Books you are ashamed never to have read?

[Piggywaspushed]

I have an English degree and have taught English Lit A level for many years. I was a bookworm as a child and have a huge stockpile of books read and awaiting reading.

Partly , this thread arises form the fact that I have been dissatisfied with so many contemporary novels recently but partly, I am also a bit ashamed that there are books I feel I should have read!

I decided a few years ago to make my way through some of this shameful list but have only managed Pride and Prejudice (knew I wouldn't like it) and Great Expectations (read it for my son's GCSE which is more than he did...it's very long, isn't it?). I read The Handmaid's Tale out of obligation and shame last year. Underwhelmed.

Frankenstein and The Grapes of Wrath are on my bedside table (have been for about a year) and Middlemarch is on my Kindle. I will read Frankenstein before DS2's GCSE. I have never read Dracula either.

I went to school in Scotland so was reading a lot of Scottish classics in my defence and have read nearly every Hardy novel.

Anyone else like to admit what you haven't read bur should have??

Feel free to boast about what you have read too! (although not Ulysses or War and Peace because we all know that would be showing off and/or a lie!)

I read middlemarch the other week and adored it. I've been putting it off for ages and glad I finally got round to it

It is good isn't it? I really liked the bit at the end with will and Dorothea. It was really romantic and I didn't know it was such a romantic book.

Gallicoscats ( great name, btw) I got it wrong, a hippo not an elephant, HGWells ..

www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3603210/World-of-books.html

Also allergic to Henry James, trying to read him is like swimming through treacle. I battled through The Golden Bowl, it took me about a year.

Hippo, elephant, same difference. Large herbivore too big for the space it's confined in. Makes me wonder if HJ's style would have suited major epics better than the comedies of manners he insisted on writing.

Can’t stand Henry James either, except Turn of the Screw, which I think is one of the best ghost stories ever written.

Some of his other ghost stories are good too.

Turn of the Screw ace, as is the opera.

Other ghost stories? Ooh, what, where, how? Only know the really creepy MR James ones...

Thank you, yes, large herbivore..but I suppose an elephant would have had more success being able to vacuum it up with a trunk. Anyway, too turgid. The Golden Bowl...another I didn’t manage. And I was set the climax of the Ambassadors in an exam. I didn’t recognise it at all, let alone as a climax..if that’s what he thought was a climax heaven knows what his adolescence was like.null and void...

Imagine how long War and Peace or Les Mis would have gone on. More like Proust ( spellcheck gave me sprouts ).

English degree. Avid reader. Have read most mentioned on this thread. Bit not Of Mice And Men

Oh calm. It will take you about an hour!!

When I was younger I tried to get into "His Dark Materials" but couldn't digest what I was reading. I've recently picked up Northern Lights to ease myself in and can't put it down!

Ulysses by James Joyce. Tried three times so far. Get farther into it every time but I don't seem to be able to sustain the energy required to finish it ...

Never read any Dickens either

I"m firmly with most of you that I could not - despite multiple attempts - manage Ulysses. I've read and loved all of the big, fat, long books mentioned here. I fear I am only really interested in a book if it is at least 700 pages and tend to read everything written by an author in a row (if I love it) and often go on to read all I can find in the genre. Not Shakespeare or Dickens. Have read way more of the latter than the former.

MN has a lot to answer for. Perhaps I'd have read them ALL if it was not for you lot of overly interesting folks

True! MN is very distracting!

I am now on The Secret History which I always hear is a modern classic. Bit wordy but am enjoying it. Much slower going than The Muse though which I just finished.

English teacher here too, with a predilection for crime fiction when off-duty.

Have finally read Great Expectations as my son is studying it for GCSE, but Dickens makes me irrationally cross because he is so universally praised and I find him long-winded and not as clever as he thinks he is.

George Eliot is another big gap in my knowledge: studied Silas Marner for A Level and that was the beginning and end of my time with her.

Love Shakespearean tragedies, love Gothic and dystopian generally, love a lot of new literature.

I am put off by anything that seems to worthy or try-hard, or that seems to be self-consciously desperate to be different. Hence never having mde it through Ulysses because it’s all a bit Emperor’s new clothes for me.

However, I did read War and Peace as a pretentious teen

I read Great Expectations for the same reason! He should have just cut out everything except Miss Havisham!

I think Dickens continues to be studied and praised because of his clear social campaigning (you and I both know the obsession with ;context'!) . But, yes, he does bang on and on and on. So does George Eliot. It's the serialisation issues, I suppose.

Whereas - the odd chapter about stone masonry aside- I would have said Hardy is more direct and pithy.

I hate Gothic literature. Sorry.

I love Wilkie Collins and have read quite a lot of his more obscure stuff... but have never managed to get through The Moonstone.

I’m just coming to the end of The Moonstone and I’ve really enjoyed it!
Another I have started but not yet had time to finish is My Antonia. What I’ve read of it so far has been interesting.
One I loved reading years ago was Lark Rise to Candleford. That’s not really fiction though!

I've enjoyed Dickens much more since approaching them like watching a soap, and not trying too hard to follow plot, etc. The characters are great, and stay with me, the plots....get a bit hazy, tbh

I'm doing Tale of Two Cities at the moment...60 pages in. By Dickens' standards it's quite short!

Completely agree with squirrel. Other than a few purple passages, the fog in bleak house, the fog and pip’s fear in GE, read quickly. He’d have been writing for TV these days, that soap about schools, can’t recall its name. Or west wing. Or something about the nhs. Bleak house, which I adore, works as a biting indictment of how we treated and indeed continue to treat “ the poor” as well as the legal service, and do goodery...added to which there’s a murder interest...yum. And some very strange and nasty people ..extra yum. . I think Our Mutual Friend works brillíantly like that, the two intertwined plots, the symbolism of the dust heaps looming over you. It would make a great serial.

I have tried reading Tolkien several times, but gave up after a few dozen pages. It’s just tripe.

Ulysses - pretentious tripe.

I enjoy most of Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies but can’t get on with the histories. Henry IV part 7, or whatever? Historic tripe.

I love the bit in David Copperfield possibly not David Copperfield, but I'm pretty sure it is where David gets drunk for the first time and it captures the feeling of being young and drunk so well. Also the family who paint Happy Cottage on their interior wall and get the proportions slightly wrong, just because I wouldn't have imagined Georgians/early Victorians doing that, but someone obviously did and Dickens wrote about it. Orlanda I really like the imagery in Our Mutual Friend too - all that dust - but I'm struggling to remember the plot!

Bleak House was mazing when it was on TV : Charles Dance was incredible. Didn't make me want to read it though!

One thing about Dickens is , from a teacher's point of view, he is really hard to read aloud : sentences that twist and twine for about 18 lines! Oliver Twist is fine if it's bits with Fagin or Sikes or the bits near the end.

Tale of Two Cities is my favourite Dickens. I also really like the Shakespeare history plays. I did Richard III with a GCSE class in the days when we had controlled assessment - he is such an outrageous villain - really engaging.