[Janice D. Soderling]

Come on, 'fess up. Everybody's got some. Those classics you think you should have read but haven't got around to. The elan (or not) expressed in the dropping of a winged word (ahem) into casual conversation or wedding speech or essay, such as "his life lie", or "Major Major Major," or "petite madeleine".

I'll show you mine and hope you will show me yours.

Three books I hope to really, really get around to reading this year because I have never read them though I own two of them are:

1. Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
2. The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
3. Orlando (Virginia Woolf)

[Roger Slater]

Moby Dick shouldn't wait another minute.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I kno-o-ow. But it is the book I don't own.

[Catherine Chandler]

I read The Red and the Black in French in my undergrad days. Wasn't overly impressed.

[Siham Karami]

First hang around the ocean, not a nice beach part, but a rocky coastline with a nearby fishing village, abandoned or functioning, or strike up a conversation with an obsessive sailboat sailor, or something along those lines, before reading Melville. Its beauty is in the total immersion in things nautical and the sea. Once in, I couldn't leave.

Meanwhile, I have to get a hold of Dickens again, whose work I abandoned reading after a poor intro during college, where they overloaded us and I had to skim books that are designed for total immersion.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Difficult for me to say, because I'm not much of a fan of the classics. Mostly from an aversion to the idea that "What is classic can never again be"—I mean, the elevation of the past over the present in an excessively reverential way.

My aversion isn't pure, however, because I prefer poetry from the past and I'm also a fan of some long-dead philosophers and essayists. But as for fiction....not so much.

So to answer what I feel I ought to read and feel guilty not having read...is difficult. I think two answers might be Burroughs and Kerouac, just because I've always had a gnawing curiosity.

There are numerous philosophers I've not read that I probably ought to read; but one only has so many hours in a lifetime. There are also some poets that I'm sure a large portion of the Eratosphere community have read that I've not read much except for occasional, odd poems stumbled upon in this or that anthology.

[Janice D. Soderling]

First hang around the ocean, not a nice beach part, but a rocky coastline with a nearby fishing village, abandoned or functioning, or strike up a conversation with an obsessive sailboat sailor, or something along those lines, before reading Melville.

Lordy, Siham, I don't have time for literary foreplay.

I'm not restricting this to classics. The idea is that we might encourage one another to read parts of what is unread.

Have at it.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I've read Moby Dick three times.

The one the time is running out for is Proust.

Nemo

[Gail White]

Since I prefer Victorian to contemporary fiction, there aren't many gaps in my 19th century reading, except for Proust and Scott.

On the other hand, I've never read a single book by Vladimir Nabokov.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Originally Posted by Gail White

On the other hand, I've never read a single book by Vladimir Nabokov.

May i suggest you read The Gift, Gail. It's about a failed poet. It's brilliant.

Duncan