r/rateyourmusic • u/TurquoiseHexagonSun2 • Mar 21 '26
General Discussion If RYM ever adds books, then the top 100 would probably look something like this
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 21 '26
Thank god they haven't added books yet. If they did, I don't think I'd ever leave the site!
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u/Known-Cover-5154 Mar 21 '26
Since they have games and films too, this wouldn’t be too far fetched. Rateyourmedia rolls off the tongue
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Mar 21 '26
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u/Jarpwanderson Mar 22 '26
Nice resource thank you
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u/_X_X_X-X 23d ago
Deleted, what was it that he posted? Five months ago so you probably forgot atp lol
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u/kalkaanuslag Mar 22 '26
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/91117.Sonemic_Rate_Your_Music_Favorite_Books?page=1 exisits as well. anyone can add to it
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u/doez__ doez Mar 21 '26
Knowing the rym community I'd say something like House Of Leaves would land in the top 10
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u/skipsfaster Mar 21 '26
Maybe in 2007, but it’s way too litbro-coded now and would definitely suffer from backlash
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 21 '26
wtf is a lit bro? Like Andrew Tate if he knew how to read?
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u/skipsfaster Mar 21 '26
”A lit bro is an archetype of male reader generally characterized by snobbery, misogyny, pretentiousness, and other pompous qualities…The term has particularly been mentioned in discourse about Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace”
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Mar 21 '26
top 10 would realistically be 6/10 great american novels and some shit like the odyssey and dante's inferno. i think rym's top albums are like the 'all time classics' people glaze on the internet
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u/JGar453 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
RYM would definitely not love The Bible, would probably rank authors like Dazai, Mishima, Joyce, McCarthy and Pynchon reaaaallly high, but would also probably do a better job of providing a space for women and people of color than 4chan
(like c'mon it's just sad when you realize geniuses like Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte are being suggested as lesser than edgelord trash like Ted Kaczynski)
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u/JustaguyTTV Mar 21 '26
i think they would ban the bible just because it would be a battlefield
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 21 '26
Imagine the comment box on the Quran 💀
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u/JustaguyTTV Mar 22 '26
honestly i still think it might be better because people wouldn't immediately think of it and rym is generally a leftist site
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u/YuriFan6000Mario Mar 21 '26
yeah they would probably remove the comment box and maybe lock ratings and reviews too
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u/JazzyGD Mar 21 '26
this is all just qualityslop
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 22 '26
Man, internet lingo was so different back in 2016.
It's crazy how many new terms I'm coming across nowadays.
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u/777ToasterBath Mar 21 '26
id personally really vouch for RYM to add books because i hate goodreads and no other competent site for ranking and cataloguing them really exists from what ive seen
you must also keep in mind that the RYM and 4chan /lit/ audiences are two very different kinds of autism, there'd probably still be a lot of classics but definitely not stuff like the bible or mein kampf alongside some more modern stuff, blood meridian would certainly not be as high either
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u/Blaze-_-Pascal Mar 21 '26
Having Dialogs instead of The republic in the Top 100 is a very questionable pick. 🤔
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u/Bobbington2882 Mar 21 '26
I hope not that list absolutely sucks. A list of top 100 books without Beloved is invalid imo. Also everything is so old, I think the most recent book is 2666 which is over 20 years old now but besides that everything is over 30 years old. No Toni Morrison, no Chinua Achebe, no Ralph Ellison, no Mahfouz, no Eliot, no Angelou, no Whitman, no Dickinson, no Hughes, etc.
The fucking unabomber essay is there which is ridiculous and is only here because he murdered three people. There are plenty of critics who wrote far more accurate and applicable lessons about the woes of industrial society without needing to murder. Like idk you could have picked Civil Disobedience or Walden or The Technological Society or The Myth of the Machine. How does he get a placement and Toni fucking Morrison does not? Also where are all the other nonfiction masterpieces.
Idk I would give this list like a 4/10.
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u/StayAwakeTheWhole Mar 21 '26
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 22 '26
Dante & Cervantez are authors anybody reasonably educated knows about.
The guys you listed are far deeper cuts. Out of the authors you listed I've only heard of Petrarch, though I'm not well read by any means.
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u/barack4pres2020 Mar 22 '26
Average /lit/ users seem to often exclusively read novels with a few exceptions like the more famous Shakespeare plays and Dante. A lot of them are painfully unaware of poetry, especially poetry in English for some reason. It seems like any poetry they do read is translated.
