Books I Haven't Read
A Guest Contribution by Friend of the Scene Freddie deBoer
As a hedge against those who would accuse those of us participating in the recent literary discussions here at TAS as a bunch of smarty-pantses desperately trying to one up each other, I’m going to start a thread discussing the books we’ve never gotten through.
I’ve never read the Proust. (If you want to be cool you have to call it the Proust.) I’ve tried before. I’ll try again. I’ve read the classics illustrated graphic novel. Never read the real thing. It’s particularly shameful because my academic focus for awhile was 20th century European novel. I’ve never read War and Peace. I read Anna Karenina, although it was kind of a half-assed reading effort. But I read it! But no War and Peace. Just too iconic, too daunting, too big. I’ve never felt prepared enough. Ready for the trek. (You know an author has a serious reputation when you get tired just thinking about reading him.)
I never finished The Tale of Genji, although I dug what I had been reading. Just lost the thread, if you know what I mean. And sometimes when you lose it, getting it back can be the hardest thing in the world. The Tin Drum might be my favorite novel, but I got very little out of Cat and Mouse and didn’t attempt Dog Years. I loved An Explanation of the Birds but have never even attempted another novel by Antonio Lobo Antunes. I’m missing a ton of Shakespeare’s histories, all of the Henrys except for the V, for example. I couldn’t even tell you the title of a single volume of Balzac’s.
I’m shockingly incomplete when it comes to the great Greek dramatists. I’ve read Oedipus and Antigone and a play or two I’m forgetting. I never read the Purgatorio or the Paradiso. I never read Don Quixote! Shameful. I never read a solitary goddamn word of Goethe or Flaubert. (I think.) I never finished a book by George Eliot. I love Thomas Hardy’s poetry but couldn’t finish (barely started, in fact) Jude the Obscure. I didn’t read Love in the Time of Cholera, although once I spent an hour discussing how great I thought it was with a very lovely young lady who called it her favorite. Never read Chabon, Franzen, Moody or John Irving. No Portrait of a Lady, or the Ambassadors, or The Golden Bowl. I like Steppenwolf and Demian but never read Siddhartha.
Never finished a Stephen King. No Man Without Qualities. No Eugene O’Neill. (Had to look up how to spell his last name, in fact.) No Tom Sawyer or Innocents Abroad. Never finished Lady Chatterly’s Lover. The Trial depressed me so thoroughly I never attempted another piece of long-form Kafka. Couldn’t finish White Teeth, or Money. Not a page of Nick Hornby or Jeffrey Eugenides. No In Cold Blood. Never read Bonfire of the Vanities. No Satiricon. No Vanity Fair, no Go Tell It On the Mountain.
Then there are the mountains of books I “read”. By this I mean my eyes passed over the text and my brain turned the visual images into coherent language, but I didn’t actually do anything close to the mental work necessary to actually have gotten much out of them. I “read” Tristam Shandy. I “read” The Aeneid. I “read” Karamazov and I “read” The Magic Mountain (which would have broken my father’s heart!). I “read” Kidnapped. I “read” Walden. I “read” Oblomov, but I don’t really feel bad about that because that was on assignment for Noah and the project never went anywhere. I vaguely remember something resembling Uncle Tom’s Cabin passing before my eyes in my teen years.
And, friends, have I still gotten into spirited discussions, at times, about the quality of some of these books, not read or “read”? Have I broadly hinted that I have read some novels when in fact I never have? Have I ventured a critical opinion that if sincere would have required an actual thorough reading? Have I out and out lied about having read a great book?
Yes, I’m sorry to say I have. I’m working on it.
Pretty sure my list is even more impressive than yours, but I don’t think I’ve ever lied about reading a book, unless you mean showing up for class without doing the assigned reading, and then participating in the discussion as if I had. But that’s school, which makes it different somehow.
I presume you’re aware of this?
— Peter Suderman · Jul 16, 04:44 PM · #
I read thirty pages of Joyce’s Ulysses and then threw it at the friend who told me I should read it…
— Erik Vanderhoff · Jul 16, 04:53 PM · #
I am very much not reading Infinite Jest at this moment.
— Matt Frost · Jul 16, 05:00 PM · #
I’ve been waiting someone to put this feeling into words. Thank you, Freddie.
Note: I’m still prepared to praise every person’s reading to the heavens and to deprecate my own. Even if it was somehow proved that I read 20x the number of books as everyone else.
