Books I Did Not Read This Year

[wiping streaming eyes]

What an odd coincidence. I too have been not reading Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought for as long as it’s been out. Why, I went to the reading she gave of it when it came out, and chatted with her and everything, and resolutely didn’t read it (along with, another coincidence, Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which sits *very near* Nussbaum’s book on my bookshelves. It’s spooky, isn’t it?) And yet – here’s where the coincidence comes in – by an odd trick of fate I slipped up this morning and read the first chapter of Upheavals of Thought. If you had posted this yesterday, I would not have had to say that, but…alas.

But there’s Peter Gay’s magisterial (at least I assume it’s magisterial, it’s certainly thick enough) biography of Freud, I’ve been not reading that for many years.

And there’s Henry Mayer’s All on Fire. I have read a little of that, but only a tiny fraction. It’s so good that I can’t read it. (That’s actually true rather than a joke, though what my reasoning is I couldn’t tell you.)

Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman. Her From the Beast to the Blonde is a brilliant book. That’s why I haven’t read its successor.

The last three or four or five or six or seven novels and/or books of stories by A.S. Byatt. Because I don’t like them.

Outstanding post. You only brought a hammer, but look what you did with it. I propose a post of books I haven’t heard of.
My category here will be books I have started and suddenly, irrevocably stopped reading.
I’ve been on page 70 of “Finnegans Wake” since the mid-1980s. Ouf. I have no idea how far I got into the “Cantos” of Ezra Pound, it is a blur. Tasso’s “Gerusalemme liberata”, Camoens’s “The Lusiads”, about twenty pages each. Butler’s mock-heroic “Hudibras”, about sixty pages, which is a pity because it’s very funny IMO. Thomas Mann’s “Der Zauberberg”, about ten pages, and I loved “Buddenbrooks.”
That’ll do. Oh, how could I miss “War and Peace”? And I even have a handy ovna-bookmark with all the families laid out.

Jodi Kantor published an elaborate, literary version of this posting a few years ago in Slate. I believe my response to that article (see the “reader comments” appended to the bottom of it) applies equally here.

Come to think of it, this is like that game in David Lodge’s – Small World? Or was it in Changing Places. A party game for academics in English. You say the most embarrassing thing you haven’t read – embarrassing for someone who teaches English literature (of course this was a long time ago, the game would be unplayable now). At first people would get it wrong, and say the most obscure item. Morris Zapp (it must have been Zapp) would patiently explain – ‘No, no, not obscure, obvious – that’s the whole point. Obscure ones aren’t shameful!’ So then one particularly competitive guy got the hang of it, and won the game but ruined his career by shouting out ‘Hamlet!’

I can top that, I didn’t even read your comment.

Well, it depends what you mean by ‘easier.’ In terms of effort, calories expended, eye movements across lines of print, perhaps. But psychically, no. Psychically, not reading long books is a massive drain, I assure you.

the inevitable outcome of going into the social science section of a big Borders in America with good intentions and an inadequate understanding of the prevailing exchange rate.

I am not sure what this means, and yet it made me laugh. Must be funny.

Invisible is a Canadian patriot and she would say something like that.

I exclusively don’t read the Bible. Everything you don’t need to know is in that one book. It’s an inexhaustible non-resource.

I’d win a movies-not-seen contest hands down, since I haven’t seen one so far this year. “Bad Santa” just got put on my list of movies to see sometime, but “El Topo”, “What’s up Tiger Lily”, and “The Producers” have been on that list for well over thirty years, so the odds aren’t that great.

“Hell, I didn’t even read this post, let alone the books mentioned therein.”

Posted by James Russell · December 16, 2003 01:34 AM

“I can top that, I didn’t even read your comment.”

Posted by Ophelia Benson · December 16, 2003 01:40 AM

I have been trying for well over an hour to come up with a worthy rejoinder to this exchange, and have utterly, abjectly failed. Thanks James, thanks Ophelia. You remind me why I visit this site.

I have this nasty habit of reading 80% of a book and then losing momentum. Once you get to a certain point you don’t know whether to start over or just finish. I also may have skipped to the end if its non-fiction, so I won’t remember which 1/5 I haven’t read.

In this way, I have not quite read:
100 Years of Solitude
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
At Swim, Two Boys
Harry Potter Y El Caliz de Fuego (vain attempt to not let Spanish 101 get too rusty. Didn’t really work anyway–now I remember what lechueza (owl), varita (wand), mago (wizard), and Senor Tenobroso (dark Lord) mean, but not how to conjugate verbs.)
Common Ground
and many others I’m forgetting.

I have never read:
any biography that’s not a memoir.
anything by Leo Tolstoy.
anything by Virginia Woolf.
Ulysses
Lolita
Wuthering Heights (waded through 90 pages, then watched semaphore version instead. Feel like I got the gist.)
anything by Milton

vinteuil: try something along the lines of “oh yeah? Well I’ve never even read this comment!”

