Books You’ve Never Read

In David Lodge’s novel Changing Places, a group of literature professors play a game called ‘Humiliation’. Each participant must name a widely celebrated literary work they have never read but assume everyone else has. Points are awarded for every other player who has read the book, making your own admission the most humiliating. The game rather wonderfully showcases the anxiety of academia, as the players have to risk their academic reputations. The winner in the novel is the professor who has never read Hamlet.

War and Peace might well be high on many lists. A friend who works with charity book sales tells me that there are huge numbers of copies of Tolstoy’s classic, with bookmarks often inserted around the 4th chapter. The confusing names have obviously been too much for some readers. Feeling guilty every time they look at the unfinished copy, they hand it over to charity.

I have never read Finnegan’s Wake, but I doubt I’d win ‘Humiliation’ with that one – most people have not read Joyce’s last novel. George Bernard Shaw felt life was too short to spend time on such a convoluted novel – I tend to agree. I have read Ulysses twice, but I plan to die without having added Finnegan’s Wake to my list of books read. I think Joyce was trying to be too clever for his own good and created an unreadable novel (feel free to disagree). Just reading the opening paragraph is more than enough for me. I have not read every one of Shakespeare’s plays, nor have I seen all of them performed, so perhaps not having read Titus Andronicus would get me some ‘Humiliation’ points, but I’m not sure. I have read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Melville’s Moby Dick, and I’ve read War and Peace twice. I’m afraid I am woefully badly read when it comes to Asian or African literature, but for the English professors in Changing Places books from those parts of the world hardly seemed to count.

Please join in the fun and send me your suggestion. Here’s a list that might help you.