Your comment illustrates a problem with the original submission: It's idiosyncratic. It says more about the writer than the subject. The various books are real

Your comment illustrates a problem with the original submission: It's idiosyncratic. It says more about the writer than the subject. The various books are really different, people's reading strategies are different, people's tastes are different. People who have been in the field longer tend to have read more books. Also, whether or not you have "finished" a book tends to be irrelevant in nonfiction. If you can't get through Code Complete in one sitting, try reading it in bits and pieces - it shows signs of having been designed for that. If you haven't "finished" TAoCP... you and Knuth have something in common. (For the record, I have read all of Code Complete at none time or another, but I've barely touched TAoCP. Which is not a problem. It is good to have things to look forward to. As someone once said: What's the point of having a collection of nothing but things you have already read?)