(Woman not reading but doing something else instead: unknown artist, ‘Autoportrait sur bois’, from Giovanni Boccaccio, Le livre de femmes nobles et renomees (anonymous French translation of De claris mulieribus), France c. 1440; British Library, found here)
I first saw this game played by Tom at Wuthering Expectations. He wrote a list of ten authors whose work he had not yet read, but felt he should have done. He supplemented this with a list of authors he had read instead. It’s fascinating to read, but I have decided to play the Jam and Idleness variation, as has Desperate Reader, and modify it to authors I have not read but whose work I already own. This is because there are so many authors I haven’t read but ‘ought’ to have done that I can’t decide on just ten, or twenty, or more... Also there is no one book or author I read in place of the neglected authors. For me, every time I don’t read Nightwood I’m reading something else instead, whether I actually think of Nightwood or whether, ahem, I forget that it exists for years at a time.
A further caveat: were this books I have not read, it would be rather more embarrassing, but while I confess I haven’t yet read Ulysses I have read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and some short stories. Perhaps Joyce should be on this list in spirit, but the rules bar him. Ha ha. The same is also true for most poets; that includes you, Dryden.
Oh, and this list could have been much longer!
1. John Aubrey
Not having read Brief Lives yet doesn’t, I admit, give me sleepless nights. However, it’s been hanging around for a long time and I suppose that my idea of myself is of a person who has read John Aubrey, otherwise I’d have given the book away by now. (And perhaps it’s standing in for Pepys, whom I have read, but rather patchily, and I do keep meaning to remedy that, although I have no idea where the hell my copies of the diaries are.)
2. Djuna Barnes
This is a particular embarrassment since I bought Nightwood when I was writing a dissertation on Virginia Woolf in 1993, and in fact I have picked it up a couple of times over the years and read the first few pages. Yet I still want to and mean to read it. Time to revive my flagging Modernist reading challenge, perhaps?
3. Miguel de Cervantes
How long has Exemplary Stories sat on the shelf? Who knows? Not me.
4. Francesco Colonna
Colonna isn’t terribly well known – nor even certain to be the author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which is the book at which I’m now looking. I bought it after seeing an exhibition on Sienese art in the National Gallery, and I bought it with great enthusiasm partly because at that time I was planning on starting a PhD and this was background reading, well it wasn’t really but I wanted to read it anyway. It seems a great pity that that enthusiasm has never translated into sitting down and reading it. And it has pictures! So, despite its obscurity, no excuses.
5. William Golding
I have amassed a small collection of Golding’s work without ever once yielding to the temptation to read any of it. And yes, I am perhaps the only British person of my age who didn’t study Lord of the Flies at school. Although that is an exaggeration, the rest of Upper IVS didn’t study it either. We read Of Mice and Men instead, which gave me my deep and abiding hatred of Steinbeck.
6. George Mackay Brown
When I first moved to London in the middle 1990s and had a proper job in publishing which paid me a salary – and how I laughed for the first few days to think that someone was actually paying me money to do this stuff – and how quickly that laughter wore off – I went a bit mad regarding books. I had more money than I’d ever earned in my entire life, there was lots of space in my manky bedsit because I had left all my books at home with my parents and I was in a city full of bookshops. Whoopee! When George Mackay Brown died in 1996 I felt it was an appalling omission in my reading life that I’d never heard of him, so rushed out and bought a copy of Beside the Ocean of Time. It was only when I was looking for Authors I Have Not Read that I rediscovered it. Sorry, George.
7. Robert Musil
Another great embarrassment: the work of Musil’s I own isn’t even the honking great Man Without Qualities cycle whose sheer size might be understandably offputting, but a slender volume of his short stories: Tonka and Other Stories. I bought this from the wonderful Oxfam bookshop in Canterbury. If you’re ever within 20,000 miles of Kent, go to this shop, you will not regret it.
8. Georges Rodenbach
I bought Bruges-la-Morte (in translation!) when I knew I was moving to Belgium. Did I hope it would reveal some of the Flemish national character to me?
9. Jose Saramago
A dear friend gave me A Year in the Life of Ricardo Reis two years ago after I expressed an interest in Saramago. Yes, I am blushing.
10. Bruno Schulz
Technically, Bruno Schulz shouldn’t be on here since I have read the first few stories in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories. But I didn’t finish the book, I forget why, and I feel very bad about him. Having seen the Théâtre de Complicité’s wonderful production of it in the 1990s, I feel even worse. Momentarily, anyway.
What is the point of this list? It made me spend some time with my books and really, need one justify that? It’s also a good way to remember what I have, because I don’t keep my unread books apart in a TBR pile. I know. But that TBR pile would be so big I would just cry every time I saw it, and reading shouldn’t involve weeping, should it? Well, unless it’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Until very recently, I used to buy books which looked interesting and trust to the future to bring the moment to read them. It’s a policy which isn’t terribly efficient and leads to forgetting of what has and has not been read and wailing from K about messy heaps of books everywhere, but I like it. Perhaps I should look again at this list in a year’s time, and see who still qualifies to be on it... Or I could just turn all my unread books into artworks, like Mike Stilkey.
Which authors haven’t you read (yet)?
(Another woman not reading: unknown artist, ‘Artiste préparant une fresque’, from Giovanni Boccaccio, Le livre de femmes nobles et renomees (anonymous French translation of De claris mulieribus), France c. 1440; British Library, found here; I have just included these pictures of mediaevel woman artists because I like them. Photographs of Djuna Barnes, 1905, from here and Georges Rodenbach, 1898, from here)