All 5 recommendations
Est. prices as of Feb 28, 2026
#1 · Penguin Classics · Most Overhyped
Ulysses by James Joyce
$18
The book everyone owns but nobody finishes
- ✓ Genuinely revolutionary modernist technique
- ✓ Makes you sound intellectual at dinner parties
- ✓ Penguin edition has helpful annotations
- ✗ 700+ pages of stream-of-consciousness that requires a PhD to parse
- ✗ Most readers abandon ship by page 100
#2 · Bantam · Hidden Gem
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
$18
The science book you bought to look smart
- ✓ Actually quite accessible despite the subject matter
- ✓ Short enough to actually finish
- ✓ Genuinely mind-bending concepts explained well
- ✗ Physics still requires serious brain effort
- ✗ Many buy it purely as a coffee table decoration
#3 · Dover Classics
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
$12
The whale you'll never chase all the way through
- ✓ Surprisingly gripping once you get past the whaling chapters
- ✓ Incredibly cheap in Dover edition
- ✓ Actual literary masterpiece worth the effort
- ✗ 50+ pages dedicated to whale anatomy will test your patience
- ✗ 19th-century prose takes effort to decode
#4 · Little, Brown · Crowd Favorite
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
$20
The 1,000-page flex that nobody actually finishes
- ✓ Genuinely brilliant and darkly hilarious
- ✓ The endnotes are part of the experience
- ✓ Smaller font edition fits in a bag for public reading
- ✗ 1,079 pages plus extensive footnotes
- ✗ Demands serious commitment; most quit by page 200
#5 · Penguin Classics
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
$16
The original unfinished-reader's book since 1605
- ✓ Actually hilarious and frequently absurd
- ✓ Shorter than you'd expect (relative to reputation)
- ✓ Foundational to Western literature for real reasons
- ✗ Multiple translations of varying readability exist
- ✗ First 100 pages drag before the story kicks in