Exactly my thoughts when I first saw the repo, it's just too much for me to be able to decide. A better approach I recommend is starting with an easy and interesting paper, reading it even if not in full, and then going through the references, which are sure to have some more interesting papers to read.

Aho-Corasick "Efficient String Matching: An Aid to Bibliographic Search", or Bentley-McIlroy "Data Compression Using Long Common Strings" are 2 such good places to start.