FAMOUS LITERARY FIGURES CONFESS TO NOT HAVING READ IMPORTANT BOOKS
Video interviews as well as text.

I'm in good company - I never read Wuthering Heights either but got an A for my exam on it. I got the second highest mark in the examining board's catchment area (I assume the person who beat me had read it). I probably based my answer mainly on the Kate Bush song, which I shall link for you in case it hasn't travelled out of England:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv0azq9GF_g

Great topic, Janet!

There are some little read books I'm proud to have read, like Richardson's Clarissa and Musil's Man Without Qualities. Proust's magnum opus is, above everything else it is, a superbly entertaining, comic creation readable by any literate person should she give it the proper chance -- even if that means skipping the overture until some other Time. But my confession is that I've read only the first two thirds of it. Two bartenders I've turned onto it will outpace me to the end.

I've not read any Faulkner novels. The bugbear final three of Henry James I've so far been unable to penetrate. Tons of poetry I should truly have read (Faerie Queene, Piers Plowman, etc., etc.).

I believe we can get some sense of which works of literature are for us at what time in our lives. I'm mystified by some of the "shaming " confessions from these esteemed writers. Rushdie's Midnight's Children (I've not read it) doesn't seem to me to have an unassailable reputation. This writer had no other gap in his education to admit to us? I once was (good naturedly) shamed by some posters here when I admitted I'd rather reread Lear than ever read Titus, reread Bleak House than ever read Tale of Two Cities. I take the point but I still think it's all okay. We'll read what we can. I won't even berate anyone for not reading Middlemarch (I like Daniel Deronda even better).

I got in heaps of trouble here for this squib I posted (which makes me think it was relatively successful on its own slender terms).

An Office, Minus One, Reads J.K. Rowling

As each successive “Harry Potter” thickens,
So our department’s common brain. It quickens
With this bold challenge, “Have you even read them?”
“Have you read “Little Dorrit” by Charles Dickens?”

My narrator's rejoinder above seems unanswerable. I haven't read them. I don't know what I'm missing. But you don't know what you're missing either. (I'm still somewhat bitter. For months I was raked over glowing embers for my "snobbery," "elitism," "inability to have fun." Oh, I have fun alright.)

Meanwhile, I'd like to know what Harold Bloom hasn't read.

Best,
Slipp

P.S. I laughed out loud at Roger's post below. There is a risk even there, Roger. You might claim at one dinner party to have read Clarissa and then forget your lie and admit at another that you haven't. Things get around.

Truman Capote claimed for decades (?) to be writing a massive Proustian social comedy. Proust, Proust, Proust he'd repeat. Gore Vidal was able to ascertain in mere moments of conversation that he hadn't read any of it. It could easily be done. "Who is Madame Verdurin?"

P.P.S. Really, to answer at all makes one sound like an arrogant jerk. There are hundreds of "must reads" that I haven't read. I mentioned the late James. I didn't mean to imply I've read all of the early and middle. All of Trollope? Balzac? Every Dostoyevsky? I do read voraciously and I choose my books well. That all I can do. I do understand the point of this parlour game. To name an interesting, surprising omission . The woman who said "Middlemarch" was brave, was actually saying something about herself in relation to the canon. The soon-to-be-fired professor who said Hamlet was most certainly brave. But to offer lamely "Midnight's Children," even "Catch 22"? Not so brave or interesting.



[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 29, 2008).]

I'm old enough that I can claim to have read anything, so long as I add that I read it in college and have since forgotten everything about it. This is true enough about so many books I actually did read that the question of whether I once actually passed my eyes dutifully across each and every page of this or that classic is of no genuine significance except to people handing out merit badges or gold stars.

I've never read:

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
A Tale of Two Cities
Ulysses
any of Tolstoy's novels
Jane Eyre

As an English professor (I just got a new job at a State University and no longer teach at the Evangelical school of which I did not believe any of its doctrines anymore) I should have all of the above, but we have our gaps.

dwl

Congratulations, David, on your new postion and let me tell you that I will never read "The Lord of the Rings Trilogy"
not even if someone offers to pay me. Nor any Harry Potter book, nor any Dan Brown book.

