Previously: Let’s talk about the books you hate the most.
It is possible, I suppose, that you are the sort of self-actualized person who has never once pretended to have read or seen something she hasn’t in conversation, and that you are never anxious about your social status, and the idea of dissembling is simply alien to you, and you laugh a silver-throated laugh at the very idea of pretending to have read a book when you could simply say “I haven’t read it” because life is a constant process of learning for you. Perhaps you are that kind of person. I wish you joy and have no interest in speaking any further with you.
We have all done it, perhaps for reasons attributable to being Young and Insecure, or to impress someone with sparkling eyes and a soft neck, or because we had no desire to prolong a conversation even one second longer than absolutely necessary. Perhaps you did it because you were at a party where you didn’t really know anyone, and recreational lying to strangers is as good a way as any to pass the time. You are among friends. You can unburden yourself here.
It’s a bad habit — you know that, everyone knows that — and hopefully it’s something you do less and less as you reach Man’s Estate. I myself had to make “not lying about books and prestige cable television in casual conversation” a New Year’s Resolution a few years back in order to break myself of the habit. We are not saints; we claim progress rather than perfection.
I will get the ball rolling: I have never seen The Wire. I have seen the pilot for Friday Night Lights three times and the pilot for The West Wing four; I have never seen any other episode for either show. I have never gotten more than three chapters into Lucky Jim because it wasn’t funny and also I hated it. At least two separate friends have lent me their cherished copies of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and I have returned their copies to both of them unopened. I have never read Octavia Butler and I’ve gone for so long without admitting it, I don’t know how I’ll get on after confessing.
I cannot remember when I gave up reading A Song Of Ice and Fire and started reading the Wikipedia summaries instead. I usually say it was after book four; it was almost certainly after book three. I have also given up reading the Wikipedia summaries. I’ve read some Margaret Atwood, but I talk sometimes as if I’ve read a lot of her. I haven’t.
I have read two Chelsea Handler autobiographies. This is not germane to the topic, but I felt the need to confess. I read the first half and the last chapter of The Brothers Karamazov but skipped most of the important stuff.
I do not know if I have ever read Camille Paglia. I have a vague idea of who she is — in my mind she is a little bit connected with Fran Leibowitz? — and I know a lot of my friends get mad about her. That’s pretty much it.
I have never read Infinite Jest. I have done my best to give the impression that I have in conversation without ever actually making outright claims, but I have not read even a single word of David Foster Wallace’s fiction. I have never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, and I do not believe that I ever shall.
Your turn.
FOR THE RECORD: much as the “books you hated” post was not to create a venue for you to argue with people’s hated books, this is not a venue for you to go “OH BUT YOU REALLY MUSTTTTTTT” at people, we are here for HONESTY.
There’s a standalone segment of The Brothers Karamazov called The Grand Inquisitor and it’s really good and short! And the bonus is, you can say you’ve read the entire thing and then mention that the only part you remember is the part with the Grand Inquisitor. Nobody will call you to the floor for your deceit; how could they? It is a small yet powerful lie and truer than most.
I read the whole thing and I WISH I had only read The Grand Inquisitor.
I did this in class (after skimming the other chapters and deciding they were bullshit) and it worked pretty well. The only thing I got out of the rest of the book is that I learned the word “ultramontane.” Still waiting for an opportunity to use that one.
Ha! Take a Belle Epoque class. That’s pretty much it.
My Significant keeps telling me I should read this book. I’m just gonna stick with my trashy online fan fiction and sci fi fantasy romance novels. Sorry! Can’t!
The Brothers Karamazov is my favorite Dostoevsky novel, and even I’m pretty much only there for Vanya. (Freaking Mr. Perfect Pants Alyosha can just fuck right off.)
Every year for about 5 years it was my New Year’s resolution to to read the Brothers Karamazov, and every year I got to the Grand Inquisitor section and stopped.
I have never read “Good Omens.” I have RECOMMENDED IT TO OTHERS.
