Oh boy. I hate those "1000 books/albums/movies you must read/listen to/watch before you die" tomes with the burning intensity of a thousand torrid suns. Not only they have the gall of insinuating my current status as a semi-cultured lummox, but very impolitely force me to confront my own mortality. Screw them.
As The Man Who is Thursday has mentioned, life is short and art is long. I mean, just estimate the number of weeks you expect to live. It's surprisingly small. You trudge your way across the canon in a race against time, lest the Grim Reaper makes you a visit and you are still halfway through War and Peace. How embarrassing that would be! At your deathbed, in presence of your mourning family, you must be able to declare proudly: "I have read every damned book in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. I really did. A Voyage To Arcturus included." And then you die.
The calvinist fear of not being among the chosen is nothing compared to the cultured person's fear of not reading enough of the canon. And How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read cannot help you because, deep inside, you would still feel guilty about cheating. (War and Peace was about Russia, btw.)
Literalizing things a little too much, one could imagine a phildickian religion whose soteriology required plowing through a humongous reading list of great literature, as the only way to achieve salvation. Its adherents would picture the Judgement of Souls as a cocktail party with Radamanthus, in which they must appear knowledgeable and respond smartly to Raddy's cultured conversation.
There could be heresies, and even religious wars about the precise composition of the Canon, because an incorrectly selected one will damn you to the Limbo of Philistinism or, even worse, the Hells of Nerdom. (Does The Left Hand of Darkness really belong in Bloom's selection? Why not a more muscular planetary romance?)
Edit: this exists.
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