I've read Finnegans Wake and view it as almost entirely a waste of time. Maybe that marks me a philistine, but I put a whole lot of effort into the book - readi

I've read Finnegans Wake and view it as almost entirely a waste of time. Maybe that marks me a philistine, but I put a whole lot of effort into the book - reading books about it, listening to two different versions on tape - and it did pretty much nothing for me. And to the original question, I consider TAOCP probably not worth the time and effort to read in detail. It has a lot of interesting stuff if you have infinite time, but very little that I've found practical to me. I've read enough of TAOCP to get two Knuth reward checks but can't motivate myself to read more than a fraction of it.