What book have you not read?
one day you’ll be dead.
Ed Simon has an essay called “Fraternity of Dreamers” at The Millions in which he expresses anxiety about libraries:
Intrinsic to my fear are those intimations of mortality whereby even a comparatively small collection must make me confront the fact that in a limited and hopefully not-too-short life I will never be able to read even a substantial fraction of that which has been written.
“You have to be judicious in what you choose to read, since one day you’ll be dead.”
Simon writes about “having never read any number of classical or canonical books.”1
During the COVID lockdown I tackled books I’d not read or read not well like War and Peace, The Demons, and Cursed Days. For readers COVID had some positive outcomes.
But like Simon, I confess, too. I have never read James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.
Share your not read book you feel you should have read.
This essay by Simon is also a rich meditation on the Library of Alexandria. “Part of the allure of Alexandria, especially to any bibliophile in this fraternity of dreamers, is the fact that the vast bulk of what was kept there is entirely lost to history.”
Started Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" years ago and never finished it. Probably I should, since I feel very much the part of the idiot lately.
"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed." -Nietzsche
Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past are the two novels that I haven't read and - were I never to read them - would definitely feel that I had missed something essential about the culture and time in which I'd lived.
I also regret not yet reading anything by Freud, and not having read more Adler and Jung. We live in a psychological era. In a way these three people assembled its foundations. It seems strange to not know them better.
There's also a non-fiction book that I started a few years ago - read about about a third of - and haven't finished. If I don't finish it I am going to have to spend the rest of my life explaining why, if this book is really so world-shattering, I haven't actually gotten to the end of it? The book is Iain McGilchrist's "The Mastery and His Emissary." It's got be the most epistemologically intriguing and subversive thing I've ever read. I have been unable to divorce the questions it asks about human experience from my own my own manner of thinking about the world since I read it. I mean, since I read the first third of it.