But there are lots of books I have read way more than once including "Jane Eyre" and "Tale of Two Cities". Also "The Alexandria Quartet". I do so relate to "Middlemarch". I think I have read every word written by Margaret Atwood (incl. poetry) and Doris Lessing.

Janice d.

Edited in to say that I have this book titled "The Reader's Companion to the Twentieth Century Novel" and once had a goal of reading all the titles listed in it. I haven't yet.

PS Thanks a lot, Janet, for giving us all (well, the sensitive ones anyway) a bad conscience.

I am ashamed of not having read so many classics. And the ones I did read, I've forgotten.

I spent many miserable years, dragging around Mann's The Magic Mountain, convinced that I had to read it, trying again and again, failing again and again.

However, I have read all of Soltzhenitsyn.

I've read everything Dickens wrote, many of them several times.

I read the Ring trilogy when I was young enough to be amazed by it.


I haven't read Joseph Conrad because I was alienated by an earnest young man who told me that women would not understand him. Must remedy that gap.

I haven't read most of the Australian novels puffed by publishers because I found most of them dead boring.


I had read the novels of Patrick White before I came to Australia.


I have read translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Goncharev, and in fact almost everything that Penguin published.

I read most 18th and 19th century English and Scottish novels.

I've also read a lot of Edwardian stuff because I was a dirt poor student with no entertainment apart from reading and I bought books from a second hand book shop. I read George Borrow and George Gissing and all sorts of Georges.

I read everything I could get my hands on then but now I only read intermittently because of real life.


Thomas Hardy kept my eye on the ball.

I have read most of Salman Rushdie. I do think he is a great writer.

I haven't read a great many important modern American books. I love Henry James and I did read all the famous children's books.

Mark Twain is for all ages.

I have not read much of Proust because I translated a book from Italian by the writer who translated Proust into Italian. I became aware that you can't translate Latin languages into English with the parenthetical sentences which are comfortable in those languages. The then available translation of Proust by C K. Scott Moncrieff seemed insufferably tortuous and long-winded. I haven't been able to afford the new translation.. I went halves in a set of the Scott Moncrieff with a newspaper editor who hadn't read Proust either. He had first go and kept it for so long that by the time I got it the new translation had come out. I tried to read the Scott Moncrieff (I didn't want to lose as much as I would do if I read it in my bad French) but I haven't managed to stay the course because I know there is a better translation out there. The Proust sits ostentatiously in my bookshelf and every now and then I have a go at it but my life is so full of interruptions that I lose the thread.


Time is the enemy of reading in modern life.

Mary,

You know I adore you from afar. But The Magic Mountain is great! I had a decade-long argument with a Hungarian friend, a lover of the book, who insisted that the book is not at all comical. The "half-lung club," the bread-pill flicking patients in the sanatorium dining room. Not comical? Do not reattempt however. This is the real beauty of literature, the divergence of opinions it can inspire.

Perhaps a more interesting question than what we haven't read would be the canonical books we've read, in whole or partly, and hated.

Best,
Slipp

[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 29, 2008).]

Slipp, this was many years ago, in my tome-reading days. Since you love it, I will make a point of trying again!

The Magic Mountain is good until one of the characters dies (can't remember who--the protagonist's brother?) and after that it falls apart and becomes a series of unrelated segments that don't tell much of a story until Mann finally just decides to end it. It is magnificently written, but structurally it is lacking.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is very near the top of my list of great novels. I've read it dozens of times and taught it a lot. I love, too, the ending of
The Cancer Ward, which is a sentence fragment (at least in the translation I have): "An evil man threw tobacco in the eyes of the Rhesus monkey. Just like that."

I went through a phase of Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse and Joseph Roth. Tolkien slipped easily into those years.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 29, 2008).]

