[Rob Wright]

Thanks for the thread Janice.

If I have to pick three this year, they will be three that are on the shelf and that I've started and put down; I've spent far too much on books this year.

1. The New Testament, Trans. Richmond Latimore. (Bogged down in Paul's Letters)
2. The Tale of Genji (Can't get around all those names.)
3. Swann's Way (I liked "Combray," but "Swann in Love" left me cold).

As far as Nabokov goes, I'm working my way through his short stories. The early ones should give any beginning writer hope. By the time he gets to Berlin, he really settles down and writes some fine prose — his own translations.

I'm with you, Catherine on "The Red and the Black" but I loved "The Charterhouse of Parma."

RobW

[Chris Childers]

Originally Posted by Rob Wright

I've spent far too much on books this year.

Already?! You must have been active yesterday!

I need to find time to immerse myself in Faulkner--a distant ancestor of mine killed his grandfather (or great-grandfather, I forget) in a duel. The grandfather was a writer and young William's inspiration; apparently he figures in some of WF's lesser novels, like Flags in the Dust and the Unvanquished. I've only read the Sound and the Fury, and half of Light in August. Otherwise the list of great books I haven't read is embarrassingly long and contains all of your most glaring omissions--Moby Dick, Proust, Nabokov, and I'll add War & Peace (and Anna Karenina, really--I read 3/4 of it but never finished). At least I've read the Brothers K twice.

C

[Michael Juster]

I'm with Nemo again. I've never read more than a few pages of Proust.

I could never make it all the way through a Faulkner novel or Petrarch's Africa.

I've not read much of the Internal Revenue Code, although I did read all the Medicaid & Medicare regulations cover-to-cover once a long time ago.

I have read Doris Kearns' Nixon book, but I won't read any more of her work, not because of the plagiarism, but because she was rude to me once in a nearly empty airport terminal.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Chris, if you are going to read a Faulkner, try As I Lay Dying, one of the greatest books of all time.

Rob, an astounding translation of the New Testament is the one by Andy Gaus, The Unvarnished New Testament. Hard to bogged down in that one. I highly recommend it.

Nemo

[Mary McLean]

Moby Dick is definitely one I feel I should read and never did. I'd also like to read more Nabakov. I only ever read Lolita and was 12 at the time... Odd perspective.

I think I might like to read more Fitzgerald. I liked Gatsby when I read it in school but never attempted any more.

I got the complete Dickens on my Kindle and unwisely chose to start with Barnaby Rudge. blech! I've read quite a few in the past, but which should be my next between Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, Dombey and Son and Hard Times?

[Roger Slater]

I'm really surprised at how off-putting Proust is to so many people who seem to be its ideal audience, many of whom also have misconceptions about what it will be like to read it. It's a deeply engrossing page-turner and hard to put down when you get into the swing of it. Its length is part of the experience, making it different from most anything else you will read, and by the time you are halfway through you will feel you are on a journey like none you've ever taken. It's wise and beautiful and full of disquieting insight into human nature and social structures. I would recommend it enthusiastically, not because it is a classic, but because you may just have the most exciting and exhilerating reading experience of your life.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Yet another vote for not having read Moby Dick and feeling guilty about it. I even purchased a nice old hardcover edition last year, but never got around to reading it.

One of the nice things about going back to college for an English degree is that it forces you to read a lot of works that you'd long intended to read, but simply never got around to. I'll be reading Paradise Lost in its entirety over the next couple of months or so (I'd previously read about half of it), and will also be reading some of the earliest "novels," such as the Satyricon, Daphnis and Chloe, The Golden Ass etc. I've always considered myself quite well-read for my age, but I'm constantly reminded of how much great work there is out there that I still need to read.