This certainly seems like a good place to mention Nicholson Baker’s oddly engaging little ode to his actual literary relationship to John Updike — he called it U&I. In it, he lists the tremendous quantity of Updike’s work that he, though a sincere fan, has not read, and maintains that such a proportion is in fact normal for most of us, however devoted we are to our favorites, because, you know, the world’s a big place, and there’s so much to see and love, and all.

I’ve been too busy reading bear scat and smoke signals for the past 3 years to have any time for the mighty tomes y’all flung forth here.

But my outhouse readin’ has nearly caught me up on the frontier wisdom of the philosophical greats that keep me tall in the saddle in a way that the others just Kant do.

Bear scat is, um, kind of nutty.
I think the semaphore “Wuthering Heights” is a monument of human art, but Katherine, I have to say I’ve never heard of “At Swim, Two Boys.” I did think “At Swim, Two Birds” was very funny, though. I like when the characters go on strike.
“Oh, Henri Bergson.”
“Is the correct answer!”
“That’s lucky, I’ve never even heard of him.”

That was an excellent post, and I sympathise with the sentiment that inspired it. Looking ahead to 2004, I have elaborate plans for not writing several books, including a dense novel exploring the complex relations between politics and the inner self in Russia, a 1,000 page polemic on the role of aid agencies in Africa, and the first critique of H G Wells’ work from a post-industrial neo-colonialist standpoint.

That’s a considerable amount of writing you won’t be doing, I hear you say. Well, it’s a significant improvement on last year, when I narrowly failed to avoid writing a haiku. Well, everyone makes mistakes.

How about this:

What is the book that you DID read, but read the longest time after you purchased.

Ideally, this should be a book you purchased, did not read, forgot you owned, perhaps got stuck in the box with the extra bed sheets when you moved to make those big bulky boxes a little heavier, didn’t get re-shelved for a while, and then, one day, when you wanted something to read, were skimming your bookshelves and though, “Hey, I forgot I even owned that one!”

Then, you must have read it and, preferable, enjoyed it considerably.

I just read, for the first time, a copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers that I purchased over 13 years ago. Can anyone top that?

Hmph. That’s no obstacle. I’ve been meaning to read The Critique of Pure Reason since my great-great-grandmother bought it at a little used bookshop in Thun while everyone else in her party was off hiking up the Jungfrau.

All the good “I don’t read”s have been taken. This is what I get for going to lunch. :(

Sign me up for the Haven’t-Read-‘100-Years-of-Solitude’-Club.”

It has been packed and unpacked during three moves and faithfully placed on my side of the bed for 20-plus years.

Never finished ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ or anything by Robert Caro, Thomas Hardy or James Finnamore Cooper. Hell I never heard of most of the books on the main list here.

Do I get bonus points for never seeing ‘Grease’ (I and II), ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘Saturday Night Fever’ or any of the ‘Rocky’ series?

I found this list via James Russell’s site. Very witty! There are so many books I haven’t read, but the pride of place must go to Kingsley’s The Water Babies and Darwin’s The Origin of Species, because I was told to read these in preparation for a seminar with two other people and a Cambridge Darwin & Victorian lit expert. Needless to say I didn’t read these books (and The Water Babies is a children’s book, and only about 150 pages long!), for reasons I can’t remember, instead trying to blag my way through it. This didn’t go particularly well. I even tried to fake background knowledge of the subject by quoting something I had read on the internet about Darwin – which lead to an impromptu ten-minute speech by the academic about how wrong I was…

Oh, and here’s a trick I invented for excusing (to yourself or other people) not having read great works of literature: tell yourself/other people that it’s not worth reading lit in translation, because no translations capture the nuanced meaning of the original work, and so you’ll leave 100 Years of Solitude, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, etc., for after you have learned fluent Spanish and French. Other people will think you are well clever, despite the fact that you are never actually going to do it.

I’ve read Ulysses & War & Peace, but I’ve never heard Dark Side of the Moon. (by Pink Floyd, that is; I’ve heard a bit of the DSotM by Medicine Head)

It was enscribed above:

It is a nice question whether longer books are easier or harder to not read. I’m thinking harder. The psychic drain — that nagging, almost-guilty sense of “I really should read this” — is just that much more intense the longer the book that one is not reading.

That’s one way to look at it. The other is “It’s so short there’s really no excuse for not having got through it.”

The one thing this thread must avoid at all costs is coming to a conclustion about something.

This comment is so far down the list that it will be easy for nobody to read.

I’m surprised that nobody has yet mentioned this important difference between the acts of reading and not reading — it’s just so much easier to not read several books at once. There are entire libraries, bookshops and personal collections out there that I am simultaneously not reading at this moment.

As a lowly, mere, and utterly incompetent undergrad, there are a myriad of books I have actively not read. The greatest of these is Empire, by Niall Ferguson (and, by extension, Empire’s New Clothes: Rereading Hardt and Negri; Jodi Dean and Paul Passavant, eds. who both teach classes i’m looking forward to not taking)
Zizek’s Desert of the Real is on my not-to-read list, and of course, I’ll continue to not read that for years to come. I particularly enjoy actively not reading, as passive not reading (regardless of length) is just so much less fulfilling.

I have not read any Shakespeare ever.