Just want to say that all three of my daughters have read and greatly enjoyed all of the Harry Potter books as well as the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I've read none of them.

I can't remember what all I haven't read - Nor what all I have read http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif Plenty of cliff notes in school, no doubt.

Anne

p.s. the last novel I read was Cold Mountain - and that has been a few years ago. I read political and theological books mostly, which don't count as English literature.

[This message has been edited by Anne Bryant-Hamon (edited July 29, 2008).]

Mary,

Oh Mary. Do try again if you must but don't hold me responsible for several more years of misery! I do respect differences of opinion.

Janet,

You know I love you from afar but your comments on the translatability of complex Latinate sentences into English seem doctrinaire, almost silly. Particularly when one considers that Proust modeled his prose style on that of John Ruskin. Almost everyone agrees that Proust in English reads wonderfully, even French scholars.

I've looked at the new Penguin tag-team translations of Proust. In almost every passage I've compared, I prefer the original Moncrieff (revised by Enright, etc.)

Best,
Slipp

P.S Editing in to say, Janet, I do appreciate that you grappled with the Italian into English and have an intimate view of the exigencies involved. And I know you admire and respect the differing capacities of different languages. But my comment largely stands.

[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 29, 2008).]

Mike,
I know some pretty sharp bi-lingual French writers and editors (in Paris) who agree with me. It was like the tablets of Moses that Scott Moncrieff was untouchable.
We can't read English that takes a whole page to complete one sentence. Italian does that sort of thing with more ease. Natalia Ginzburg's "Lessico Famigliare" is similarly constructed and works beautifully in Italian. In English, it was necessary to break the sentences in order to retain the freshness.

Lydia Davis says:
Scott Moncrieff had considerable persuasive skill as a writer, his version was the first and for a very long time the only English translation available, and Proust's novel is powerful enough to shine through almost any translation: for these reasons, the Scott Moncrieff version has become deeply entrenched, and the experience of reading Proust has been, for readers confined to English, inextricably identified with Scott Moncrieff's flowing but misrepresentative version. For them, Scott Moncrieff's style is the voice of Proust.

But it is not. Proust, in French, is plainer, and clearer.

I don't like the idea of several translators either. It must be one mind. Perhaps I attributed the translation to Christopher Prendergast, the editor, and was in error. I know some fine translations which are consistently the product of a good writer of English and a bilingual native speaker, but they have collaborated for the entire book. Perhaps Christopher Prendergast is the unifying voice?
I had the same experience with Arthur Waley's translation of "The Book of Genji". I learned to love Genji through Waley and was slowly persuaded to give the later and more austere Seindensticker a chance.
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 29, 2008).]

Here's an interesting aside that could very well deserve a thread of its own:

Inquiring minds want to know...

Janet,

Thank you. (I think you cross-posted with my P.S.) I do know that Moncrieff was ornate and that he bowdlerized certain passages and metaphors. And that there have been textual advances since the first translations. These are issues that Enright deals with in his revisions of Moncrieff. And these revisions are more direct, plainer, dare I say more masculine, than those very first versions. Proust is at his absolute best, most moving, when utterly plain (I'm thinking in particular of the grandmother's long death scene.) I had looked forward for years to Richard Howard's announced complete translation but it was, alas, never to be.

My French is nil so I make do. The experience in English is huge enough. (And I do know of your general, and wise, distrust of translations. I just didn't know that it extended as passionately to prose, ordinarily thought of as "translatable.")

Best,
Slipp

Janet, I'll note to the Sphere that Lydia Davis is one of the Penguin tag-team and has a vested interest in distinguishing her translation from Moncrieff's (which has been revised twice). I do know that you linked her but not everyone pursues such links.



[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 29, 2008).]

Okay: anybody do this? I go into big bookstores--Barnes & Noble and Borders in the USA--go to the literary racks and count how many books in each section I've read. Sometimes, in fact, I'll even say, "I'll bet I've read at least twenty in this rack," and then see if my estimation is correct or over. It's a great boost for the ego.

