words at an incredible 600 words per minute would be 6944 minutes, or 115 hours.

115 hours for a trained speed reader to burn through over four million pages -- many of which are incredibly dense. And this is 15% of the list. Sure, I did pick many of the highest-page-count items on that list, but again, this is just 15% of it.

And your special high school for speed-reading geniuses required you to read all of this. War and Peace, Everybody Poops. And you read it all.

TL;DR: Not only are you a liar, but you're a stupid liar because, when called out, you doubled down on an obviously transparent lie.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent