13 Books Nobody Has Read But Say They Have

[Doug_Tipple]

I didn't vote because I haven't read or tried to read any of the mentioned books. I jokingly tell my wife, who is a voracious reader, that I do have a favorite book, but I can't remember what it is. She is fond of telling that to her friends. I do read several hours a day, pot pouri on the internet, but read books, I don't do it. I have a hard enough time keeping track of the characters on a one hour TV mystery. Instead, I work with my hands, cleaning, making meals, repairing the house, and making flutes.

[MTGuru]

OK, I'll play.

Canterbury Tales. About a half dozen in detail, the rest skimmed. In Middle English, of course. Translations are for wussies.

Ulysses. I think I made it through once. The Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, both yes. Finnegan's Wake, you've got to be kidding. But I like the musical version, Finian's Rainbow.

Christmas Carol. Yeah, sure. Plus a bunch of other Dickens. I like the part where Clarence gets his wings. Oh, wait ...

Moby Dick. Once through. Required HS reading. Somewhere around the middle I was hoping someone would harpoon me.

Name of the Rose. Twice through, I think. Also Foucault's Pendulum. And a bunch of Eco's academic stuff on semiotics.

Don Quixote. Bits and pieces, in Spanish.

As I Lay Dying. Don't remember. Several Faulkner novels were required HS reading, to reassure NY high school kids that The South is merely a depressing fiction of Faulkner's imagination.

I offer having read Durrell's Alexandria Quartet as a substitute for Proust. Hey, substutions are allowed in my world.

I'd add Gravity's Rainbow to the list.

[s1m0n]

I suppose I've also read A Christmas Carol, come to think of it. It's 30k word novella and isn't a difficult read in any sense.

[s1m0n]

My favorite factoid from the American Lit course I had to take was the headline of a contemporary review of Moby Dick. Prior to its publication, Melville had had great success as a writer of sea stories and his south seas travelogue, neither of which even remotely prepared his readership for the rigors of MD. One reviewer was sure he'd gone mad, and headed his review "Herman Melville [is] Crazy!"

[Innocent Bystander]

The Canterbury tales were disappointing. The f*rt jokes and the people falling in and out of each others beds, great. Well, so-so. Then it all got a bit "why is he telling us this"? Makes you wonder what people will make of the dead parrot sketch five hundred years later. "What's a parrot?"

Ulysses. I've read it at least twice. Out of obligation both times. There's a point when you realise, oh yeah, I've read this before. Can I remember any of it, apart from the first and last lines? Nope. Finnegan's Wake? Mmm. I do not yearn to read that. Portait of the Artist as a Young Man was good. It was fun. Dubliners was dreary, seriously dreary. The kind of book that would put you off going to Dublin at all, ever. I think that was the intention.

Here's a weird one. I read La Souris Bleue on holiday. (I might not even have been in France.) I enjoyed it so much that I decided I would have to read the original English version. Imagine my surprise when, a couple of chapters in, I realised that I already had... in English...

I like Dickens. I know he isn't everybody's cup of tea, and "A Christmas Carol" is not my favourite by any means. If you are wondering about Dickens, I'd say read "Pickwick Papers". If you don't like that, then forget the rest.

War and Peace and Moby Dick. I found these to be most enjoyable. It mystifies me that people find them "difficult". Maybe (for War and Peace) you need the background reading first - to know what was going on in the Napoleonic Wars, and how the alliances shifted. I didn't. I found out about that afterwards. War and Peace is one of my favourite books, up there with "The Good Soldier Svejk".

