10 Canonical Literary Doorstops I Will Proably Never Read Before I Die

For literature enthusiasts certain books are like Mt. Everest. Those 1200 page monsters that taunt you, mocking your inability to read more than fifty some odd pages before giving up and reserving yourself to a life of middlebrow agony or Judy Blume books.

Here goes:

1. Ulysses by James Joyce. Mr. Joyce, all this for one single, solitary day!??!!? Guess what, I haven't read Portrait of the Artist either and that's under 300 pages. I've written essays on it for college credit thanks to the good folks at SparkNotes, but haven't ever actually read it so take that, you overly verbose Irishman! I couldn't give a rat's ass how good Molly Bloom's interior monologue supposedly is because that's all the way at the end. Stream of consciousness my balls.

2. Capital by Karl Marx. Communist malarkey, you bohemian Kraut! And this series is not just one dense 1000 page book but several volumes of 1000 page books. Looks like it's back to the Communist Manifesto for me.

3. Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Dickens, you folksy jibber jabber moralist tool! Your books are so long just because they were published serially in magazines and, therefore you'd get paid more! Try writing an outline next time rather than just winging it to make me feel stupid and lazy! You opportunistic soap opera bastard! I'll stick with A Christmas Carol or the "Masterpiece" Theater adaptation from 2006.

4. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. Stupid drugged out hippie Pynchon! I don't even think he really exists. Postmodernism is sooooo 20th century and unfunny to boot! Some of this is like a burnt out stoner intellectual describing The Three Stooges in microscopic detail over a doobie with his acid casualty physics professor buddy. Yet if I read this I will have such hipster cred, or at least something about with the longhair literature professors. "Man, I ever tell you about the 60s..." Baby Boomers shouldn't be trusted with anything, especially literature.