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I found this a provocative read ~ I too am a big reader ~ I easily admit that I read far more of the 'classics' while in school ~ today, my reading is virtually always contemporary fiction and current events ~ I've probably read 50% of the titles listed below ~ I also admit I've never even heard of some of the authors mentioned below and note that several of my current favorite authors aren't even mentioned here ~ anyone here big on the classics and to-be-classics [a la Harry Potter]? ~ Sooz
Shelve your shame and read those books
Mary Schmich
December 8, 2010
"But I must shamefully admit to you all," she said, "that I have never read Dickens."
With these words, and the announcement that two 19th-century Charles Dickens novels are her latest book club picks, Oprah Winfrey has opened the door to a national confession.
So let's share: Bless me, fellow readers, for I, too, have sinned.
I must shamefully admit to you that I have never read "Moby Dick." Or any book involving Harry Potter. Or more than a few pages by Mark Twain.
"Crime and Punishment?" Don't stone me.
"Ulysses?" Don't make me laugh.
"War and Peace?" Only if reading the first 200 pages three times counts.
The list of my shameful literary omissions could fill "Bleak House," an indispensable thousand-page novel by Mr. Dickens that, I shudder to say, I have never even opened.
And yet I read. A lot.
I have read almost every mystery by Lee Child, Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley. Scott Turow? Big fan.
To prove that my taste is not dictated entirely by airport bookstores, I'll add that I've consumed most of Anita Desai, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James and Alice Munro. I have not entirely ignored Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie.
But Toni Morrison? I'll eat my laptop before I confess publicly to that failure.
All of us, at least all of us who like to read, have a bookshelf of shame: that psychic space, or bedside table, crammed with Important Books and Important Authors that we think we should have read, but haven't.
The works of Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand. "Exodus." "Animal Farm." "Middlemarch."
Those are just a few of the names that popped up when I quizzed friends, face-to-face and on Facebook. Several mentioned "Infinite Jest," which until then I hadn't thought to add to my shelf of shame.
It's there now. Next to — please, no scolding e-mails — the Bible.
"'Anna Karenina' was on my list forever," said Facebook friend Kathy Mathews, "so I made a Facebook book club and 47 of us attempted it together and half of us finished. We are doing the same thing now with 'Far from the Madding Crowd.' I think Oprah is doing the same thing — using her book club to get her to do something she wants to in theory."
Mathews makes a good point. Reading books from your shelf of shame is easier if you have a support group. A special occasion or place can also help.
I read John Steinbeck's thrilling "The Grapes of Wrath" several years ago on a visit to California. I'd avoided it since high school, but the week I read it, I was in the land it described. The book fed the place and the place fed the book. It didn't hurt that I was somewhere without the twin time thieves, TV and the Internet.
"Does it count if I saw the movie but never read the book?" asked one friend.
No. But it's easy to get confused. I would have sworn I'd read "To Kill a Mockingbird" until I picked it up in a bookstore several months ago.
Why should any of us feel bad for not having read everything touted as good? We shouldn't.
But we harbor our bookshelves of shame not only out of duty but out of hope and curiosity: maybe there's some special delight or insight we're missing, some unknown pleasure to be seized with a little unaccustomed exertion. Shame can motivate.
In that spirit, I may finally get around to "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/colu ... 171.column
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