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.
I should read at least one play by Shakespeare before I die. My school ruined him for me. Not sure which I should read, tempted by Hamlet because Nick Cave sang a song about him ; )
I'm the odd one out in this group. Most of my reading is fiction, but it's well-researched fiction. I read John Sanford, Jonathan Kellerman, Greg Iles nowadays. I read early Grisham, but later stuff has mostly disappointed. I read Steve Martini and several others. The hallmark of my own writing is meticulous attention to detail down to the street level, local customs and terminology, police and trial procedures, medical issues and building entire detailed worlds in my head; I read work that has that as well.
You'll note there are no female writers on that list. I used to read Patricia Cornwell, but she dropped by the wayside around 2005 when I found her going further and further afield. Most female writers, other than you and perhaps half a dozen others, are so caught up in providing visual descriptions of carpet, drapes, wall paper, women's apparel, ornate furniture, that one goes on for a dozen pages waiting for something to happen.
I haven't Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Hélas.
Also, I've made it to Chapter 14 of James Joyce's "Ulysses" --twice!-- but haven't finished it. I should. Also, I hear "Middlemarch" is great, so it's on the list, and one I feel likely I'll finish. As for "Finnegan's Wake"? Whew. I tried. I did. But I think I'd rather re-read Tolstoy and Shakespeare and some other classics I was lucky enough to encounter as a young person in the ever-shorter time I have left. I can't believe how much my impression of "Anna Karenina" changed from when I read it as a callow kid and then later as a family man myself.
An interesting question. Sort of like a Booket List. It got me to thinking. Other than the 3 actual books on my nightstand and a list of 5 or 6 kindles that I plan to get to I can't think of anything. By next week I will have read 1 and will add 1 or 2 more.
These days most of my reading is on the internet, lots of articles so I don't read as many books as I did in yesteryears. There was a time period of 4 or 5 years when I read 4 to 5 books a week. That was in high school. Then a period of about 25 years of 2 to 3 books a week. Then about 20 years of about a book a week. Lots of books. I'm guesstimating that less than 5% were fiction.
I don't blame ANYONE for not reading "Finnegan's Wake." Stick to "The Dubliners." As for me, I have a copy of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" staring at me from a nearby bookshelf, and I know I am deficient in my Russian classic reading. Someday I will get to it. But when I get done with the biography of "Robert E. Lee" by Allen Guelzo that I'm slowly wandering through right now, I plan to attack Timothy Snyder's "Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" (2010), Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary" (2021), Michael Schmidt's "Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem" (2019), Andrea Wulf's "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World" (2015), and Harold Stephens and Albert Podell's "Who Needs a Road: The Story of the Longest and Last Motor Journey around the World" (1968). Crime and Punishment will have to wait.
So many that I didn’t read when I was young and had tons of time and energy and no internet. And now I very likely won’t. But I still aim to read King Lear and The Tempest.
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.
Cooked by Michael Pollan - started a while ago, now prob have to start it again
I should read at least one play by Shakespeare before I die. My school ruined him for me. Not sure which I should read, tempted by Hamlet because Nick Cave sang a song about him ; )
Damn, that library is ugly.
I'm the odd one out in this group. Most of my reading is fiction, but it's well-researched fiction. I read John Sanford, Jonathan Kellerman, Greg Iles nowadays. I read early Grisham, but later stuff has mostly disappointed. I read Steve Martini and several others. The hallmark of my own writing is meticulous attention to detail down to the street level, local customs and terminology, police and trial procedures, medical issues and building entire detailed worlds in my head; I read work that has that as well.
You'll note there are no female writers on that list. I used to read Patricia Cornwell, but she dropped by the wayside around 2005 when I found her going further and further afield. Most female writers, other than you and perhaps half a dozen others, are so caught up in providing visual descriptions of carpet, drapes, wall paper, women's apparel, ornate furniture, that one goes on for a dozen pages waiting for something to happen.
I haven't Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Hélas.
Also, I've made it to Chapter 14 of James Joyce's "Ulysses" --twice!-- but haven't finished it. I should. Also, I hear "Middlemarch" is great, so it's on the list, and one I feel likely I'll finish. As for "Finnegan's Wake"? Whew. I tried. I did. But I think I'd rather re-read Tolstoy and Shakespeare and some other classics I was lucky enough to encounter as a young person in the ever-shorter time I have left. I can't believe how much my impression of "Anna Karenina" changed from when I read it as a callow kid and then later as a family man myself.
War and Peace. I've read a good bit of other Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but not that one.
An interesting question. Sort of like a Booket List. It got me to thinking. Other than the 3 actual books on my nightstand and a list of 5 or 6 kindles that I plan to get to I can't think of anything. By next week I will have read 1 and will add 1 or 2 more.
These days most of my reading is on the internet, lots of articles so I don't read as many books as I did in yesteryears. There was a time period of 4 or 5 years when I read 4 to 5 books a week. That was in high school. Then a period of about 25 years of 2 to 3 books a week. Then about 20 years of about a book a week. Lots of books. I'm guesstimating that less than 5% were fiction.
I don't blame ANYONE for not reading "Finnegan's Wake." Stick to "The Dubliners." As for me, I have a copy of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" staring at me from a nearby bookshelf, and I know I am deficient in my Russian classic reading. Someday I will get to it. But when I get done with the biography of "Robert E. Lee" by Allen Guelzo that I'm slowly wandering through right now, I plan to attack Timothy Snyder's "Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" (2010), Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary" (2021), Michael Schmidt's "Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem" (2019), Andrea Wulf's "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World" (2015), and Harold Stephens and Albert Podell's "Who Needs a Road: The Story of the Longest and Last Motor Journey around the World" (1968). Crime and Punishment will have to wait.
“It is a long and ponderous chain!”
So many that I didn’t read when I was young and had tons of time and energy and no internet. And now I very likely won’t. But I still aim to read King Lear and The Tempest.