Vanity of vanities . . .

dwl

Michael,
I learned to love Russian novels by way of what very knowledgeable Russian editors have told me was Constance Garnett's production line. I didn't know that the translations were dreadful because something of the original reached me and changed my life. Five minutes' conversation with the Russians convinced me that I had barely scratched the surface of the novels. Still, without Constance Garnett I wouldn't have even guessed at the world the novels represent.

I intended to improve my French but something always got in the way. I could sing in it and I still cook in it but now I wonder about trying some childish Pinyin Mandarin instead. Probably neither will happen.
Janet

Whatever is missing in translation from Proust was not enough to deprive me of by far the most exciting and gripping reading experience of my life. Nothing even came close. I read it all in about three months, on buses and subways and wherever I found myself, and when I wasn't reading it I was constantly boring my wife about how wonderful it was. Words cannot describe how totally transfixing and wonderful the experience was and how much about life it taught me (I was about 30 at the time). If it is appreciably better in French, I probably couldn't have taken it. Among the many things that reading Proust in English taught me is the utter nonsense of supposing that a work of genius cannot be effectively translated, or that all the "poetry" is lost in translation, since Montcrieff and Kilmarten are not, to my knowledge, literary geniuses, but the book they served up clearly embodied genius that bowled me over for three amazing months.

Meanwhile THERE IS THIS FILM. JOHN MALKOVICH IS WONDERFUL despite his mechanical French ;)

Until you read the book.

I will now. I WILL!!

I should have said that I won't read books that are over-promoted. When the radio and newspapers are full of chat about a book I usually avoid the book.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 29, 2008).]

Ah, Janet. How nice to find another Rushdie fan!

I've read most of his novels as well, and love them all. I just finished Fury three weeks ago.

My favorite period of literature in general is the first half of the 20th Century. I've read most Steinbeck and Orwell novels (the latter's Keep The Aspidistra Flying is one of my all time faves...I like it even more than his more famous pair). I've read lots of Hemingway, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Huxley, Graves and the like...but there are some authors I just can't get into at ALL. I loathe Joyce. I've tried hard, too. I can't stand Faulkner. I made it through Hardy's Jude The Obscure...barely. It's harder to list the things one hasn't read than what one has. One classic I mean to read some day is Moby Dick. I enjoy Melville's novellas and short stories, but I haven't tackled the whale as yet. Most of what I DO read these days is fairly literary, and not a lot of contemporary stuff other than Rushdie, but there are more great books out there (classics and otherwise) than I have time to read. I think that will hold true for most folks.

David,
In Australia it would be easier ;)

Actually there are some good bookshops in Sydney and I'm sure in the other major cities.

My struggle in the place where I now live is to find a book I would ever have wanted to read.
Janet

I once read 'The Naked and the Dead'. Apart from the curious and much reiterated word 'fug' I remember nothing about it at all except that it effectively stopped me reading anything else by that particular nasty-minded, self-important windbag.

I never read 'Dracula'. I genuinely regret that though obviusly not quite enough.

[This message has been edited by John Whitworth (edited July 29, 2008).]

John,
Dracula is very good. I first read it when I lived in an upstairs room overlooking a foggy park. Also as a child I was terrorised by "The Green Eyes of Bast" by the same author.

Alan and I memorized the Lord of the Rings as boys. Came in handy when we translated Beowulf for Longman. Only novels other than Patrick O'Brian's and the Latin American Supernatural Realists that either of us ever read. We read poetry, lots of it. No wait, Slipp! I was FORCED to read Clarissa. Only the 1200 page Abridged Version. No wonder I don't read novels.

The important thing is: read what you want to read, and never feel obligated to finish a book just because you've started it! What a liberating feeling -- tossing aside that book you just can't get into!

