<i>On that point, at least, I can agree entirely with Jones: I am always crushed by how many books I have not read.</i><p>So much truth here.  The sad thing is, barring some Kurzweilian breakthrough in life-extension technology, none of us will live long enough to read all the books we might want to read.  I often joke with people &quot;I wish all my favorite authors would quit writing for about 100 years and give me a chance to catch up, and they just won&#x27;t&quot;.  But even the joke is silly, because IF I lived another 100 years, and IF none of my favorite authors wrote anything else in that time, I&#x27;d still not &quot;catch up&quot;.  In fact, I&#x27;d venture I&#x27;ll still be further behind at the end, as NEW writes keep spring up as well.<p>You can&#x27;t win, really.  And since you have to make a choice based on something, I figure it might as well be pretty close to arbitrary.  There are authors I&#x27;ll never read, although perhaps not many that I would make a fuss over actively avoiding.  But out of that list, there are probably plenty I&#x27;d enjoy very much, if I bothered to read them.  Maybe I&#x27;d like some of them more than some of the authors I read now.  But the bitter irony is, you can&#x27;t <i>really</i> know if you&#x27;d like reading a book or... until you have already read it.  <i>sigh</i><p>I think the best most of us can hope for is simply to make it a point to try and be at least somewhat diverse in our reading, and take the occasional foray into unexplored territory.  I did that a while back when I picked up my first Haruki Murakami novel. I&#x27;d heard of him, heard him mentioned by a lot of &quot;literary&quot; types, and assumed his work was probably snotty, pretentious &quot;pat yourself on the back&quot; stuff, and so put off reading anything by him for quite some time.  And then I read <i>After Dark</i> and I was hooked.  I&#x27;ve still only read two of his works (the other being <i>Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki</i>) but I&#x27;d now mention Murakami as one of my favorite authors.<p>I resisted reading the Harry Potter books for quite a while because &quot;they&#x27;re kids books&quot;.  Once I read them, I found that they were very much worth the time.  OTOH, I started <i>Infinite Jest</i> by DFW a while back, and I have been struggling to find any enthusiasm for reading this book. Should I continue with it just because it&#x27;s so widely revered? Or should I read something I enjoy more instead?  That&#x27;s one of life&#x27;s little conundrums.  <i>shrug</i><p>At the end, you just have to do the best you can.  Nobody gets out of life alive and all that...