Having said all of that, I should probably read more Dickens, though his work has never grabbed me. Faulkner is another one that I'll give another chance to -- I tried reading The Sound and the Fury about a decade ago, but I just couldn't get around the dialectical writing. After reading his short story "Barn Burning" last Spring, I found I greatly enjoyed it...so we'll see. Another oversight of mine is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I'm guessing I've fallen prey to the conflation of the book with the pop-culture proliferation of the subject, but many have assured me that the book is extremely worthwhile.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I did not in any way mean to disparage Proust. I meant he is someone I really want to read and am convinced that I will love--but which, because of the length, I have put off so long I fear I will miss out on it.

As for Dickens, I recommend Hard Times. I loved that one.

Nemo

[Kevin J MacLellan]

In answer to Mary MacLean:

As to Dickens, I recommend you go next to Dombey & Son --it is poignant and hysterically fun in its clever characterizations, in the way only Dickens can be -- and maybe then Hard Times. I say this in the hope that it will restore your faith, or at least bolster your trust, that this guy hs great things to offer and he does offer it in heaps. (Bleak House struck me as boring by comparison to his other works.) But none beats Oliver Twist in my book. (I wish I could have the 'Artful Dodger's courtroom tirade by heart!) Sorry, but I don't remember Nicholas Nickleby, if I ever read it.

Nabakov: You will love Pale Fire --I hope. I think it is far better and more representative of his remarkable talent than Lolita. PF starts with a very fine POEM of 999 lines - and we are free to wonder whether there should, or would?, have been a last [1,000th] line - and then proceeds to a fascinating story with the most lunatic of unreliable narrators. It was, at its time, considered experimental literature. It is almost universally applauded; but more interesting yet is the fact that there are actual camps or divergent schools of critics who disagree violently about the correct interpretation of everything from the meaning and role of the poem to the secret identity of the narrator! Amazing. I think it is sheer genius --and great fun, too.
Nabakov at his best!!

For my part, I am right now in the midst of a Henry James binge, having read six of his novels and novellas recently, and am about to dive into The Golden Bowl. These deep dives into one author's oeuvre are usually just recreational, but in this case I guess I am trying to discover the secret of his eventual descent into a deplorably labrynthine prose style (especially in his non-literary writings; the 1904 prefaces and other such) in the later phase of his career. (It has, this binge, then, something in common with Janice's challenging question. I am trying to fill in the lacunae in my own literary education.)
So much is written in defense of HJ's opacity that doesn't satisfy my sense that, all excuses and pretensions aside, he went from a superb master of eloquence to a frustratingly excruciating literary dandy.

Finally, the confession: I have to admit that Shakespeare's Histories and most of the Comedies are still on my to-do list. While I'm at it I should also admit that drama, as a genre, is mostly on my to-do list. I wish I could read for ten-twelve hours at a clip as I once did, but now cannot.
So much to do, and so little time, eh?

P.S. I just realized that I was cross-posted with Nemo. I can second his vote for Hard Times, so long as it leads to D&Son. It (Hard Times) is probably the most sober, and sobering, of D's novels that I know of.

[Lance Levens]

I listened to Moby Dick on my MP3 player this past summer while walking. It took a while, but the experience confirmed my theory that many great books shine brightest when read aloud. The problem is finding someone who can READ aloud. My guy with Moby Dick wasn't Derek Jacobi, but after a while I got over his nasal accent and settled into the rhythms of the Pequod.

I'd say many classics--Homer, Virgil, Dante--plead for a rhetor and a willing audience and maybe wine and cheese. Aren't too many of our reading experiences insular and hermetic?

I suppose--to finally respond more directly to Janet's inquiry about the erudition gap--the gap may be there because we have no group to read with. I realize this may sound strange. I used to wonder how anyone read through The Ring and the Book or The Idylls of the King. Now I suspect they were read en famille with mom and dad and aunts and uncles there to explain the hard words, chuckle aloud at the jokes and someone, maybe Uncle Joe--always the first to get a little tipsy-- to repeat the lines aloud and savor them for the group.

Sure Proust may not fit my claim, nor Thomas Pynchon, but I suspect Dickens' chapters were greeted one by one the same way my family
huddles up for new episode of Cummerbund Bandersnatch and Sherlock and the only parts of Finnegans Wake I even remotely get I got from listening online.