I feel like librarians and book store owners/employees must do this all the time.
I was just coming here to post that I do this literally all the time, and they pay me for it!
I mean I don’t actually lie that I’ve read them, I just give enthusiastic descriptions, and patrons make the assumption.
former bookstore employee here to confirm
Not so different from servers recommending dishes at a restaurant I bet – in most cases you can’t possibly have had every dish, and perhaps you have dietary restrictions, so you might recommend something that you heard somebody else rave about.
Or when you actively dislike a dish, but can’t actually say that, so you have to say, “well, I’ve never managed to enjoy [ingredient], but other people tell me this is really good!”
I recommend the Vorkosigan books to people a lot and I got about 3/4 of the way through Cordelia’s Honor and had to stop because it was making me too upset and anxious.
I regularly recommend books that I haven’t read. I most recently gave a copy of Rubyfruit Jungle to a young friend and went on and on about it, based on a description my friend gave to me when she convinced me to buy it.
I’ve never read Ada or Ardor and I have recommended it to what may be dozens of people. I really enjoyed the first hundred pages!
I’ve never read the “Texture of Time” chapter from Ada or Ardor. The rest of the book is utterly enchanting, but that section makes my eyes glaze over within seconds.
I actually just finished reading Good Omens for the first time and can honestly say I wish I hadn’t read it. It was awful.
I don’t remember it being awful, but I read it a long time ago and never had any desire to re-read it
When I worked in a Barnes & Noble I recommended stuff I hadn’t read all the time, sometimes because it was stuff I fully intended to read eventually and had heard was good, and some because even though it wasn’t for me, it was probably for them.
I loved Good Omens, but intensely disliked the one other Terry Pratchett book I read (and gave up after maybe 50 pages). I still participate actively in “Terry Pratchett = God” conversations so I can keep my nerd card.
I’m a teen librarian who regularly goes out to area schools to booktalk. One of the rules of booktalking that was hammered into me in library school was that you never talked about a book you hadn’t read. Well, when you’re doing at least 5-6 school visits a month, plus all of your regular work back at the library AND trying to keep up with reading newly published stuff (also considered to be part of your job), YOU try and read every single book you talk about from cover to cover. It’s just impossible. I read as many as I can and otherwise try to read the first and last chapters, skim the rest and find detailed summaries online.
This is the only logical explanation for it’s continuing popularity. A truly dreadful book. Thank you for your honesty, my world makes a bit more sense now.
I have read Good Omens and Neverwhere and half of American Gods. (I’ll finish the other half someday, probably.) I speak enthusiastically of Neil Gaiman all the time, even though I didn’t really like Neverwhere and the Good Omens stuff I liked was mostly Pratchett-esque. I might actually not like Neil Gaiman as a writer, and I’m sort of avoiding reading any more of his books for fear of finding that out.
I cannot read more than fifty or so pages of Good Omens because I don’t like it at all.
Let me unburden myself:
I call Angela Carter one of my favourite authors, but I’ve read only two of her novels and only a collected issue of some of her short stories.
I have read much less Daphne Du Maurier than I like to pretend
I have literally never read any of the White Male Literary Fiction I dismiss, apart from American Psycho and The Dice Man, both of which have given me enough reason to not read the rest
I have never read any Hemingway
My discovery of Shirley Jackson is very recent
I have never read Sylvia Plath, and I have only read a little Christina Rossetti.
I just read The Haunting in August, despite seeing the movie many many times. It was the first Shirley Jackson I have read, and it is still the only.
I actually did read The Haunting, and I don’t remember a word of it. Was there a bit where a person made boulders rain down from the sky? Was that real or did I dream that?
Sort of. Eleanor is invited to Hill House because she was involved in a potentially psychic incident in her youth where there was a rain of stones over her house.
(I have read The Haunting of Hill House many many times and it’s my favourite ghost story.)
I think I read it in college, out of a sort of obligation to Read all the Ghost Stories. I should probably read it again now that I know what the hell I’m doing.
