The Book You Haven't Read

[Historiogaffe]

Riffing off the "books not to read" thread, I'm curious: what book (all-purpose term including play, poem, &c.) do you feel like you've missed altogether? You know, it seems like everyone's read it and you're not quite sure why you haven't.

For me, it's The Great Gatsby. How does everyone else encounter it? Is it a high school read? All I know: it's famous, for ages I've been wanting to read it -- and more so now that I know there's a disappearing baby! -- and I seem to be the only one who hasn't. I think I hear the Lit GRE, somewhere, laughing maniacally.

[DorindaAfterThyrsis]

I don't even know where to begin. I am, all things considered, an astonishingly un-well-read person.

It's a little embarrassing, and not at all helpful to my already raging impostor syndrome.

(On an unrelated note: this post just taught me that I've been spelling "embarrassing" (embarassing) and "impostor" (imposter) wrong for an awfully long time. Oops! Thanks, Google Chrome.)

[Unamuno]

Yeah I never got around to The Great Gatsby either. In fact, I feel like I've missed out on most post-colonial American literature. I've always intended to read some Hemingway, but I always seem to forget.

[antecedent]

As I mentioned in another guilt-inducing thread somewhere, I haven't read Macbeth. I also haven't read Pamela or Clarissa. And there's a giant, glaring hole in my "I've read that" mental bookshelf with the 17th and 18th centuries should be. I just seem to have missed them some how.

[perrykm2]

MacBeth has two of my three favorite lines from any Shakespeare play. My favorite non-Macbeth scene, so as to not potentially spoil something for you, is from King Lear when he gets totally naked and starts talking to chairs as if they're his daughters then runs out into the storm and screams, "Blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes!"

Like, dude, you're old and wrinkly and totally naked. Get it together.

[perrykm2]

I feel like I have pockets of information, and everything between those pockets is just empty. I can't think of things specifically except when I mentioned I've never read Jane Eyre in another thread, but I know there are a million things. I'll probably remember later in the thread.

[Timshel]

I haven't read any Chaucer.

[RoundandRoundAgain]

There is so many things I haven't read that I feel like I've missed out on:

Dickens (especially Great Expectations)

Little Women

Late Henry James ("The Turn of the Screw" as an example)

The Hunger Games (seriously, I don't know why I haven't read this yet - I love YA lit)

Poe (I'm not sure I've read any poetry other than "Annabel Lee")

Poetry in general (so much poetry I haven't read especially Romantic and American) - this is what doomed me on GRE Lit

[antecedent]

MacBeth has two of my three favorite lines from any Shakespeare play. My favorite non-Macbeth scene, so as to not potentially spoil something for you, is from King Lear when he gets totally naked and starts talking to chairs as if they're his daughters then runs out into the storm and screams, "Blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes!"

Like, dude, you're old and wrinkly and totally naked. Get it together.

YES. King Lear and Richard III are tied for my favorite Shakespeare play. Perfect characterization.

[marlowe]

I have almost zero American Literature. I only took one course in American Lit in college, and it was contemporary (so Pynchon, Gaddis, Barth, et cetera).

Hardly any Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Salinger. I had Eliot and Steinbeck from high school. I've spent the last year or so catching up, and I'm doing pretty well, I think. The gaps are shrinking.

[perrykm2]

You would be really surprised how many people have not read Richard III. The reason I know this is because "now is the winter of our discontent" is always attributed to Sean Connery somehow.

[RoundandRoundAgain]

It took me all of high school and four undergrad Shakespeare classes to read Othello and Julius Caesar (and I didn't read A Midsummer Night's Dream until that third undergrad Shakespeare class). I have, however, had to read Hamlet for four classes (three times in the space of one year once).

[eatriceorgohome]

Being an American lit enthusiast, I can't even begin to list the gaps in my knowledge of British lit. My big American omission, however, is Moby Dick - but I've read Blood Meridian, Sea Wolf, and Middle Passage, so that almost equates to Moby Dick.

Edited February 17, 2012 by eatriceorgohome

[Julianne Pigoon]

I, too, have a glaring 18th century gap. I also totally missed The Great Gatsby and also The Catcher in the Rye. It might have been because I went the honors and AP track all through high school, and I know that the "college prep" track was doing those books while we did a lot of Shakespeare. Which I loathed at the time. It wasn't until I took a Shakespeare class last spring that I fully appreciated him.