Shhh...... don't say that loud enough for my kids to hear. They are bored with their required summer reading. I'm currently on their cases to <u>JUST READ IT!</u> Because summer is drawing to a close.

But thank you for removing that burden from me, for all the books I've only partially read! http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Anne, a liberated woman, aahhh......

[This message has been edited by Anne Bryant-Hamon (edited July 30, 2008).]

Summer drawing to a close? Schools only got out last week here. They have six weeks ahead of them.

I started Proust, Roger, and had much the same experience as you, during the bit that I read. I just never get a chance to read that much, and my eyes can't take too much book prose. I do want to read more, much more.

Haven't read:
anything by George Eliot except Middlemarch
the second half of The Golden Bowl, even though I loved it
David Copperfield
Paradise Lost, through
Ulysses, through
Baudelaire, enough; many of the French
Goethe; Heine
Balzac
Victor Hugo
Brothers Karamazov, though once again was amazed by the beginning
Turgenev
Pushkin
War & Peace, though once AGAIN...
Robinson Crusoe
Byron's Don Juan, through
Canterbury Tales
Musil, Mann, The Radetzky March, The Leopard, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Pope
enough Henry James, my hero


Terrible admissions!


Don't want to read:
any more Rushdie
any more Ian McEwen
Ayn Rand
any more Lawrence
Trollope, Disraeli
any more Kundera
any more Roth, Updike, Bellow, Amis
Margaret Atwood
Jeanette Winterson
any more Virginia Woolf


Have read:
Fanny Burney's novels, plus much of her journals and letters
all of Austen, several times
Keats' letters
The Pound Era, by Hugh Kenner
Candide
Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
Moll Flanders
Vanity Fair, one of my favourite books ever
Hardy's novels
Josef Skvorecky's novels


I've pretty much given up on novels though - except for the few I really want to read or have some reason to read. Eyes and time. I've also pretty much given up feeling sheepish for anything I haven't read. So what. I've read more than most people. And I don't consider anything wasted!

Famous books I read and didn't think they deserve the reputation they have:

Life of Pi--it was okay, but everyone raved about it as a work of great spiritual insight. I'm still looking for the spirituality.

Jude the Obscure--my fellow grad students loved it, called it "Jude the Obscene." I found it well-written but rather boring. And it seemed unbelievable that a six year-old boy could hang his brother and sister and himself and leave a suicide note explaining why he did it.

Cold Mountain--struck me as a lot of overblown naturalism. Naturalism? That went out of style with Jack London.

The Old Gringo--started out fine but then in the last half he turns into a pornographic novel. Now I've got nothing against eroticism, but Fuentes ruins a perfectly good book with a lot of violent, clinical and (I think) unnecessary descriptions of people having sex. Too bad.

The worst novel I've ever read: A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells. For God's sake, don't read it unless you're forced to. And if you're forced to, endure the torture bravely.

dwl

I don't want to reread a lot of fine books that I treasure in my memory. Life is short and my needs keep changing. I don't think that therefore the books are no good after all. I know they are tremendous but they're not what I need now. I keep the books because their presence recharges my memory and my respect. And I also may suddenly change and need to read them again.

I have read "Candide" and indeed Sciascia's "Candido". And if anyone hasn't read "Penguin Island" by Anatole France, they should read it.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 30, 2008).]

Amen on BOTH of those counts, David.

I read Life Of Pi at the beginning of this year, and words cannot properly express how horrible I thought the book was, especially in light of all the hype it received. It reads like it was written by a teenager who had just read Old Man And The Sea and The Satanic Verses a month prior. I had honestly thought I was doing myself a favor by reading an alleged "modern classic"...and it was such a waste. There are literary authors I don't like, but for almost all of them I can at least admit that their work has literary merit, and that I can understand their allure, even if their work isn't my cup of tea. But I consider Life Of Pi an affront to my intelligence, and a cruel joke on all of the people who champion its success.