This is not a thread for ‘oh you really must’ so I’ll just say I really, really like it as a ghost story and it makes me happy when other people have read it. If you want to read it, go ahead and read!
I just this second realized that Carrie White’s childhood boulders-from-the-sky incident in Carrie is Stephen King’s homage to The Haunting of Hill House.
Stephen King does a LOT of Homages to Shirley Jackson. He’s on record as thinking Haunting is the perfect ghost story.
I know I’ve read him on the subject of HoHH, but I hadn’t connected Carrie’s stones to Nell’s stones until today.
What did you think of it? Gosh, I should reread The Haunting of Hill House, it’s been a few years.
tangential: I’m putting together a late-October live-tweet of The Haunting (1963) to coincide with an article The Toast will publish in time for Halloween. I hope some of you will join us! I’m on Twitter as @emilyorelse.
It was so good! But I was more amazed about how well done the movie adaptation is. One of the most accurate book-to-movie transitions ever.
I am SO in. I barely use Twitter, but I will happily do it to watch The Haunting. It’s one of my favorite movies ever.
EXCELLENT! It’s such a great film.
That sounds FUN. I have been meaning to read Shirley Jackson books but somehow never have.
I love Angela Carter…and have only made it halfway through The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
I have nevertheless recommended her to others.
🙁
That’s one of the ones I have never read
I have read Wise Children, and whatever that one with the puppet show is.
The Magic Toyshop.
I haven’t read either; my opinion of Angela Carter is based solely on The Bloody Chamber, which I read for a Fairy Tales and Gender class at Smith. I definitely do not correct people when they assume that I have read them all though.
I have read bits and pieces of Burning Your Boats and the first chapter or two of Doctor Hoffman, and still I list her as one of my favorites :/
My experience with Doctor Hoffman was always, “Oh yeah, Angela Carter sure is great. Buuuuut I kind of don’t….don’t feel like finishing this. Eh.”
I love her too and I made it about a chapter into that one. Nights at the Circus forever!
My notes throughout Snow Falling on Cedars indicates I read it (for my A levels) but I remember so little of it I might as well not have.
Oooh, I can’t actually remember whether I’ve read that or not. I’ve certainly HEARD a shitload about it!
I read it recently! There were a lot of very detailed descriptions of various penises, including one on a drowned corpse.
See, you think I’d remember reading that. (I know I read it for AP Literature, but have no recollection other than the cover, which I may be confusing with the cover of A River Runs Through It)
I’ve never read the Angela Carter everyone expects me to have read, but have read the one no one no one ever talks about, so I’m useless in conversation about her.
I also discovered Shirley Jackson very recently (and now call her one of my favorite authors), and I haven’t read any Sylvia Plath.
ME TOO and I have only read The Lottery.
I’ve long regaled my friends with stories of the time Hemingway made F Scott FItzgerald feel better about his dick size, promising them that, “of course it’s real! It’s in A Moveable Feast!”
I have only read the intro to said book, when I was maybe nine.
That really is the best, ahem, part!
Is that on their long drunken road trip? I don’t remember but now i want to!
I stopped reading American Psycho on page twenty and will never go back. I lie about how I felt about it all the time. Mostly to White Men.
I have never read The Great Gatsby. I usually don’t have to out-and-out lie about this because I can lean on the assumption that everyone read it in high school.
I have never been able to finish anything by Dostoevsky. This is a greater sin because my secondary major in college was Russian literature. I don’t really have any defense of this; I just don’t particularly like his writing style I guess. I can quote some of Crime and Punishment in Russian though so usually I hide behind that.
I peaced out on Crime and Punishment when my class read it in high school. Too much existential whining, or something, I can’t remember.
I was in the Very Much Not Honors english class for my sophomore and junior years, so classtime was very often entirely dedicated to rehashing exactly what happened in the (very few) pages assigned for that day.
