Exactly!
“Why be average”, when exceeding that is not so much effort?

Nevertheless, how to get to the good stuff quicker?

This brings to mind the following

https://psoberoi.github.io/stepanov-civilization/canon.html

This was created relatively recently to attack the problem of Too Many Books. Which is illustrated nicely in merely glancing at the list it references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

And, to preemptively address the Western World bias, there is a fuller set of categories in the following.

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html

Happy reading!