I find it less embarrassing to admit that there are a lot of books I haven’t read, which anyway would be patently obvious to anyone who has the misfortune to corner me at a party, than to admit which books I haven’t read, which include nearly all the classics of all literatures. I tell myself that someday I’ll read the Iliad, for example, but someday never comes, and before you know it, I surreptitiously shove the damn thing to the bottom of another to-read pile. Fortunately, thanks to a Frenchman (it is a universally acknowledged fact that the French are always useful for such things as this), it’s now possible to learn how to never again admit my ignorance. Woo hoo!
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So Sweet Land is really good, FYI.
by greg—Feb 15, 09:03 AM
My mother said she decided to quit the English lit world mostly because she was so sick of people saying to her, “You call yourself an English major and you’ve never read ____?!?”
The Odyssey is much much better than the Iliad anyway.
I myself, like David Wright (if you search for his name in this thread, it’s the second message, way near the bottom), am making a list of books to be read after I die.
by Laura—Feb 17, 07:15 PM
It’s a good idea. It seems reasonable, for example, to swear to read all of Dickens postmortem. I must think on this more. There are surely other corpuses worth dying for…
by greg—Feb 18, 04:20 PM