In this way, I read some fraction of nearly everything assigned, but was able to pass the exams just fine regardless of how small that fraction is. In short, I never read *all* of Huck Finn, and especially peaced out for the middle third of Tale of Two Cities, but have the “ability” to carry on at great length about Dickens’ narrative style.
Ughhhh fuck Dickens with a shoe, that’s what I have to say about his narrative style.
YES!!!
Charles, I know you were paid by the word, but did you have to make it so bloatedly obvious?
He was not paid by the word; he was just wordy.
He was awful and I’m glad he’s dead.
The very worst thing about Dickens is this: I hate him, I hate his wordiness, I hate his cardboard characters and emotional manipulation. But then when I start reading, damned if I don’t fall for every single one of his cheap tricks and paper-thin plots. But when I’m not actively under the spell of his goopy sentimentality, I remember that I despise him. I actually despise him even while I’m under his spell, but I fall for the sentiment anyway.
My life is pain.
I thought this was a direct reply to EPWordsnatcher and was like, “But they only used 16 words, including “Ughhhh”!
Saaame. I read up to the murder and that was good enough for me.
Also too much hatchet-murdering. Graphic death or existential whining, dude. First it put me in a horrible mood, and then it gave me actual nightmares (and books don’t give me nightmares much). I finished it because I felt like that was the only way to be able to get closure/never think about it again. It worked, mostly.
I only read The Great Gatsby this year.
I have never read Lord of The Flies.
I know that this isn’t the thread for it but one time I was at my grandparents’ house and I was sleeping in my granddad’s bedroom (is it weird that they didn’t share a room? I dunno) and he had left his copy of this William Golding novel the title of which I cannot recall but there was this totally weird sex scene with a lady with a wrinkly face and like a perfect young looking body? Super duper weird. Anyway, I secretly read it and then was all scandalized and then couldn’t get it out of my head when reading LoTF the next year in school. The end.
Lord of the Flies was required reading in two of my high school english classes, so I was forced to read and “analyze” it twice. You can count one of my readings as one of yours, if you want- I’m not using it (that’s how reading books works, right?). I’m pretty sure I’d be just as well off if I had never read it. Possibly better off, really.
I read The Great Gatsby in ninth grade, but I don’t really remember the experience. Almost everything I know about the book I picked up through cultural osmosis.
Yes, Pelevin! Although he has gotten really lazy lately.
And another thing: why do people associate Russian literature with ~GRIMDARK!!!~? Why isn’t anyone making Russian lit majors read Ilf & Petrov? Or Zoshenko? Or Saltykov-Shchedrin, if you really want earlier stuff?
I took a Slavic Lit class in college and didn’t finish a single book. We read (or in my case “read”) Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Doctor Zhivago, The Idiot, and numerous short stories. I never got to the end of a single one of them.
Lovely that the professor didn’t realize there are Slavs outside of Russia.
Solidarity! I managed to get an English degree without ever reading The Great Gatsby. I really, truly love the hair and jewelry from the movie adaptations, though. (So, so shallow…)
I am forcing my way through Infinite Jest because my ex told me he didn’t think I could. But it may take a while as I read other, LESSER,books while I am completing this task.
My husband and I both came into our relationship with copies of Infinite Jest, which neither of us has finished. We used one as a doorstop.
I asked for that book for christmas last year, never opened it, just sold it for 5$ at a bookstore and then bought ice cream. Best decision of my life.
I’m pretty sure the only way I could make it through (I keep stalling out between pages 180-220) would be to power through on spite alone. This is less about David Foster Wallace and much much more about motivating spitefulness is for me.
Ugh, your ex. I had a male friend who used to complain at me about his (female) love interests’ lack of intellect. He frequently used Infinite Jest as his shibboleth for intellect – one love interest was not intellectual enough because she was considering listening to the audio book.
He was the worst. We are no longer friends.
James Rollins. My sister is convinced I will love his books, if I Just Give Them A Chance, so she keeps buying them for me — actually, she keeps buying one in particular for me, because I Will Love It, Really. I’ve got several copies of it now, and I can’t get past the second chapter — I just don’t care for it. But since she keeps buying it for me, I’m now trying to pretend that I’ve read it just to break that cycle.
