How long would it take to read the greatest books of all time?

The Economist no paywall: “The Economist consulted bibliophile data scientists to bring you the answer. precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short,” wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the 19th century. People are living longer than they did in Schopenhauer’s day, but the number of books has increased by a much bigger factor. So his dictum ought to carry even more weight now than it did then. In issuing it, the famously pessimistic philosopher was uncharacteristically optimistic. He thought that readers could reliably discern which books deserved their time and which did not. That faith has waned. The idea of a literary canon has come under attack. Some readers would pry it open to admit more works by women and non-white authors; others would just sink it. Critics have lost cultural clout. The number of newspapers with book-review sections has dwindled. These days, it seems, everyone has their own personal canon. And yet the need for winnowing persists, so much so that book recommendations seem to be almost as popular as the books they suggest. Influencers on BookTok, a bookish corner of TikTok, a video app, have replaced the credentialled judges of yore. Thousands of readers rate and review books on Goodreads, a website with tens of millions of members. Rebind, an app that is now in a test version, will let readers of classic books use artificial intelligence to question experts about the texts. The Economist periodically publishes best-book lists, plus reviews and recommendations on specific subjects. Still, the number of texts that people are told they should read seems overwhelming. One way to prune is to see where best-book lists overlap, on the theory that books that appear most often must be really worth your while. That is what a website called thegreatestbooks.org has done. Its creator, Shane Sherman, a computer programmer in Texas, has used more than 300 lists to come up with a list of lists, which he calls, not entirely seriously, the “greatest books of all time” (GBOATs). It has more than 10,000 books, ranked by how often they appear on the constituent lists. You can search the top 500 below and sort them by decade or century of publication, year of publication, language and length.”