— a young man · Jul 16, 05:01 PM · #
There was a meme going around of this sort at some point a few years ago – name the ten books you really need to read (some combination of objective and personal criteria) but never have. Back then, my list was:
1. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
2. Virgil: Aeneid
3. The Talmud
4. Aristotle: Poetics
5. Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Architecture and/or The Stones of Venice
6. Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals
7. Wordsworth: The Prelude
8. Bialik: Songs
9. The Mahabharata
10. Gonick: The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume III
Since then, I’ve read the Virgil and the Gonick, and dipped into the Talmud and Ruskin, but not in a substantial way. That’s it. Obviously I’ve read lots of other things, but not from this list.
Would I make the same list today? Probably not. What we consider “must read” changes over time as well. I feel less urgency about reading Thucydides now than I did then; the moment has passed. I feel more urgency about reading Montaigne, which I’ve also never read.
My education in European literature is pretty skewed, when you come right down to it. I’ve read a number of the Spanish classics and a number of the Russian classics, but I’ve read comparatively little of the canons of France and Germany, and just generally there are holes all over the place. That’s life, you know? You never read it all. You couldn’t if you wanted to, and you don’t want to, not if you’re honest with yourself.
As for Oblomov: what do you mean the project didn’t go anywhere? The project was to read four books in Russian or about Russia. I read Babel’s Red Cavalry, Gogol’s Tales, Chekhov’s Stories, and Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Yeah, not the most ambitious list. Maybe I’ll start reading another four from the list, though “Fall of the USA” may take precedence in the doorstop department.
— Noah Millman · Jul 16, 05:24 PM · #
Between Noah and Alan, I am beginning to wish that people would just start posting pictures of their big gas grills to see which was the most impressive.
In a bar, talking, this stuff would be great. But on a big blog it is precious. People are trying to be the conservative Dave Eggers when part of being conservative should be that you don’t want there to be a conservative Dave Eggers.
Who ever thought I would long for Reihan rapping?
— tom · Jul 16, 05:29 PM · #
I followed up on the Russian Reading Challenge here.
— Matt Frost · Jul 16, 05:30 PM · #
“People are trying to be the conservative Dave Eggers…”
Guys! He’s totally onto us!
— Matt Frost · Jul 16, 05:32 PM · #
Noah, you’re not going to read the Mahabharata either. I have — in Sanskrit no less — but even in full English translation, not going to happen for you, now you’re older and have kids.
tom: gas grills as a dick-measuring game? Hardwood, or lump charcoal.
Freddie, the thing is I think it’s a non-topic. I mean, duh, we’ve all read less than we haven’t by a LOT. A walk through B&N is a list of “oh, damn, gotta get that sometime” and probably I’ve read a percent or so of what I want to. But, eh. What one’s listing, guiltily, what one hasn’t read is trying to signal is membership in a club of the precious. I’ll pass. There’s some stuff that’s pretty common, by authors a lot of people have read, and then you have a couple things you read and you really like that either nobody has heard of (no point in naming anyone), a couple everyone has heard of but not read (for me, Vollman: read Argall recently), everyone’s heard of and read, and maybe sometimes you get lucky and it goes for the first category to the third and you can lord it over assholes (I was into Pamuk way, way before Snow). But, so?
I think in all the time I’ve known her my wife has read — well, for sure fewer than three works of fiction. She reads, constantly: but we get over two dozen magazines and she gets lots of books of science/nature/some history. Probably were I dink enough I could’ve beaten her as she is now at the “well read game” by the time I was 15. But she’s got a ferociously agile, learned mind. Novels don’t interest her (nor does politics). She probably doesn’t know more than half the authors’ names (if that) in these discussions. She’s also probably sharper and more insightful than most people I’ve met.
Basically I care what you’ve read because I feel awfully strongly about some of what I’ve read and think that stuff deserves to be in circulation, and it’s something we can talk about that I enjoy thinking through. But there’s not much motive to link omissions in that list to personal deficiency.
Unless you are idly rich, or teach English to little boys, I suppose. And also some things I gues are cultural commons but I don’t know that many of those are books: I can’t think of a book you might not have read that would make nearly the impression on me as your saying you hadn’t heard “Billie Jean” or that godawful Cher “do you buh-leeeeeeeeeve” song. That would be a much more fascinating list (I’ll start: I have never seen an episode of “Seinfield” or “Friends.”)
