You should try and read Modern Library's 100 best novels

Reasons to agree:

1. The books on the "Modern Library's 100 best novels" list are good
1. Reasons to agree:
1. #13 on the list: "1984," by George Orwell is a good book
1. Reasons to agree:
1. Art imitates real life, and real life imitates art. People form the 1950s soviet union say that is what it was like, only 1984 was a little worse. 1984 is an accurate warning. You can't ask much more than a book's main point to be based in an important truth. 
2. Number 31 on the list, "Animal Farm" by George Orwell, is good. 
1. Reasons to agree:
1. Truth is beauty and beauty is truth. If a book is not truthful it is not beautiful. However, obvious truths are often ignored, because people would rather be unique than diligent. A good book can vividly explain obvious truths in such a way that people would feel stupid to ignore. It is an obvious truth that workers' revolution tend to go wrong. However people keep ignoring this fact, because the motivations behind workers revolutions are so strong. Orwell creates an allegory from which you see how stupid these people are. Truths well told:
1. Whenever you give power to people they typically succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. 

Reasons to disagree: 

1.  Just because someone said a book is important doesn't make it so. 
2. #10 on the list: "The Grapes of Wrath," by John Steinbeck, is not a great book +8
3. #2 on the list: "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is not a good book
4. #1 on the list. "Ulysses," by James Joyce is a great book

Websites that agree:

1. http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

Read:

• 41. "Lord of the Flies," William Golding
• 74. "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway

Need to Read?

• 3. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," James Joyce
• 4. "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
• 5. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley
• 6. "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner
• 7. "Catch-22," Joseph Heller
• 8. "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler
• 9. "Sons and Lovers," D. H. Lawrence
• 11. "Under the Volcano," Malcolm Lowry
• 12. "The Way of All Flesh," Samuel Butler
• 14. "I, Claudius," Robert Graves
• 15. "To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf
• 16. "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser
• 17. "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," Carson McCullers
• 18. "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut
• 19. "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison
• 20. "Native Son," Richard Wright
• 21. "Henderson the Rain King," Saul Bellow
• 22. "Appointment in Samarra," John O' Hara
• 23. "U.S.A." (trilogy), John Dos Passos
• 24. "Winesburg, Ohio," Sherwood Anderson
• 25. "A Passage to India," E. M. Forster
• 26. "The Wings of the Dove," Henry James
• 27. "The Ambassadors," Henry James
• 28. "Tender Is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald
• 29. "The Studs Lonigan Trilogy," James T. Farrell
• 30. "The Good Soldier," Ford Madox Ford
• 32. "The Golden Bowl," Henry James
• 33. "Sister Carrie," Theodore Dreiser
• 34. "A Handful of Dust," Evelyn Waugh
• 35. "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner
• 36. "All the King's Men," Robert Penn Warren
• 37. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," Thornton Wilder
• 38. "Howards End," E. M. Forster
• 39. "Go Tell It on the Mountain," James Baldwin
• 40. "The Heart of the Matter," Graham Greene
• 42. "Deliverance," James Dickey
• 43. "A Dance to the Music of Time" (series), Anthony Powell
• 44. "Point Counter Point," Aldous Huxley
• 45. "The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway
• 46. "The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad
• 47. "Nostromo," Joseph Conrad
• 48. "The Rainbow," D. H. Lawrence
• 49. "Women in Love," D. H. Lawrence
• 50. "Tropic of Cancer," Henry Miller
• 51. "The Naked and the Dead," Norman Mailer
• 52. "Portnoy's Complaint," Philip Roth
• 53. "Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov
• 54. "Light in August," William Faulkner
• 55. "On the Road," Jack Kerouac
• 56. "The Maltese Falcon," Dashiell Hammett
• 57. "Parade's End," Ford Madox Ford
• 58. "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton
• 59. "Zuleika Dobson," Max Beerbohm
• 60. "The Moviegoer," Walker Percy
• 61. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," Willa Cather
• 62. "From Here to Eternity," James Jones
• 63. "The Wapshot Chronicles," John Cheever
• 64. "The Catcher in the Rye," J. D. Salinger
• 65. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess
• 66. "Of Human Bondage," W. Somerset Maugham
• 67. "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad
• 68. "Main Street," Sinclair Lewis
• 69. "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton
• 70. "The Alexandria Quartet," Lawrence Durrell
• 71. "A High Wind in Jamaica," Richard Hughes
• 72. "A House for Ms. Biswas," V. S. Naipaul
• 73. "The Day of the Locust," Nathaniel West
• 75. "Scoop," Evelyn Waugh
• 76. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," Muriel Spark
• 77. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce
• 78. "Kim," Rudyard Kipling
• 79. "A Room With a View," E. M. Forster
• 80. "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh
• 81. "The Adventures of Augie March," Saul Bellow
• 82. "Angle of Repose," Wallace Stegner
• 83. "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul
• 84. "The Death of the Heart," Elizabeth Bowen
• 85. "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad
• 86. "Ragtime," E. L. Doctorow
• 87. "The Old Wives' Tale," Arnold Bennett
• 88. "The Call of the Wild," Jack London
• 89. "Loving," Henry Green
• 90. "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie
• 91. "Tobacco Road," Erskine Caldwell
• 92. "Ironweed," William Kennedy
• 93. "The Magus," John Fowles
• 94. "Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys
• 95. "Under the Net," Iris Murdoch
• 96. "Sophie's Choice," William Styron
• 97. "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles
• 98. "The Postman Always Rings Twice," James M. Cain
• 99. "The Ginger Man," J. P. Donleavy
• 100. "The Magnificent Ambersons," Booth Tarkington

