From The Daniel Boone Regional Library:
Moby-Dick, Or, The Whale by Melville, Herman
Les Misérables by Hugo, Victor
Ulysses by Joyce, James
Finnegans Wake by Joyce, James
Infinite Jest, A Novel by Wallace, David Foster
How To Read Infinite Jest, web resource
Mark Z. Danielwski’s House of Leaves by Danielewski, Mark Z.
War And Peace by Tolstoy, Leo
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Atlas Shrugged by Rand, Ayn
Link to the rest at The Daniel Boone Regional Library
Or, of course, there’s the notoriously long and difficult poem nobody ever finishes (for good reason; as mediocre as it is at the beginning, it falls apart after the first two-thirds or so):
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen
I’m also a bit flummoxed by the narrow range of offerings. Where are Proust, Mann, and Döblin? Back in the day (when we had to walk to class up hill both ways), that was less than half of the reading list for a 3-credit sophomore Twentieth Century World Literature course… and we all did it, nobody wanted to disappoint that professor.
The Faerie Queen has its charms, but yes, Spenser was rather over-ambitious. Then there is Paradise Lost. It starts out going gangbusters, but Milton pretty clearly lost his head of steam before reading the ending.
Texas by James Michener. After the first 500 pages, it really start kickin’.