[Hotblack]

I've read Canterbury Tales in modern English 'cos I wanted to. I really enjoyed it.
I once tried Ulysses. Got about 20 pages in and gave up. Didn't really like The Dubliners either. I'll not bother with Finngan's Wake.
I've never read A Christmas Carol but I've pretty much read the rest of Dickens' stuff and loved it. Little Dorrit and The Old Curiosity Shop are sitting on my to-be-read shelf at the moment.
Didn't really enjoy Satanic Verses but Midnights Children is brilliant. Some of his other stuff (The Moors Last Sigh, Shalimar the Clown ) is quite good
Moby Dick was a struggle but I made it through to the end.
Loved The Name of the Rose (although some bits are a bit tedious). Foucault was a waste IMO but Baudolino was excellent. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is another book sitting on my to-be-read shelf.
I've tried Don Quixote, got about a third through but intend to try again one day.
War and Peace I've tried three times and each time got stuck about 600 pages in. Never again. I once heard it described as 'the peace bits are good and the war bits are good but there's an awful lot of 'and''.
I've not attempted any of the others on the list and probably never will.

[Hotblack]

I like Dickens. I know he isn't everybody's cup of tea, and "A Christmas Carol" is not my favourite by any means. If you are wondering about Dickens, I'd say read "Pickwick Papers". If you don't like that, then forget the rest.

Pickwick Papers is one I've struggled with so far. I need to try again as I've never made it through yet. I'd suggest Nicholas Nickleby as a good Dickens starter. It's a fantastic novel. The others I'd suggst would be Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations before moving on to the rest.

Just my two penn'orth.

[dwest]

The wife tried to read Alexandre Dumas, père in English years ago, finally gave up. She will sit through the worst movies made taken from his works in English however.

[Doug_Tipple]

I take it back, I did read "War and Peace" when I was in high school.

[Innocent Bystander]

I take it back, I did read "War and Peace" when I was in high school.

There you go. You're just too modest, Doug.

[mutepointe]

About the year 2000, I read an entire 1960's encyclopedia. It was too funny.

[Anyanka]

Credit should be given for any book read in anything other than your native language.

I only ever read in other-than-my-native-language these days.

We'll need more than that.

I'm not British [nor, more to the point, was English my first language, or even my second], but have been reading mainly English language lit for ca 30 years now. John Steinbeck's collected works, the occasional Hemingway, 2 Dickens novels (bleargh), much Thomas Hardy, some Bronte, a little Jane Austen, and the collected works of the great Gary Larsen.

Yeah, alright, my first language was German. It's awkward.

[s1m0n]

...and I have a copy of Ulysses. I liked Dubliners which is apparently a lot more accessible. Maybe I'll try it with Cliff's Notes.

It helps to know that there are at least three simultaneous threads going on systematically throughout the novel.

The first, most obvious and most significant is stream of consciousness. Joyce followed Freud to the conclusion that the 'work'* of a piece of literature happens inside someone's head, not in the external events of the narrative.**

The second is a recapitulation of historical english literary styles. Towards the middle of Ulysses, Joyce devotes a chapter to each major era, running backwards. First modern literature, then a pastiche of the nineteenth century novel, through Shakespeare, Chaucer, and finally to Beowulf. If you haven't done a few EngLit survey courses, you're likely to find this annoying and opaque.

Third, the novel also follows the general schema of Homer's Oddessey, with Bloom as Odyseus and the events of his day mirroring the major episodes of the Oddessey***. Bloom is tempted by sirens, visits the underworld, escapes a cyclops, etc. The Oddessey is in many regards the ur-novel; the first major work of the western literary canon, and Joyce's major point is that ordinary life is as heroic as an epic tale from the golden age. Like everything else in the novel, he's also doing this because it's fun to do.

Added together, these three things are intended to make a very definite statement about what art and literature are and should be. Joyce is saying that from the oldest to the youngest, and encompassing every intervening style, this is what literature has always been.

~~

*I mean a physics metaphor here - something like 'that which is changed by the effort applied'.

**This, by the way, is my private definition of literatue. The lit that I care about is all about changes in the interior landscape, irrespective of the events (or non-events) of the external narrative. There are other kinds of lit but I find them a lot less interesting.

***Derek Walcott's epic poem, Omeros, does the same thing in shakespearean blank verse while telling a tale of poor fishermen on the Carribbean island of St Lucia. He's the only other author to pull it off as well, in my view.

[mutepointe]

A spoiler alert would have been nice.

[Innocent Bystander]

Ya, no point in reading it now.