"Ulysses," by James Joyce is not a great book

Reasons to agree:

1. Works of literature should not be measured by how much work went into them. Sure a lot of work went into writing Ulysses. But writing shouldn't just be a game where someone says, look at all this fancy work I can do, and people pat themselves on the back for being able to notice the fancy work. 
2. Ulysses is tiresome
3. Ulysses is tedious
4. Joyce is a pseudo-intellectual. Scientist are intellects. They propose a hypothesis  Make it as clear as possible, and gather evidence to support or weaken the hypothesis. If Joyce believes things, he should state them clearly, make a list of logical reasons to support those conclusion, and encourage other people to submit their reasons to agree or disagree with his conclusion. We can do that now. Lets advance the science of thinking. Lets be clear. Lets be organized. If you believe your ideas are important you owe it to your readers to be clear, comprehensible, and transparent. Genius does not need to hide itself so that only fellow geniuses can comprehend, but true Genius is making truth plain.
5. "By turning literature from entertaining stories into puzzle solving, I believe he has turned many children away from reading." (From Amazon).

"The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is not a good book

Reasons to agree:

1. There is no reason Gatsby should love Daisy. Yes we all get it. People fall in love for bad reasons, and this ends in tragedy. You should fall in love with real people, not your allusion of what you think these people are like. But you shouldn't waste your time reading stupid stories about stupid people that do stupid things. From an Amazon review: "But unhappy endings need not be the same thing as nihilism. Gatsby's universe is a highly nihilistic one, a world so far gone that even the saddest ideals seem priceless simply for being ideals. Perhaps it's the kind of cynicism the book represents--it's not "grumpy old man" cynicism like Vonnegut or Twain, which at least feels earned and honest".

You should listen to Librivox

Reasons to agree: +2

1. They are free, if you have a computer or MP3 player.
2. Librivox has good books. The following books are good:
1. The Grapes of Wrath
2. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
3. The Man Who Would be King by Rudyard Kipling
4. The Tragedy Of Macbeth By William Shakespeare
5.  Howards End By EM Forster
6. Poetics By Aristotle
7. Treasure Island By Robert Louis Stevenson
8. The Awful German Language By Mark Twain
9. The Sayings Of Confucius By Confucius
10. Anna Karenina Book By Leo Tolstoy
11. Les Miserables Volume By Victor Hugo
12. Pride And Prejudice By Jane Austen
13.  The Autobigraphy Of Benjamin Franklin Ed By Frank Woodworth Pine
14. The Return Of Sherlock Holmes By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
15. Great Expectations By Charles Dickens
16. The Secret Garden By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Reasons to disagree: -2

1. Each Chapter has the "This is a librivox recording..." thing
2. Listening to a book on tape may be more distracting than listening to music

Websites that agree: +1

1. http://librivox.org/

Score: +1

The Grapes of Wrath is not a great book

Score: 2 + 2 +1 +3 = 8

1. Reasons to agree:
1. Good books should be relevant to you. The Grapes of Wrath is not very relevant today 
1. Reasons to agree: + 2
1. Poverty in America has drastically changed from the time of the Great Depression
1. Reasons to agree: + 3
1. We have food stamps.
2. We now have disability
3.  Kids are not starving to death in America in more. 
2. Yes we all know that things were tough. The great depression was hard. Life sucked. But life has always sucked. Why should I read about it now? People live like that overseas. 
2. Tragedies with no hope are great at pointing out how wonderful the author is, but there is often little reason to read them.
1. Reasons to agree: + 1
1. Why waste your time learning about depressing stuff? Life is short. Write about your own problems. Better yet, try to fix your problems. But why read about other people's problems? Why read about fake other people's problems? If you want to read about other people's problems, why not read about important real people from history? Better yet, why not read about people who overcame problems like Lincoln, Washington, John Adams?

http://archive.org/details/TheGrapesOfWrath_557