I am intrigued by reading omissions in specialists: the military historian who has not read Thucydides rankles as does the Classicist who hasn’t read Homer. I was in a optics guy’s office recently and we were arguing something, and I said, “let’s just look it up in Born and Wolf” (the classic optics text, and hell, he was much older: my generation doesn’t even use it in classes) and he says, “What’s that?” and I know from the offended way he reacted, exactly what look I gave him: but, damn, it’s ignorant not to have seen that doing what he does (and Yariv for the quantum/nonlinear stuff). And I think Olivia Judson pointed out recently that few biologists have read Darwin: I find that inexcusable unless you’re really an arrow-pusher. So I think this kind of “confessional” is potentially really interesting and revealing, if it’s really, really limited in scope.
— Sanjay · Jul 16, 06:17 PM · #
I give you two hypotheticals:
(1) Suderman chimes in, “I’ve never read any Hemingway, actually.”
(2) Suderman chimes in, “I’m can never remember which one is Lisa and which Maggie.”
Which of those knocks you from your chair?
— Sanjay · Jul 16, 06:23 PM · #
I used to try to persuade people to read “War and Peace” by saying it’s like any long, English, Victorian novel — lots of characters and ideas jostling around, and it all coalesces eventually. Unfortunately, hardly anyone reads long, English, Victorian novels anymore, so the argument is a little flat.
— Josef · Jul 16, 06:46 PM · #
Contra Sanjay, I think Freddie’s project here is more than just a “non-topic.” If one of us convinces him to buckle down and read War and Peace, for instance, it will have been worthwhile (and the great part is just how little buckling down is required, once you get started).
— Matt Frost · Jul 16, 06:50 PM · #
I’ve tried and failed on Crime and Punishment more times than I can count. Currently, I’m failing to finish recent Nobel Prize-winner Snow.
— right · Jul 16, 07:22 PM · #
I like the Millman’s “books I haven’t read but should” meme better than either the prior “books no one should read” or the deBoer “books I haven’t read although other people think I should have” meme. A few summers ago (this is actually relevant), I decided that my summer project would be to read all the books that supplied the characters for the movie “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” The summer ended before I finished “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” and we don’t seem to have “Dorian Gray” in our summer house, but I did the others.
— y81 · Jul 16, 08:13 PM · #
Years ago I created a list of books I needed to read to pass Ben Franklin’s test of knowing everything about something and something about everything. I started with Bloom’s Western Canon, and from there traced the ontogenies of western philosophy and capital-S science.
I am now the greatest badass on the planet, but for different reasons.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 16, 08:50 PM · #
“Which of those knocks you from your chair?“
(3) Sanjay actually sends me some of his much ballyhoo’d coffee in time for me to enjoy a breakfast cup with my wife in the cockpit of our sloop without having to wear a sweater.
— Tony Comstock · Jul 16, 09:06 PM · #
I also will confess to pretending to read a book when I had not while trying to impress a girl very many years ago. However, just like school, I do no think that counts.
Steve
— steve · Jul 16, 09:38 PM · #
I don’t know, I guess I just thought that since we’re talking about what we’ve read, it might be worthwhile to talk about what we haven’t read.
Now here’s the question: what’s worse, signaling by talking about books? Or chalking everything people say up to “signaling”?
— Freddie · Jul 16, 09:47 PM · #
Yeah, my list is as long as your arm, but you really should reread The Brothers Karamazov sometime. And some George Eliot, and Tom Sawyer, and for god’s sake read Don Quixote. It’s hilarious. Jude the obscure is bleak stuff, but also worth another try. I’m reading the Mayor of Casterbridge after having “read” it some years earlier, and I’m enjoying it. Other than that, I found myself nodding a good deal reading this post.
— Gus · Jul 16, 10:39 PM · #
Most of this stuff is stuff I want to read— or, sometimes, want to have read, not to my credit— but just haven’t had the time too or the inclination at an appropriate time. I’m not trying to say that any of this isn’t worth reading.
— Freddie · Jul 16, 11:00 PM · #
Sanjay,
I can’t say I know what to make of your hypotheticals there. I’ve read some Faulkner, thanks to a college course on Faulkner on film (no, I didn’t read everything I was assigned — but I read enough). And while I’m not all that much of a Simpsons geek (I’ve probably seen 20 or 30 complete episodes in my life), I can usually spot the difference between the characters.
But I’m probably just really obtuse and missing something obvious here.
— Peter Suderman · Jul 16, 11:15 PM · #
What the… Faulkner’s not Hemingway (unless you’re playing it real cool by the film thing, linking Faulkner to Hemingway through Bogey and Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Clever!)
Yeah, but even if you hadn’t seen those 20 or 30, if I said, “Don’t have a cow, man,” you’d get it. Hell, I’ve never read a sentence of Harry Potter and have actively avoided it, but I know by now that Voldemort’s the bad dude and I’m a “muggle.” Not knowing that would be weird. Not being able to name six residents of Yoknapatawpha would be … normal.
