Embarassment

A pedant writes: in the original game, the winner was the person who picked a book which had been read by the largest number of other people.

I have not read the Odyssey (yet).

Take the Enniads of Plotinus, for example. Not a chance in hell I will get around to them. Why, just considering nineteenth century novels alone, I'd say there are umpty-diddly Balzacs, Thackerays and Eliots I will never crack open. Macht es nichts.

You'll enjoy it, I think.

I love Tjanting, so there's no reason why I wouldn't love Ketjak. But some pleasures are postponed. Or are enjoyed in the postponement.

I think the point of this exercise is that nobody's read the entirety of the canon (ignoring issues of what the canon is comprised), and people will always have that one book that they're "ashamed" of not having read. While I'm not as old as Aimless (I'm guessing, anyways), I too am unconcerned with being shamed, possibly because of the Pop flattening of my tastes. Though I'll admit to being ashamed somewhat that I've yet to read The Spirit (or anything by Eisner), the good volumes of Cerebus, and Kirby's early Marvel stuff.

I'm embarrassed by being the first to spell embarrassment wrong.

Context about the game - it's played by members of a university English faculty. You could play the same game in the Philosophy department - "I haven't read The Critique of Pure Reason", "Yeah, well I couldn't get through the Tractatus" "Well I've never read the Phaedo" - or see which politics lecturer has only read notes on Rawls, etc.

i think there are few contexts where the expectations are normalized enough for any real embarrassment to result: there has to be a strong, centralized canon, some kind of status or moral value set on knowing it, and so on.

in other words, it's a hard game to play nowadays.

Being a regular reader of ILB I'm abashed that not only have I ever read a Pynchon BUT I've never laid eyes on one - in new bookshops, secondhand bookshops, libraries or friends or relatives houses.

Sandy, I've only read one Pynchon, Vineland. It's pretty straightforward, so if you want to have read one, that'd be a good one.

Trish - thanks for the idea of starting with Vineland :)

However, I do have a precious second-hand copy of The Crying of Lot 49 on my shelves inside, waiting to be read. So if any of the other Pynchon beginners were thinking of reading it, we could do it together.

Lot 49 is 150 pages, but reads like 400!

and approx 10 times as good!

although i should try to make it through vineland for a 2nd time. i managed perfectly well the first time, aged approx 12, but when i tried to reread it later in life as a pynchon fan i couldn't stand it.

i dunno if martin skidmore still posts here but i seem to remember him saying he read all of proust in like 2 weeks!

i read vols 2-6 (of the vintage edition) in 4 or 5 days, in order to catch the film before it disappeared from the cinema. i didn't really do much else on those days, though.

the second time i read GR i had a summary on hand that helped avoid that kind of pitfall. i'm never sure whether i have a short attention span or whether everyone has this problem with pynchon (i kinda suspect the latter).

of course I can't really remember that much about it.

Hee hee, don't get your hopes up! Mysteries, yes. Unfolding, not so much.

Probably should read it, now.

(I’m considering starting a Cormac McCarthy thread as I’ve recently discovered that I love his stuff. The George Saunders thread made me smile; I’ve dug the guy since I came across a New Yorker story of his a while ago but I haven’t gotten around to buying one of his books. Bookstores never have it.)

in addition, my tolstoy to date is just the first 250 pages of war and peace, which got set aside some years ago and i haven't returned to. and i've read no woolf fiction, just a room of one's own. there's also a group of people, mostly contemporary writers, whom i've read only short stories by, not novels (updike, roth, t.c. boyle, j.c. oates). and that's not even mentioning all the genre writers i have on my list to get around to.

i would like to live another 250 years, please.