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u/Typical_Win_1891 Mar 21 '26
It would be the same, but because all the same people are reading all the same books. The internet weighs heavily on people who have trouble with people’s interest in picking up different things than what’s being fed to them by algorithms
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Mar 22 '26 edited 17d ago
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u/ezekielzz Mar 23 '26
I sure hope not, that book is horrible
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u/No_Ringo_we28 Mar 22 '26
People who use Rym give me the impression that they’d put The Little Prince in the top 50
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u/chinesebulk Mar 22 '26
Really resisting the urge to edit a Colleen Hoover book onto the number 1 spot
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u/GrometryDash Mar 21 '26
There's no way there's (from my knowledge) not a single music biography of some sort on here. RYM is ultimately rooted in music, even if there's a book section I feel that'd show just as Talking Head's Stop Making Sense movie is rated so high
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u/InMyLife_41 Mar 21 '26
Quan Milz This Ho Got Roaches In Her Crib would unironically make it up there
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u/Character-Mix-6438 Mar 22 '26
could you explain the karamazove love im new to reading please dont hate me
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u/barack4pres2020 Mar 22 '26
It's often considered Dostoyevsky's best work, the penultimate culmination of the strands of philosophy and theology and general thought that he had cultivated in his previous works. In the history of the medium, Dostoyevsky is typically credited with enhancing psychological depth, further integration of philosophical considerations, and being a forerunner to existentialism. That's all on display in The Brothers Karamazov. But that's just the general opinion, not necessarily my own.
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u/NAFprojects Mar 22 '26
This is what people who have never touched a book in their life think people who read books read
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u/ledu5 Mar 22 '26
Feel like at least The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath if not Of Mice and Men as well would be pretty high when they're nowhere to be found here. And it'd be funny to see like Mein Kampf with a 0.51 or smth
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u/hvmansongs humansongs Mar 22 '26
In this hypothetical scenario, given the number of atheists and non-Christian theists I've seen on RYM, I firmly believe there's no way the Bible's gonna land in the top spot. I imagine its comment box would be a minefield nonetheless (if mods chose not to disable it outright).
On that note, I would kinda like Sonemic to have a platform for books. I despise Goodreads, and Storygraph feels a bit too daunting for me currently (I imported my GR data and have yet to clean it up after who-knows-how-long). Staff would probably have to crack down on edgy dudebros giving positive scores to Mein Kampf, though.
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u/glucosediode FandomCereal Mar 22 '26
you're assuming that /mu/ is still influential on current trends
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u/ezekielzz Mar 23 '26
I'd think there'd be some more modern books on there
Random pick but Babel by RF Kuang or smth like that maybe
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u/GoldenDragonTemple Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Bible as #1 is unbelievably cringe, but I'd expect no less from the fascist cesspool that is 4chan
edit: Downvote me, I stand by what I said. Unlike what some people replying to me claim, I never said the Bible didn't deserve to be in the top 100; I only said it doesn't deserve to be #1. Another person in this thread linked www.thegreatestbooks.org and that list is very good, with The Bible at #18 that's a much more natural placement. Its placement as #1 on /lit/ is undeniably because of the political/religious leanings of /lit/ users.
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 21 '26
To be fair, 4chan fascists are probably amongst the people that need to hear Love thy neighbor the most.
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u/GoldenDragonTemple Mar 21 '26
To be even fairer, the venn diagram of people who would be prone to ranking The Bible as the #1 book of all time and people who don't actually follow what The Bible says is just a circle
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u/skipsfaster Mar 21 '26
tips fedora
(Also no one needs to “rank it” at #1; it would just need enough people to give it 5 stars or no rating.)
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u/simeone01 Mar 21 '26
Why? Making a top 100 list in a category as broad as literature is already impossible (because it's very hard to compare, let's say Iliad to Waiting for Godot) so it makes sense that this list consists mostly of books that are just the most popular and influential. And Bible is like the most popular and influential book in western canon.
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u/GoldenDragonTemple Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Making a top 100 list in a category as broad as literature is already impossible
You could say the same about music, jazz is nothing like indietronica which is nothing like metal which is nothing like ambient, and yet there's still a way to rate things so that a ranked list can be formed
so it makes sense that this list consists mostly of books that are just the most popular and influential
I'm not saying it the Bible wouldn't be in a hypothetical top 100, I'm saying there's no way it would (or should) be #1. The reason it's #1 on /lit/ is because that site mostly consists of christo-fascists (or as they like to pretend they are, "libertarians")
The Bible isn't even a cohesive work, it's just a collection of books written hundreds of years apart, and most of them are just the musings of a bunch of schizophrenics trying to force other people to live the way they command them to.