There are so many things that I want to read. I want to read everything, I just don't have all the time.

[Stately Plump]

There is so much I want to read that, whenever I go to Barnes and Noble, I end up feeling depressed/guilty because it reminds me that I should be home reading, not looking at books that I might read.

Notable misses:

Great Expectations

Russian lit (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, etc.)

Hemingway

The Aeneid (which is especially noticeable, given my interest in early modern lit)

Thomas Hardy

There are scores and scores more; these are top on my list of "must-read to-read" list. (I have a separate list for "not-must-read to-read".)

Edited February 17, 2012 by Stately Plump

[rising_star]

Chiming in because I have a literature degree from undergrad:

- American literature, basically in its entirety. To give you an idea, we're talking Faulkner, Morrison, Hemingway, etc.

- Chaucer

- Joyce

- Bronte or Austen, other than Pride and Prejudice

- Dickens

- Lord of the Rings

The list goes on...

[antecedent]

You would be really surprised how many people have not read Richard III. The reason I know this is because "now is the winter of our discontent" is always attributed to Sean Connery somehow.

[veniente]

I have not read Richard III, Macbeth, Ulysses, Moby-Dick, Spenser, Chaucer, Milton, Bronte, Henry James, nor much poetry... so pretty much everything on the GRE subject test. And I call myself an English major!

If someone says Hamlet I reckon they win.

[jma310]

Romeo and Juliet! Despite two Shakespeare courses. Also, anything Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, the entirety of Paradise Lost.

[spasticlitotes]

Ironically, being well-read is a guarantee of absolutely nothing. I think short of the Russians, I've covered a LOT of ground (between my undergrad Lit major, comp lit minor, and MA in lit, thank god, otherwise, I might have to push a bookshelf on myself), but given the number of rejections I've gotten, I seem to have missed the point somewhere...

I haven't read Pynchon... :-/

[hawkeye7269]

Aside from Heller and Salinger, I've read nothing in later 20th century American literature. Only in reading this thread did I realize Pynchon was some sort of well known author...woops!

Also, anyone else feel like they missed 18th century entirely? I've read not a thing from that whole period. But then again, I'm into renaissance/early modern/medieval, so it kind of makes sense that I've missed those.

But, I AM a LOTR junkie; I think it's one of the finest pieces of literature of the 20th century. So that's something recent, I suppose!

Edited February 20, 2012 by hawkeye7269

[veniente]

Like Eggers, I only discovered that George Eliot was a woman and Evelyn Waugh a man when I was studying for the subject test.

[Stately Plump]

Also, anyone else feel like they missed 18th century entirely? I've read not a thing from that whole period. But then again, I'm into renaissance/early modern/medieval, so it kind of makes sense that I've missed those.

But, I AM a LOTR junkie; I think it's one of the finest pieces of literature of the 20th century. So that's something recent, I suppose!

I can't remember reading anything from the 18th century, unless you count Mary Wallstonecraft, but that was like, 1796 or something. And I, too, am a LOTR junkie. I had a course called "Medieval Tolkien" (<-- sunglasses to disguise dorky LOTR fanaticism)

[athousandlemmings]

Of the Victorian novels, I've only read Dickens (Great Expectations and David Copperfield), Eliot (Adam Bede), and Hardy (Tess and Jude), and those completely outside class for my comprehensive exam. So no Brontes, no Austen (technically not Victorian), no Gaskell, no Thackeray (who I don't think anybody reads anymore anyway).

Also, and I'm trying to remedy this, never read anything by Woolf.

[Bayo]

I decided to use my year between undergrad and grad school to spruce up on American literature. In October I started Moby-Dick. I am currently on page 208. Of 615. Yes, practically five months and I'm like 1/3 of the way in. And it's not that I don't love it, because I'm actually kind of in awe of this book, it's just that I'm too busy worrying about getting into grad school to focus on making sure that I'm even better read when I get there.

Also, I was a complit major who focused on Spanish and German national lits, but along the way took a TON of Russian lit classes. I mean, I have read some of the most obscure 18th century Russian stuff imaginable. I've always wished that I had better affinity for the language. As it is, I think those courses probably acted like dead weight on my transcripts.