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Why do I impose such difficult #reads on myself?
1. Some #books are way better than others, were much more original when published, or have a much larger influence today.
1. My own taste, my personal bubble's recommendations, and current trends — none of them are reliable indicators of quality.
1. Books that seem huge today may be forgotten in a decade; what persists for generations or even centuries is more likely to be worth reading.
1. The opportunity cost of reading _“Trendy Fantasy Saga”_ instead of _“Universal Masterpiece Of Five Centuries Ago”_ may be high.
“Great,” you say. “I agree with all that!”
Cool.
“Now, how can one figure out what #books are truly worth #reading, what is the very best?”
I don't have the perfect answer to that. But it seems to me that the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff and to eliminate all biases is to aggregate qualified opinions across time and space. ie, see what lots of experts in different places have considered the best books in different languages, over the years, and find common patterns there.
The best approximation I have found of that is
https://thegreatestbooks.org/