I got maybe three pages into Pride and Prejudice before I gave up. I then wrote a 2000 word paper on it and got a B.
SOLID
I wrote a paper for someone else about Hyde/Jeckyl, never having read more than the back cover. In my defense, I didn’t do my best work and was in high school. She got a B+
I did this with Jane Eyre. I was…thirteen?
I didn’t think I’d have anything to contribute to this thread, but if lying to teachers or professors counts, I’M BACK IN.
Ok! I wasn’t actually counting school lying, I mean, why not, though? So here we go.
I actively participated (more actively than anyone else actually) in classroom coversation on this book: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/172816.James_H…
And I was 28 years old and should have known better! I just totally forgot to even read it.
I got 97% in my A-level paper on Jane Eyre in which I wrote an extra chapter for the end and killed them all off, because I couldn’t bear to actually read it.
I also got a 2.1 degree in French literature without reading anything other than the Little Prince and Dangerous Liaisons. This is what textbooks of literary criticism are for, surely, so I don’t have to come up with my own ideas?
I never finished it either! The problem is I have two friends who ADORE Austen and I’m dreading the day they find out.
Not dreading it enough to actually read the damn book, but still.
Watch the BBC mini-series and they’ll never know. And you get to look at beautiful people for like 5 straight hours.
For years, I was very comfortable proclaiming that Austen was one of my favourite authors based solely on Pride & Prejudice. When people would talk about her other books, I’d smile and nod and steer them back to P&P. Finally read the rest of her books about a year ago. They’re…okay, I guess.
The best part of S & S for me is “this cottage is so TINY and only has ONE garden” and then you reread the description and it’s like a freaking mcmansion.
I did an English degree and I just can’t get into Austen. And I also forget if I’ve read P&P or S&S. Is there any difference? It always seems to surprise people that a female English major doesn’t like Austen, because aren’t romances the only literature ladies can relate to?
I found Sense and Sensibility to be the more boring one, I think. Although I don’t remember either particularly well. I’m pretty sure I read them, I just retained absolutely nothing after putting them down, apparently.
Sense and Sensibility is the one where the movie version that came out ~1995 includes the line, “Anne?! Why would anyone want to marry Anne?!”
(I went to see it with my friend Anne.)
I wrote my Freshman Seminar paper for Pride & Prejudice about how I could not possibly finish it. I don’t really recall much about the paper, but it must have gotten at least a B. I had an easy professor for that one though…
PRO.
I have tried to read pride and prejudice at least 3 separate times and gave up every time. SORRY JANE AUSTEN.
I have attempted Catch 22 several times. I have never cared enough to complete it.
That dumb book has some inexplicable hold over me. I have never finished it or even slightly enjoyed reading it. But whenever I see it I have to pick it up and give it another go.
SAME.
This. I have tried reading it several times, and I actually really like the style, but I feel like by chapter 4 or so I’ve gotten the point.
This is exactly what I came in here to post. If it comes up in conversation, I just quote a thing about “Major Major Major Major” and it seems to work okay. It’s enjoyable but SwitchingGenres nailed it, it just doesn’t grow on me like I think it’s supposed to.
I lived in West Africa for the summer and only brought three books, one of which was Catch-22. I hoped, that given the fact that I lived in a relatively isolated setting and had no form of transportation, I would finally read it.
Then I remembered the Kindle my mother gave me which had a bunch of Barbara Kingsolver and Shitty Fantasy on it and I found boxed wine that was really cheap and Catch-22 stayed in my suitcase.
Oh yeah, this is the one that has always gotten me. It’s still on my shelf just in case. I cannot remember anything about it. His name is Yassin or Yasser and he’s in a war, maybe, and he’s being all modern hipster over it about it?
Yossarian. That is literally all I remember about the book.
