Unread Books: A Perusal

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When making goals to read this year, I thought I would make it through all the great-books one needs, or ought to read.  The great joke in the English department goes like this: what do English professors do when they get drunk? Admit to the others the great books they haven't yet read. With that in my thoughts I compiled a list of great-books I hadn't yet read, or even considered.  I found, much to my dismay, these grouped more into authors or regions I had never read.

 The great Russians leap out: Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, or Anton Chekhov.  This seems inexcusable. In French,  The Count of Monte Cristi  and The Hunchback of Notre Dame-- though it's not for want of trying.  For Americans, Faulkner is my glaring fault.  I've not read Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, or Light in August. In addition to that, there's Flannery O'Conner, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Despite being my favorite subject, I think it might also be my weakest. For British literature, the resounding classics I keep avoiding are all by Dickens. There's a truckload: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak house, and Great Expectations. I've also never touched D. H. Lawrence or Walter Scott. Then there's George Orwell who I found too traumatizing in middle school to re-try 1984 or Animal Farm. 

And then they're the books I pretend to have read. I can write essays about them, I can talk to you knowledgeably and become animated and discuss my favorite viewpoint, but have not, from cover to cover, read them.  The Divine Comedy and The Faery Queen and the Metamorphoses and Gulliver's Travels all come to mind.  

Not to mention the modern writers I won't yet touch (how can I-- am I smart enough yet, for Ulysses James Joyce? for Swan's Way, Proust?) or the ones I read when I was too young-- mostly Hemingway and Harper Lee-- and need to reread. I'm not even going to tell you the phd books I need to consider. Far too many, and that would be appallingly embarrassing.

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So much for my confessions! Any authors you love, or love to hate? Hope you're warm despite this dreich Tuesday found here in Durham xo