Shakespeare's work is missing also.
I sincerely wish we'd lost Salinger in the war.
It's the most influential books ever written, not a list of books the HN crowd is most likely to have read. I think there's an argument for HG wells, but Dune? really?
HG2G does not belong to the list, I agree, dunno what I was thinking when including it.
And if you don't call Asimov's work influential, I don't know what else constitutes as such.*
* if we agree that when talking about sci-fi we should waive the test-of-time argument
It also remains to be seen whether Dune is influential beyond the current cultural zeitgeist, since it hasn't even been around for a century yet. It's entirely possible another book or movie will come around that changes the entire aesthetic of speculative fiction, leaving Dune as a book that was popular for a particular culture as a particular time.
Its interesting to compare the Venn diagram of this list of influential books vs "old books you should actually read as opposed to know about to consider yourself educated". I've read Gibbon and Plutarch and Kafka and Orwell and Thucydides and Thoreau and quite a few of the others and enjoyed them immensely. I've read some of the others on the list and not enjoyed them so much. I've glanced at Principia and a couple others and Nope'd. Maxwell, no, not going to happen.
I self educated on what amounts to a great books curricula when I was a kid. Any teenage boy who claims not to like Anabasis or maybe Plutarch either has something wrong with him or is lying about having read it (or maybe got stuck with an awful translation). Some of it was tiresome, having to haul books from old fashioned public library or pay serious money in some cases. The modern tech world should be better but it isn't.
Anyway bringing it on topic for YC / HN we now have the technology to give everyone in the world a handheld device with not only "the" great books curriculum but any collection of great books curricula, although the whole "product" is not quite there... maybe only 99% of the way and terribly expensive. And that last 1% is going to be hard. I have no idea how a startup would fix that last little bit, but I'd love to see one try. Maybe a really good (free, or close to) ereader and study app containing various collections of curricula, some of which like the gutenberg editions require a bit of massaging and tidying up. Also needs some kind of markup language / links to wikipedia / merged with academic notes.
A little more education wouldn't be the end of the world.
On the other hand, I had little success trudging through An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke.
So, I'd suggest that a reader who makes a patient attempt will find that many of them open up and become old friends. If not, I wouldn't bother to suffer through. There are plenty of books to try. You can always try one again in another decade or perhaps another lifetime.
Outside of the US, barely anyone reads Ayn Rand or cares about her. It's considered to be 'capitalist bullshit' as much as Americans consider Marx 'commie bullshit'. Of course both are wrong, but in the final analysis, Marx actually offered profound insights and is still being read widely. Ayn Rand will be forgotten in a few dozen years.
The books on this list, however, are mostly centuries old (or even older) and were hugely influential to generations upon generations of humans - shaping untold thoughts, feelings, and actions - and laying the intellectual and emotional foundations of the modern world (foundations we take for granted, which is why we can take these books for granted).
You can make an argument against The Trial and 1984, but I'm skeptical many people will agree that they were less influential than any of the books you listed.
Agreed on Mao and Marx.
I'd argue that HGW, Verne and Asimov created or helped significantly in shaping a literary genre which has a high impact on our psychological and cultural behavior and currently paves the way to our future. Whether their ideas last only a 100 years is irrelevant. Is Baroque, or better yet - Rococo - irrelevant?
There will be a handful of books that make a big, permament paradigm shift in society as a whole (or in big parts of it). But in order for the authors who will write those books to be born, society has to constantly move and spawn new trends.