Books you feel you should have read ....

[MadBadandDangeroustoKnow]

but have somehow never got round to?

For me, there are very many, but another thread has reminded that I've been intending to read Middlemarch ever since the BBC adaptation, more than a decade ago.

Anyone else want to confess?

oh yep thats the one

it ids all such a long time ago..i wouldnt read her books through choice

Am generally bad at classics but feel I should read them. Particularly Dickens (haven't read one), W&P, Anna Karenina.

Have read Sophie's World but it was years ago when I was in a job answering phones and the phones weren't ringing much (it was actually quite a glamorous phone answering job as it goes but still....).

I have also read 100 years of solitude and considered it to have been time wasted....

agree - 100 years of solitude was appropriately named for how long it took to get through.

Absolutely adored, 'Love in the Time of Cholera' though.

I once made a list of books I was never going to read and stop pretending that one day I might.

James Joyce came top, closely followed by Charles Dickens (although I have since read tale of two cities and it was corking)

Never finished Sophie's World, never finished Midnight's Children.

life is too short to bother with books you don't really want to read just because you think you ought !!

was thinking this yesterday as I haven't read any Salman Rushdie (is that how you spell him?) and was listening to front row talking about Midnight's Children winning the booker of bookers.

Never read any Charles Dickens and feel I should particularly as I love the TV adaptations. There are lots of classics - Black Beauty, Wind in the Willows etc that I hope to discover with dd as she grows up. We even tried the latter on the bus the other day but ir is so wordy I found I was tired of "simplifying" it for her - a bit later perhaps....I want to read some more of the "beautiful young things" stuff as love Nancy Mitford so want to try some more Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh - have read Brave New World though. Worst book - definitely Crime and Punishment. Our french literature teacher highly recommended this as we were studying existentialism and reading Sartre. The title pretty much sums up the experience!

russian books are quite heavy and if you put down for long rest, you probably never get it
i also got degrees in both english and russian literature, i taught in college.
its that people like anna karenina but not war and peace,crime and punishment

I've tried What Maisie Knew so often the first three paragraphs come back to me at night. I wonder just why that one is quite so sticky.

For people with an interest in Dante, I said this on one of the other threads already but.... the Penguin Classics Dante in English (that's not an affiliate link, just the cheapest I could find it and annoyingly, about 30p cheaper than I paid for it a few weeks ago ) is a great introduction to Dante. Lots of "good bits", plus a whopping introduction (about 200 pages worth) and a slimmer note on the historical background. And then if you like what you read you can move on...

ninedragons, snap! on Ulysses (although mine was only a piffling little dissertation so only covered one episode).

Gosh, what a lot of Eng. Lit. grads there seem to be on here.