Hi writers,
The
big news this week is that Philip Roth died. I've never read any Philip Roth, and have sat back and watched, clueless, the past few days as people have argued back and forth about Roth's place in the canon.
I
don't care that I haven't read any Philip Roth. It's not by design or to make some kind of point: I just haven't gotten around to him.
I've also not gotten around to Proust and Frankenstein and
Norman Mailer and James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf.
Nor Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, 1984. I've never finished a James Joyce novel or a Saul Bellow novel. I don't believe I've read To Kill a
Mockingbird or any Jane Austen but Emma.
Some of these I'm interested in, others I don't care about. I don't regret having not yet read any of them.
We can't read everything. We can't even read most of the things.
Tell me about some famous books and writers you've never read but have always wanted to, and why you haven't gotten around to it yet.
Tell me about some famous books and writers you've never read and have no interest in, and why.
And tell
me about some famous books and writers you've never read but have pretended to read, and what the situation was.
