I've read a lot of Azimov, including the Foundation series, and nearly all books by the Strugatsky brothers. And I too loved Harry Harrisons's Deathworld when I was a schoolboy :)
Reading Chekhov makes me genuinely sad, maybe I take the lives of his heroes too close to heart.

I am not sure about top 3, but if I had to reread something I've read before, I'd start with Dostoevsky's 'Idiot', continue with "За миллиард лет до конца света" by Strugatsky brothers, and maybe I'll reread the Permutation City by Greg Egan.

As for the Three Body Problem, I find it unique in that it realisticly represents the humanity's place in the galaxy (a fly on the wind shield). Lui Cixin's cosmic sociology [0] rings true to me too. The idea of laws of physics being the result of the activity of advanced civilizations, while not original (see Lem's “The New Cosmogony”), is fascinating nonetheless. The story of how 'right' moral choices in the context of that world lead to the end of humanity is another original bit.

[0] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixi...

Anna Karenina, A Suitable Boy, and the like. Excellent books but after college it's been difficult to start and keep at them in a acceptable period of time given the time (or lack of it) is an issue now. I also wanted to read Ulysses. I am stuck around the ~20% of Dostoyevsky's Idiot since a long time. Off late I've had better success with shortner ones.

For me the reason is simple - it's just the daunting number of pages and it is a shame that I have not read/finished these books.

> “Call a Rabbit a Smeerp“

Game of Thrones is famously full of that.

> "Idiot Plot"

Probably the most tiresome, as I see it constantly. It normally manifests itself as a squad goes into a dangerous situation, and then all split off and wander around on their own. Eventually, most get back together, then wonder "Where's Bob? Did anyone see where Bob went?" and of course, Bob has gotten into big trouble.

"The Walking Dead" was so full of this lazy trope I gave up watching it.

(From the referenced Turkey City Lexicon.)

Absolutely. TVTropes has a real danger of adding its crazy vocabulary to your everyday life, especially on things unrelated to entertainment. (See also Idiot Ball, Fridge Logic, and Forensic Phlebotinum, which may be on topic.)

Really, someone should write up some of these political stories in terms of TVTropes so I can know how I feel about how the plot's progressing. So far it seems like we're in a poorly written mockumentary.

Well, those are both examples from fiction. "Idiot principal/genius agent" is a very funny fictional trope that has seen use in satiric works from Catch-22 to Yes Minister, and there's no debate that it's not effective. I'm just saying that setups like that tend to be very unstable, usually ending in tears with a manipulative agent under the idiot principal. (In fact, that happened in Catch-22 and Yes Minister - so the instability is even represented in fiction.)

> romantic idea of the poor

It is actually quite fun to read Dostoevsky’s Idiot with that in mind that Dostoevsky might have written Prince Myshkin (the Idiot) with Leo Tolstoy in mind. Dostoevsky was very much not a man of means, whereas Tolstoy literally came from a line of nobility. To Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s talk of the impoverished must have sounded like he had no idea what he was talking about.

That being said, I do think that romanticism of the poor is a really old school mentality, maybe some boomers sometimes still engage in it, but I doubt that you’ll find contemporary leftists engaging in it. Today’s left is much more AOC and Greta Thunberg complaining about how shitty life is for the poor (with a substantial retweet history each backing up poor people calling for it).

This is a perfect example of why it's important to understand not just what your client is asking for, but why they think they need it.

The same lesson goes at least as much, imho, for negotiation - I used to see this all the time at my last job. We'd be negotiating a deal with some counterparty, and they would ask for something completely unnecessary and completely unpleasant (for our side). Sometimes it was just a negotiating ploy so they would have an ask to drop in exchange for something they wanted more, but often as not they just hadn't thought about whether or not they really needed Onerous Provision X. And if instead of fighting over Onerous Provision X you tried to figure out why the other side thought they needed it, and then tried to address that need in some other way, the whole thing went a lot more smoothly, you usually didn't need to give them Onerous Provision X, and everybody walked away feeling like they got what they wanted.

The point of which rambling story, I guess, is that in spite of the linked piece being presented as Idiot Client Asking for Dumb Things, the real lesson is that half the time a ridiculous request is actually just an opportunity to meet the underlying need in a better way.