[Janet Kenny]

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

[Alexander Grace]

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

[Mike Slippkauskas]

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).]

[Roger Slater]

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.

[David Landrum]

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

[Janice D. Soderling]

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.

[Diane Dees]

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

[Mary Meriam]

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.

[Janet Kenny]

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.

[Mike Slippkauskas]

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).]