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As we are kind of in Ken Kesey country here, I would add "Sometimes A Great Notion", which I think is his best novel - better than "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest".

It took Joyce seven years to write Ulysses at a page per day. It's not an easy read. It is a great book. On the other hand Ken Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion in three months, and to my mind it compares favorably to Ulysses in many ways. It is also a great, though overlooked, novel.

I've noticed the same three categories discussed in two "go west" novels -- Steinbeck's East of Eden (1952) and Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion (1962). It's interesting, and a bit jarring, to see the MBA translation of what, to me, existed as a literary aside.

"Yes." (Couldn't resist that one.)

Ulysses is a hard slog. That should be expected from someone who wrote one page per day. IIRC correctly Ulysses took 7 years, so Joyce apparently wasn't even writing every day. I read Sometimes a Great Notion soon after, and enjoyed Kesey's 3 months of effort more.

Actually I was recommending "Sometimes a Great Notion".

Everything in moderation.

Ken Kesey wrote two of my favorite books "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962) and "Sometimes a Great Notion" (1964), but basically produced nothing of much merit after that.

I'm convinced that his subsequent over-indulgence in psychedelics destroyed his ability to produce great literature.

Articles about Apple censoring the illustrated Ulysses have made it to HN lately. It took Joyce 7 years to write Ulysses. Ken Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, a favorite of mine, in about 3 months. It struck me that Kesey touches on some of the same themes as Joyce. I consider it an overlooked masterpiece.

Howard's End, EM Forster, is one, along with all of Forster.

Arcadia, a play by Tom Stoppard, is fantastic. Good for many re-reads (and re-watches).

Ursula Le Guin (maybe The Left Hand of Darkness is my favorite?) might be the best sci-fi/fantasy ever written, as much as I love Lois McMaster Bujold (three worlds to choose from, each offering many more or less independent novels and novellas), who is also great.

A few more:

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey.

My Antonia, Willa Cather.

Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut.

Non-Fiction (Science)

  - *The Selfish Gene* by Richard Dawkins

  - *The Righteous Mind* by Jonathan Haidt

  - *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman

Non-Fiction (Social)

  - *The Art of Not Being Governed* by James C. Scott

  - *The Unwinding* by George Packer

  - *People's History of the United States* by Howard Zinn

Fiction

  - *East of Eden* by John Steinbeck

  - *Sometimes a Great Notion* by Ken Kesey

  - *The Brothers Karamazov* by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

edit: formatting