My friend Adam Goodman recently pointed me towards a recent NPR.org blog entry by Lynn Neary called 'The Shelf Of Constant Reproach': Best Books You Never Read.
Adam wrote up his own shelf of constant reproach, which you can read if you "friend" him on Facebook. I reckoned that my own list might make a good blog entry:
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) -- I believe I had this assigned in four different college classes and I wrote four different literature papers focusing on the first section of the book. Why? Because I couldn't stand this book and couldn't make myself read the rest. Perhaps one day I will make amends for my sketchy collegiate career and read the damn thing.
War and Peace (Tolstoy) -- I was genuinely enjoying it when I got distracted and set it down five years ago, about 300 pages in. I have yet to pick it back up, and now I fear I'll need to go back to the beginning to be able to keep everybody straight. That fear is what has kept me away from picking it back up, and year-by-year the fear is morphing into guilt.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez) -- This omission doesn't really haunt me like the others, since I still mean to get around to it and expect to enjoy it when I do. But I really do feel as if I should have read this by now.
Other than those three there are obviously lots and lots and lots of books that I'd like to read that I still haven't read yet. Heck, I've knocked off less than half of the Telegraph's list of 100 Novels Everyone Should Read, having only read 37 of them by my count. But that doesn't keep me up nights. I'm sure I'll keep knocking off the occasional classic, but other than the three titles above there's not really anything else that I feel genuinely bad about not having read yet ... at least there are none that I can think of right now. I'm sure more will eventually come to mind and I'm sure there are some that others would be shocked that I never read.
(Interestingly, I see that I knocked off only 28 of Time's All-Time 100 Novels, thus doing worse on the American publication's list than I did on the British publication's list. Since two of the books on Time's list are by Thomas Pynchon, and since I have read both and would put neither on my own top 100 list, I view the unread 72 with reduced guilt.)
Come to think of it, that list above is only three books, albeit big books. I could probably knock them off this Summer and enjoy a lighter load of guilt on my shelf this Fall. I usually try to knock off an as-yet-unread classic or two every year, so I guess I have three nominees in hand for this year's efforts. However, they have successfully eluded me thus far, so don't expect any dramatic developments anytime soon.
Um, so in the midst of these high-falutin' literary ambitions, what was my last big reading project? Glad you asked. I sorted out my copies of Knights of the Dinner Table: Bundles of Trouble, Vols. 1-26 (collecting issues 1-89 of the comic) and read them in order. Yeah, that didn't appear on either of the big lists, but it was a lot funnier than most of those entries. It had more insight into the human condition than some of them, too. Hopefully, I'll get around to a full entry on that deranged saga sometime soon.
P.S. As an interesting point of comparison, here's a link to the list of Ten Books That I've Read That Have Stuck with Me that I posted back in March.
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I refuse to adhere to any top 100 list that does not contain BOTH Watership Down and The Pillars of the Earth. Bah to you Times. That's right, I said bah to you.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, Watership Down made Adam Goodman's list of constant reproach on the grounds of "too long" and "I don't like books about talking animals."
ReplyDeleteI think the real reasons are that he's afraid of bunny rabbits and that he's also afraid there'll be rabbit-habit specific information along the lines of what Susan has shared on her blog about her own rabbit's fecal output.
Acorn has many things to offer our family. In addition to fecal blog content, she bit me yesterday when I attempted to pet her. It was all very Monty Python-like, I assure you.
ReplyDeleteGosh, my list for a shelf of constant reproach (though it bothers me not much, obviously) is quite long and now Susan's mentioning of Watership Down just adds one more to that list. Watership Down has been on the list since my sister, Michelle, read it as a child and said I should too...
ReplyDeleteHere's a vote for Watership Down, althought, I think, real rabbits would find it a little puzzling...
ReplyDeleteBTW, Watership Down was the first true indication that my future lay in vocabulary and indexing. For my 6th grade English class project I did a full listing of the cast of characters, with each character classified as minor, major, or main. And I have to say that it was one of the most enjoyable projects I did in my academic career, and it was probably one of the best.
ReplyDeleteIn retrospect, there could have been a direct path between that project and my current gig. Naturally, I chose the windier path.