Books you've never read that you should’ve: A Challenge

Brothers Karamazov
Finnegans Wake (if I can't die until I've finished it...)
The Gulag Archipelago
Gravity's Rainbow
and something that will occur to me as soon as I post this.

I thought this thread was going to be lie that game Embarassment, in one of David Lodge's books, where you own up to the books that you've never read. (Won, in the book, by the English professor who admitted he'd never read Hamlet)

I think Brothers Karamazov would qualify as my most embarassing. I always claim to love Dostoevsky, but I've never finished one of his books. I've read about a quarter of BK, along with half of Crime and Punishment, and bits of Notes from the Underground... etc., but there's something about Dostoevsky that I can't get into - or simply can't get - even though I know I should love him, and do love what I've read. It's odd.

I blame the translations - though I was reading Pevear & Volokhonsky's Brothers Karamazov, so there should be no excuse there.

i read the first two books of proust and loved them so much, but it was taking me waaaaaaaay too long to read them. i was going thru each sentence with a fine-tooth comb and re-reading paragraph after paragraph. there were just too many other books i wanted to read and i kept stopping to read them and poor proust fell by the wayside. but i wanna give it another go.
war & peace, definitely. and moby dick too. brothers k and the idiot were life-changing for me.

Ulysses
The Bible
Complete Works of Shakespeare (just to be sure of some extra time)
Memory Babe: The Biogrpahy of Jack Kerouac
The Riverside Chaucer

I should point out, Zan, that South of the Border, West of the Sun is a very short book. You hasten your own doom! Pick longer books.

This seems like a variation on the game "Humiliation" in David Lodge's book Changing Places. See site below for description:
http://www.atforumz.com/showthread.php?t=217011

Only five, huh? Here's mine:

The Life of Picasso by John Richardson
Disraeli by Robert Blake
The Riverside Shakespeare
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
The Bible

those two biographies seem to stick out. why them?

Picasso is my favorite artist and Richardson's biography is considered a great study of the man. The volumes have been on my shelf for ages and I've longed to get to them, only other books always pop up as more pressing reading priorities. If I'm ever confronted with the premise posed by the question, though, they would be the first to make the cut.

As for Blake's Disraeli, it's up there because it's renouned as a great study of a prime minister who's always intrigued me -- and as a book that I was supposed to have read in graduate school but didn't, I'd feel too guilty to not have read it before I died.

The Bible
The Divine Comedy
Paradise Lost
The Recognitions
Gravity's Rainbow

accentmonkey: I think for me the object was not to pick books that would prolong the event of my death, but rather books that I want to read before I die. South of the Border, West of the Sun is the only Murakami novel I haven't read, and so would complete the collection. I'm trying to save it until After Dark comes out in English... then that one will take a place on the list.

It's actually interesting, because Murakami once said in an interview that he's terrified of dying while in the middle of a novel. And I don't want to die before I've read everything he's written. We're both fighting mortality in a sense...