Comments on: Books I Did Not Read This Year

By: Crooked Timber » » Favophobia

Crooked Timber » » Favophobia — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 21:01:44 +0000

[...] I wish I could say that buying this book has increased the probability I will read it, but past experience tells me this is not the case. The last book you re [...]

By: holojames

holojames — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 13:40:36 +0000

I have not read any Shakespeare ever.

By: lathrop

lathrop — Sun, 18 Jan 2004 03:15:18 +0000

I have been intending but failing to re-read Proust’s ‘Remembrance of things past’ in its entirety again so I can understand it better after reading it ten years ago and then reading critical commentary. Does not getting it re-read count?

By: Ally

Ally — Sat, 20 Dec 2003 00:09:08 +0000

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.

By: davelo

davelo — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:04:11 +0000

I’m illiterate, so I don’t read anything at all. Could somebody please explain this thread to me? (You might have to shout—I’m pretty far away.) Aha, It’s really funny:)

By: taj

taj — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 20:02:41 +0000

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.

By: Victor Lieberman

Victor Lieberman — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:25:30 +0000

Excuse me, but I believe that I have all you pathetic non-readers trumped. Mine is a Generational, Multi-Volume (they’re harder, as we’ve all learned) non-read. My father bought a set of Harvard Classics which, believe me, is in as fine shape now as the day it was unpacked. Must be 40 or 50 volumes to the damn thing, including most of the titles mentioned by others that were written way back in caveman times (before Cliff Notes). To say that one hasn’t read the Harvard Classics is, in a word, to say that one hasn’t read much of anything important at all. I work daily on not reading this set I’ve inherited in order to leave a similar legacy.

By: Edward

Edward — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:21:16 +0000

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

By: Damien

Damien — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:53:46 +0000

I’ve been busy not reading Don Quixote, and I’m working on not reading the rest of the Guardian’s top 100 novels of all time. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1061037,00.html I’ll start not reading biographies in my 50’s…still a lot of fiction to not read before then. Damien PS Received Critique of Pure Reason some 12 years ago. By far my longest owned not-read book. Been to Europe twice and back, never flipped a page.

By: Jonathan Goldberg

Jonathan Goldberg — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 14:49:45 +0000

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.

By: nnyhav

nnyhav — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 14:14:52 +0000

"I have never read Proust either." -- Bad Boy

By: dave heasman

dave heasman — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 12:40:11 +0000

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)

By: James Russell

James Russell — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 03:42:37 +0000

I can top that, I didn’t even read your comment. applause What is the book that you DID read, but read the longest time after you purchased. At the moment the winner of that competition is A Brief History of Time, which I bought in 1990 and did not read until 1998.

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 00:26:15 +0000

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.

By: Alan McCallum

Alan McCallum — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 22:52:14 +0000

Look. The reason I don’t have time to read my books is that I spend too much time reading blogs like this. Weell that’s one excuse anyway.