Wednesday, March 23, 2005

The New Book Meme

Ralph Luker, picking up on a suggestion of Derek Catsam, is spreading the new meme: what are the three books that you are ashamed to admit that you have not read?

I'm sure Ralph's office -- and life -- are like mine: surrounded by stacks of books that we can only hope to finish. He mentions some books that he will try to get to.

However, there is another category of books -- things that have been pushed to the side so long that I operate as if I have read them. And I don't even posess them! So here it is, the three books that I am ashamed to admit I might never read!

The first two are remarkable because I have read other things by Roth and Stendhal that I love. The last reveals how low I might stoop: I put Mary Barton on a list of books from which students could write a report. Any forgiveness out there?

The good news: my current reading, I am confident, will become a classic: Orhan Pamuk's Snow.

posted by Nathanael @ 11:36 PM

2 Comments:

At 10:37 AM, Blogger Brdgt said...

(I would have to preface this by saying this is more like three books I feel like I have to read, although I don't necessarily feel bad that I haven't)

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (I even bought it, moved with it twice and just sold it on half.com)
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna Haraway (Her writing makes my eyes bleed)
The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 by William McNeill (hey, I just finally got around to reading Plagues and Peoples!)

As far as books that I really DO want to read and am embarassed I haven't:
Pale Fire by Nabakov (I loved Lolita and everyone says this is even better)
The Master and Margarita by Mikahail Bulgakov (The husband has been wanting me to read this forever)
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann (I tried once, it's a tough one)

-brdgt

 
At 11:49 AM, Blogger Nathanael said...

I notice that neither of us deeply regret not reading historical/theoretical works but feel differently about fiction. Historical works tend to overlap one another, so that each work by an historian has some core from the previous. Also, those ideas are discussed so widely that that it is easy to know a work without reading it.

As per EP Thompson: I blitzed through it, and only to compliment the labor histories I read in French and German history.

 

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