True, there is no real up to date curated reading list that I know of. Actually, there was a list of 2014 deep learning papers going around recently, but it seemed to list basically every tangentially related paper that the authors could find, so it was pretty useless as an introduction to the field.
The point isn't to read every paper it references, but to just get a summary of what the current state of research is. If you are interested in an area then you can go read the papers there.
