you are too embarressed to admit that you haven't read that book yet

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Okay, my list is pretty long so I will name only four of them:
Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra
Michel Foucault - Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in
the Age of Reason
which reminds me of Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
and John Barth - Lost in the Fun House
It's just that I come across with these books almost in every
literary conversation and I have no idea why I haven't read them yet.
Believe me, I am dying to read them for years but somehow I haven't
even bought them yet.
By the way I forgot to mention Proust - In Search of Lost Time.
So anyone with me on this??

― yesim (yesim), Friday, 13 February 2004 12:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

― Vermont Girl (Vermont Girl), Friday, 13 February 2004 13:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Any of the Harry Potter books.

― Ike Stephenson, Friday, 13 February 2004 14:11 (twenty-two years ago)

curious incident...

the glass bead game

the glass bees

the worker

the transposed heads

foe

the song of roland

world as will and idea

the elder edda

i am a camera

roth's berlins diaries

the new testament

― rogerp, Friday, 13 February 2004 14:16 (twenty-two years ago)

This is so silly. Why be embarassed if you haven't read books you think everybody else has? Just read what appeals to you. There are no right or wrong texts and fashions change all the time. Elitism and snobbery are the enemy. Read what you like.

― MikeyG (MikeyG), Friday, 13 February 2004 14:39 (twenty-two years ago)

The only books mentioned so far that I have read are the Harry Potter ones. I'm so lowbrow.

― LondonLee (LondonLee), Friday, 13 February 2004 15:20 (twenty-two years ago)

Stupid White Men
Harry Potter

Oh, is this about books we wish we had read? If so, then any of Proust, the rest of Nabokov, much of Shakespeare, a lot of Ibsen, all of Sartre... Bloody Hell, there's so much to read. I will have to stay alive until I'm 300.

― SRH (Skrik), Friday, 13 February 2004 21:31 (twenty-two years ago)

One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And compromise is possible. The first Proust, Swann's Way/A la cote de Chez Swann is easily the best. So just read it, and you can always tell the Dewars people you're in the process of reading Proust.

― rams (rams), Saturday, 14 February 2004 18:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Stupid White Men
Pattern Recognition (everyone I work with has read it and it is directly related to what I do)

― dr. b., Saturday, 14 February 2004 19:49 (twenty-two years ago)

Watch out what you answer! Remember what happened in Changing Places.

― Richard Bellamy, Sunday, 15 February 2004 03:10 (twenty-two years ago)

I think it's only embarrassing not to have read the book if you've spent your adult life pretending that you have. Pretending not only includes actually saying 'yes, I remember when I was reading [insert name of difficult and improving book here], I noted that [insert opinion you picked up from the LRB here], aren't I clever', as well as the far sneakier knowing nod when someone else mentions something from the book and you just try to look as though you've read it without actually saying anything.

Otherwise I'm with MikeyG on this one. Who cares if you've not read things? You're not being graded anymore. (unless you are)

― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Monday, 16 February 2004 11:14 (twenty-two years ago)

Uhh, can't think of a one. I'd much rather read what I'm personally interested in than what a bunch of poindextrose bookworms figure I should. Though if we really got down to it, I suppose I'm disappointed in myself for not reading that nice edition of Frazer's 'Golden Bough' that's sitting on the shelf at home.

― writingstatic (writingstatic), Monday, 16 February 2004 22:29 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm not embarrassed, just kind of wondering why I never picked up "Of Human Bondage" before now...

― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Wednesday, 18 February 2004 02:39 (twenty-two years ago)

I've a lot of books sitting on my shelves that I'm sorry I haven't had time to read, yet, but I don't think that there's many books that I'm aware of and that I want to read that I don't have floating around my house, somewhere.

― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Thursday, 19 February 2004 07:04 (twenty-two years ago)

Zelig to thread!

― DV (dirtyvicar), Saturday, 21 February 2004 17:26 (twenty-two years ago)

This reminds me of a game called humiliation, where you have to name a book you haven't read and you get a point for everyone who has read it (so to earn points you should to admit to all the classics you never got round to). In a David Lodge novel an English Professor is so fired with the will to win he says he never read Hamlet.

I am ashamed how little i have read by any American writers, esp, nothing by Hemingway.

― isadora (isadora), Wednesday, 25 February 2004 22:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Once in a while I feel a bit ashamed that, as a Canadian, I haven't read much by Margaret Atwood, but then I remember that what I have read was crap, and I feel ok about it.

― August (August), Thursday, 26 February 2004 03:46 (twenty-two years ago)

Proust and Homer and I must confess that I've made a couple of attempts at Proust.

― Steve Walker (Quietman), Wednesday, 3 March 2004 03:41 (twenty-two years ago)

"In a David Lodge novel an English Professor is so fired with the will to win he says he never read Hamlet."

I remember that scene! I have not, however, ever finished Middlemarch.

(Don't you love old Lodge?)

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Wednesday, 3 March 2004 03:59 (twenty-two years ago)

For all my love of W H Gass, I'm a bit coy about not having read The Tunnel.

Anyone out there read it?

― David Joyner (David Joyner), Friday, 5 March 2004 04:27 (twenty-two years ago)

Um, why sit here and talk about books you haven't read? That's like talking about buildings you've never seen. Clam it and talk about what you've finally gotten off yer butts and digested.

― McDowell Crook, Friday, 5 March 2004 07:10 (twenty-two years ago)

Maybe Ann is my long lost twin? I also have not finished Middlemarch. But in the long list of books i haven't read it's not near the top.

Outranked by War and Peace, Moll Flanders, Tale of Two cities, etc.

― isadora (isadora), Friday, 5 March 2004 22:37 (twenty-two years ago)

I finally found you! I knew it! Back to the mother ship!

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Saturday, 6 March 2004 01:40 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm much more embarrassed about the books I haven't written. (Yet!)

― PuzzleMonkey, Saturday, 6 March 2004 10:58 (twenty-two years ago)

I have not read any Shakespeare. I am very, very bad.

― holojames, Sunday, 7 March 2004 17:33 (twenty-two years ago)

one month passes...

Any John Irving, because both my parents have been telling me for ten years that I'd absolutely love him.

― derrick (derrick), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 08:56 (twenty-one years ago)

John Irving's pretty crap - or at least The World According to Garp is much overrated. I haven't read any Thomas Pynchon... thankfully.

― Charles Dexter (Holey), Wednesday, 21 April 2004 23:02 (twenty-one years ago)

I've not read War And Peace or Finnegans Wake yet, but I admit this without any embarrassment - I can't imagine being embarrassed about not reading some book.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 22 April 2004 21:15 (twenty-one years ago)

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