As for Jude The Obscure, it had the unfortunate effect of making me not want to read ANY other Thomas Hardy. I'm sure his other work might be more to my taste, but I just can't bring myself to pick any of it up, thanks to that book.

Like Janet, I read mostly 19th century fiction, though now that we're in a whole new century, I'm creeping up as far as the 1930s.

So here are the novels I should have read but haven't:
Ulysses
Anything by Saul Bellow
Anything by Nabokov

On the other hand, I think I've read more fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe than anyone who wasn't writing a thesis on her.

(PS - I can't believe no one but me has made a post since
1:00 today!! Where are you, people?)

Katy, of the ones you haven't read that I have read, I'd most encourage you to drop everything and read (1) David Copperfield, and (2) Paradise Lost, through.

Paradise Lost was another surprise peak reading experience of my life. I had read it before, but in an edition with at least three footnotes per page telling me what this or that word meant. Years later, someone gave me a nicely printed hardcover edition that didn't have a single footnote (just a few Blake prints here and there). I ended up reading it like a wonderful novel, and if I didn't understand a word or two here and there without footnotes, I just pushed on and it didn't matter in the slightest. I would urge anyone to find an edition without footnotes (hard to find, I think) and curl up for an amazing read.

Oh, and (3) Robinson Crusoe is also pretty fabulous, though not on the same level.

I've also not been able to read Don Juan straight through, though I did barely manage Childe Harold. And I've read only one book by Bellow (Humboldt's Gift) and nothing by Philip Roth.

For a while I tried to strike it rich by writing a legal thriller like Grisham, but one day it occurred to me that I had never succeeded in reading a Grisham so the odds of writing one were not good.

And I haven't read Trollope.

Yeah, I know, I'm just so crap at anything long... Crap, isn't it! I do dip INTO Paradise Lost... but I just can't see me reading David Copperfield at this stage. I'd rather read the Proust.

I had a terrible shock one day at about fifteen, when I suddenly had a sharp sense of the finiteness of one's reading life, and realised I would probably never read Le Rouge et le Noir. It was like, well, you can talk all you like about Stendhal... but he just isn't really THAT likely to get to the top of my list!

Shocking.

Katy, I had the advantage of growing up in a country that didn't get television until I was a student and too poor to buy one. I have read nearly everything published that I could get my hands on up to the time I was in London and went to visit a friend who had a television set. I said: "Do you mean to say that you can watch films and exciting stories on television?"
Everybody in the room laughed.


By the time I had said that I had already read almost everything that you say you will never read. I had several friends who had read "Finegans Wake". I read morality plays, every French novel in English translation, the complete works of Thomas Hardy, most fashionable English writers. If I was less well read in American writers it was because the books were not available. I did read "Portnoy's Complaint".

Since then, I have watched an awful lot of television.

I have never read any of Timothy Murphy's books. The reason is that he's read all of them to me over the phone, making my own efforts irrelevant and unnecessary. Does this count?

I have not read Finnegan's Wake but have looked at it quite a bit. Does this count?

I have read The Naked and the Dead, twice. Does this count against me?

I have read all books by John Whitworth--the long and the short and the tall. This will get me into heaven if I convert to the C of E.

I have read almost everything else except any novels by James Fennimore Cooper, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Danielle Steele. I have read almost all of Waugh except Brideshead Revisited, which sounds entirely too serious to be any fun. I have also not read anything by Walker Percy or Confederacy of Dunces. I have even read, god help me, The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, where a character says, "Mardoux, go naked in the world." And she responds by walking around with no clothes on until she gets arrested. I have read more Maugham than Lawrence and had a better time than those who favor the latter. I stand by these omissions and inclusions and will punch out anyone who says I ain't literate.

Signed,

Arse Gwynn, bibliophile and book-lover

Oh, I had to skim Middlemarch to get ready for an exam. But I do play to go back to it, eventually. I swear.

I adored Middlemarch, Arse.

Sam,
You're really on the hard stuff when you read Romola.