Matt, how would that be great? He’s already convinced he ought to read it because we’re all so damn precious. If instead he buys my “War and Peace…oughtta read it…but if I don’t, fuck it” argument, maybe I can teach him to change his own oil instead. A little better for him, a little better for the environment, a little better for everyone. Besides, failure to read War and Peace gave us Markov chains and Monte Carlo models. It’s a noble thing, failing to read War and Peace. Would that I had failed, who knows what I’d have discovered.
— Sanjay · Jul 17, 12:20 AM · #
I’m convinced I should read it because enough smart people, historical and contemporary, say it’s a masterpiece.
— Freddie · Jul 17, 12:25 AM · #
I have no idea why I mentioned Faulkner there. It’s been a long, long day.
I read Old Man and the Sea in high school, or part of it, anyway, but haven’t read any Hemingway since.
If this post/thread results in Freddie reading War and Peace, I’ll be greatly amused.
— Peter Suderman · Jul 17, 01:46 AM · #
OK, Freddie, but can you rebuild your engine? Didn’t think so. Guess what: spending the same weekend shotgunning someone doing that will do more for you than reading War and Peace. I’ve done both, so I know!
Which doesn’t mean it’s better. It just means, yeah, there’s shit you haven’t read. It is very unlikely my wife has read any Tolstoy. She might not know the name Tolstoy off the top of her head. She is by most reasonable measures smarter than most of the “smart people, historical and contemporary” recommending him. Clearly from an informational standpoint it’s much much more interesting to get a partial list of what you’ve read than of what you haven’t but want to….
Comes with engagement, Suderman. The day before my wedding — my only car accident. I rear-ended a dude.
I know, I know, I’m on the other side of the issue than I was on below. Dig it.
— Sanjay · Jul 17, 02:23 AM · #
Who knew Sanjay was Robert Stacy McCain?
At some point, I think you’ve got to recognize that no matter how intricate a cathedral you build of your own self-regard, you’re still just masturbating.
— Freddie · Jul 17, 03:19 AM · #
So, given all you have not accomplished, tell us again why they’re letting you blog at the American Scene?
— nb · Jul 17, 11:19 AM · #
So, given all you have not accomplished, tell us again why they’re letting you blog at the American Scene?
Affirmative action.
— Freddie · Jul 17, 12:15 PM · #
A few years ago Newsweek interviewed Harold Bloom and asked him to name a really important book he had never read, and he replied, “I cannot think of a major work I have not ingested.”
— Alan Jacobs · Jul 17, 01:05 PM · #
Who’s Dave Eggers?
— Jim Manzi · Jul 17, 01:22 PM · #
I think I might be with Sanjay. Given the same number of hours to do it in, what’s more important: reading Shakespeare and many of the commentaries; reading all the major works of the American canon; or playing a lot of tennis?
They all have their advantages, and I’m not sure I can privilege one over the other.
Now with that said, I kind of like Freddie’s game, especially with Noah’s gloss – what books haven’t you read that you want to read, and when are you going to get around to it?
— J Mann · Jul 17, 02:48 PM · #
There ought to be a cleverly-named rule against mentioning the opportunity cost of time in a blog comments thread.
— Matt Frost · Jul 17, 03:45 PM · #
Alan, Bloom’s comment is meaningless given that he reserves the right to define which works are major…
— Sanjay · Jul 17, 04:22 PM · #
Frost, you’re discounting the possibility that commenting in blog threads, at least on some threads and at some blogs, might indeed be a rational way to spend time.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 17, 04:24 PM · #
KVS-
You’re right. Sometimes it’s an entirely rational choice. And sometimes, an analogy to the Third Reich is just what’s needed to clinch an argument.
— Matt Frost · Jul 17, 05:05 PM · #
Goebbels was also a cynic.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 17, 05:34 PM · #
Matt,
Ironically, one of the reasons it took us so long to enter WW II was that FDR assumed Godwin’s Law to be prescriptive, not descriptive. As a result, every time one of his staff discussed the European theater, he would cover his ears, shout “Godwin’s Law!”, and wheel out of the meeting. As a result, it wasn’t until the Japanese committed an act of war against the US that FDR was willing to listen to war reports.
It’s somewhat excusable for FDR to misunderstand Godwin’s Law — he didn’t, after all, have access to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, there is no such excuse today.
(This post has been carefully examined and certified free of violations of Godwin’s Law, of course).
As to the opportunity cost criticism, I don’t buy it.