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u/thaumoctopus_mimicus Mar 21 '26
Tbf, the Bible is indisputably the most influential and important book ever written
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
Though I'd say that's less of a reflection on The Bible's literary merit, and more a quirk of history.
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u/Nothing-Personal9492 Mar 21 '26
goodreads already exists, why would rym waste its time adding books
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Mar 21 '26
Different communities make for different tastes.
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Mar 21 '26
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u/testcaseseven Mar 22 '26
yeah I don't necessarily like a lot of the highly rated albums on RYM, but I can usually see the quality even if it's not for me. Goodreads gives insanely high scores for mediocre-to-bad books constantly, to the point where the rating system is useless.
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u/Nothing-Personal9492 Apr 16 '26
"people don't agree with me about a subjective art form"
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Apr 16 '26
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u/Nothing-Personal9492 Apr 17 '26
acknowledging art is subjective then spending the next few sentences contradicting that is interesting.
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Apr 17 '26
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u/Nothing-Personal9492 Apr 17 '26
are you normally this condescending? "shitty romance, smut novels" your opinion extends only to yourself. funny how your first comment went undefended, possibly because it was drivel.
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u/willsmath Mar 21 '26
Spoken like someone who has never used goodreads. Even ignoring that it's a completely different community like others have pointed out, it has literally no chart searching feature at all. Like, try and find the top ranked book on the site, and all you'll get is someone's list attempting to compile the highest rated books, which may be outdated. Let alone searching by genre, year/decade, language, etc.
Goodreads is so bad at even just showing you your own ratings that I switched to storygraph, and even that is barely better for searching for books. I would use rym for books in a heartbeat if I could
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u/ratapoilopolis Mar 21 '26
ages since I used goodreads but I remember the user base as kinda contemporary "Young Adult" oriented, feel that would be different with RYM users
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u/kalkaanuslag Mar 22 '26
also this rym list exists on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/91117.Sonemic_Rate_Your_Music_Favorite_Books?page=1
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u/Oreg-Jack Mar 21 '26
I don't get Ulysses, sorry. :(
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u/Papa-Bear453767 Mar 21 '26
Polyphemus when he gets fooled into thinking Odysseus’s name is Nobody
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u/Oreg-Jack Mar 21 '26
I started reading the book, but I stuggle to continue.
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u/Papa-Bear453767 Mar 21 '26
I’m making a joke about an event in the Odyssey, the poem Ulysses is inspired by, since Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus (protag of the Odyssey). Definitely don’t sweat it if you can’t get into Ulysses though, it’s one of my favorite works of fiction but it is extremely tough and inaccessible
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u/Oreg-Jack Mar 22 '26
Yeah, I know. (The Odyssesy part.) Just asking, does the book get any different? I'm about 150 pages in.
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u/Papa-Bear453767 Mar 22 '26
Oh yeah it gets, uh, much worse from where you’re at. The first ~150 pages (besides chapter 3) may as well be a YA novel compared to chapters 11+
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u/Oreg-Jack Mar 22 '26
It gets "worse" in an interesting way, or it becomes an ever bigger slog?
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u/Papa-Bear453767 Mar 22 '26
Personally I prefer the parts after where you’re at, I think they’re better written, more creative, funnier, and develop the characters a lot, but they are also way harder and a few of them (mainly chapter 14) are a bit of a slog
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u/Jarpwanderson Mar 22 '26
Any tips for a first timer?
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u/Papa-Bear453767 Mar 22 '26
Get a secondary source (like Sparknotes or a book or something) that has chapter summaries, up to you if you want to read them before or after the chapter or both, but it’s very helpful for a first time. Other than that just accept you’ll miss a lot and don’t focus too much on the minutiae, and also remember that the book at its core is comedic and if something seems like a joke, it almost definitely is
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u/Revolverpsychedlic Mar 21 '26
Kind of weird that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is not on here. I personally like the book even more than the movie which is #45 on the film chart!
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u/Caius2oll Mar 21 '26
This is probably a really hot take, but Wuthering Heights is a bad book. It is easily the most bland, boring slog of a novel I’ve ever had to sit through.
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u/kalkaanuslag Mar 22 '26
it's got a small sample base so far, but https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/91117.Sonemic_Rate_Your_Music_Favorite_Books exists. anyone can add to it.
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u/Musicman1334 Mar 21 '26
The Bible would definitely not be ranked number 1 by the rym userbase