I&#x27;ve read Finnegans Wake and view it as almost entirely a waste of time. Maybe that marks me a philistine, but I put a whole lot of effort into the book - reading books about it, listening to two different versions on tape - and it did pretty much nothing for me.<p>And to the original question, I consider TAOCP probably not worth the time and effort to read in detail. It has a lot of interesting stuff if you have infinite time, but very little that I&#x27;ve found practical to me. I&#x27;ve read enough of TAOCP to get two Knuth reward checks but can&#x27;t motivate myself to read more than a fraction of it.