Even assuming that I enjoy watching Angel reruns (and I do), unless I plan to stop (and I don’t), I must nevertheless chose to read at most Melville or Joyce tomorrow, but not both.
— J Mann · Jul 17, 06:15 PM · #
J Mann,
Last night I wrote a longer comment, partly in response to Sanjay, about how we’re ranking books under the assumption that we have already allocated our marginal time among different activities (reading books, fixing cars, etc.), and the question, then, is how to sort books within the discrete reading time available to us.
Then I thought, “what am I thinking. I could go to bed.” That was when I was trading blog commenting against sleep, rather than against work, as I am now.
All this is to say that both you and KVS are more right than I care to admit.
— Matt Frost · Jul 17, 06:29 PM · #
Okay. I lie about reading books all the time. It has to do with being the young upstart in a group of older intellectuals and literary scenesters (some valid, others meh). I love reading my books, I’m as well-read as anyone in my field (and it’s a conceit that I think I’m a diverse reader), but people tend to think that the more you read of the “canon” the better a writer you become. Bullpoop.
Lying about what I read usually goes along these lines:
“The New York Trilogy was (insert adjective here).”
[I think about the book collecting dust in my bookshelf, then switch on to what I feel about his other works that I have read:] “Well. I know that Auster’s technically good. That is, I recognize his literary whammy; but he’s not the kind of writer that lingers in you, knowwhattamean?”
There.
Also, from the article: “Then there are the mountains of books I “read”. By this I mean my eyes passed over the text and my brain turned the visual images into coherent language, but I didn’t actually do anything close to the mental work necessary to actually have gotten much out of them.”
THIS I do a lot.
Lolita (would like to go back to). One Hundred Years of Solitude (would like to finish). The Old Man and the Sea (I am sure I hated this, VERY SURE). Bah, so many many things. Up until recently, I haven’t read any Chekhov and Hemingway (although I am mending that, trust me — and I am not lying this time).
Oh yeah, I am lying about my name as well.
/hurrah for intellectual stimulation
— Lisbon · Jul 17, 06:57 PM · #
But Matt, that comment would’ve missed the point. Sure, we’re ranking books given missed opportunities and “you can’t read them all” is a banal observation too, since ideally there’s simply flatly better ways always to spend ones’s time (read: fucking). My issue is this whole idea isn’t “these are things I want to read but haven’t,” it’s “these are things I should read but haven’t,” and that makes all the diffference. The former is interesting only as a Christmas list or if one is asking for recommendations. The latter is an application for membership in some club of the precious. Screw that. I mean if you were to use Freddie’s idea of smart people saying a book is good we’d all be reading nonstop Dan Brown because the overlap of smart people with people with no taste is nonzero. And looking at the useful things you could be doing other than getting your preciousness union card is just intended to reinforce the idea that, screw it, all that’s special, objectively, about this book here is, a lot of snots like it. Oh, and so do I.
— Sanjay · Jul 17, 07:26 PM · #
(caveat, again, for specialists in a discipline where “I should have read” is a valid sentiment.)
— Sanjay · Jul 17, 07:30 PM · #
FWIW, Sanjay, I look at this sort of thread not as preciousness but as group therapy — we members of the club carry around a lot of guilt about our non-reading, and it’s comforting to know that (a) we’re not alone, and (b) at least we’re not as bad as that guy who hasn’t even read Important Book X like we have.
— kenb · Jul 17, 07:49 PM · #
I may not, for the life of me, know what FWIW means, but I’m with kenb up there. There’s a shame to the booklover when s/he has not read the books that “should be read by booklovers.” A whole lotta bull gets whizzed around because the peer pressure among intellectuals/snots/bibliophiles have incredibly strict standards that leaches into the education system (what gets assigned where, to whom — for goodness’s sake, in sixth grade the principal, on a Born-Again Christian spree, made us read Tuesdays with Morrie, holy baby panda weeping).
I guess this is one of those “people do it all the time, only no one talks about it” things.
Good.
— Lisbon · Jul 17, 07:55 PM · #
I have never read Urdu poetry.
— JB · Jul 17, 10:15 PM · #
Ditto about Ulysses. It remains my least favorite partially read book.
— Joules · Jul 19, 01:55 AM · #
<i>At some point, I think you’ve got to recognize that no matter how intricate a cathedral you build of your own self-regard, you’re still just masturbating.</i>
Of the reading of books there is no end. My new goal in life is to break out this quote at a very inappropriate time. Maybe as part of a eulogy.
— Michael B. · Jul 20, 01:03 AM · #