Agree completely. However; I have lied so skillfully about having read it that I was publicly commended as being someone’s “favorite friend, because she is the only one of you who has read Catch-22”
Mostly the books I have fibbed about having read were books that were assigned to me in school and that I did not finish by the deadline.
YES. I love, LOVE reading, but I have thrown in the towel on two books, both of which were assigned for class. They were “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and some absolutely massive tome by Carl Jung. I might have tried the Jung had I not been ass-deep in failing chemistry. I attempted Portrait and gave up in disgust after the first interminable chapter.
I…I managed to get an English degree only reading 1/3 of the assigned texts. I don’t know if this makes me terrible, or amazing. Likely, it says damning things about the US higher education system either way.
I don’t know about English, but the consensus among my graduate school friends is that a large part of the purpose of graduate school was teaching you how to read papers without actually wasting your time reading the whole thing. “If you’re reading all of the assigned readings, you’re doing it wrong” was a common saying, so I think you’re amazing.
Yeah, I did my first MA in history, and the head of the graduate department specifically told us we needed to learn how to “gut” a book — read the introduction, the chapter headings, and the conclusion. If it’s especially germane to your research, read the whole thing (or maybe just the intro to each chapter).
I think a lot of literature-heavy fields are like that. My astronomy professor told the class once he’d wanted to be an Anthropology major also but couldn’t handle all the reading. He was very surprised (and perhaps disillusioned?) when I told him you’re only supposed to skim those long-ass research papers for the important parts.
Yeah, it worked pretty similarly for my MA in English. It tended to apply more to secondary material than to the literature itself, but logic alone would tell you that there’s no way you’d need to know all the intricacies of every single book assigned for seminars. Even if you had enough time for all that, and nobody did.
(I did have a classmate who’d apparently taken it upon himself to memorize the whole of Terry Eagleton’s literary output and to act like everyone had read this particular paragraph from this particular book and was fully prepared to discuss it at any time. As someone who was not as up to speed with theory, it intimidated the hell out of me then, but in retrospect it seems like a big waste of time. Especially with Eagleton.)
I am dyslexic but until the year I graduated was clueless/in denial about this. So… probably about the same proportion for me. I mean, the stuff I liked I read, but everything else was too long and dense to get through without being invested. I managed good marks by trying to figure out what essay the professors wanted to read and farming the quotes with ctrl+f in online copies.
A huge amount of it is class discussion. If you can bounce off a point somebody else has made, add some background knowledge of your own, and then ask a question that only subtly rephrases what your classmate has said, you’ll look like a genius.
Same here. To this day, I don’t know how The Scarlet Letter actually ends.
They all live happily ever after. True story.
I have a BA with honours in Classical Studies. I have never read the Iliad or the Odyssey and I only read the Aeneid after graduating.
I am floored by this admission, as someone else with a BA in Classical Studies.
Same here, Classical Studies major and I only read bits and pieces and mostly for translation.
On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever read any of the epics in full, only selected chapters.
This is honestly amazing, and if I were you I’d probably casually brag about it all the time.
I have a minor in classical history and I tried. I really tried but they’re so tedious. This is probably a worse admission but reading them just feels like swimming through mud. I was trying with lesser translations and I have a copy of Lattimore now but I’m just so daunted.
SO MUCH depends on the translation that you’re reading! I remember a line from an Aeschylus play that took my breath away, it was so evocative and interestingly-phrased. Later I saw it on a website that compared a bunch of translations of the same play, and all the other translations were shockingly flat and insipid.
I would recommend the Fagles translation of Homer and the Aeneid if you’re planning another attempt.
I think the Ruden Aeneid is way better than the Fagles — it’s fleet and witty and elegant instead of ploddingly overwrought with bells and whistles tacked on.
(Confession: I’ve only read bits of any of Fagles translation, but I totally pretend to be an expert on how much I don’t like them.)
My Classics adviser haaaaated Fagles.
I have made a name for myself from all the books I haven’t read. But a big one in my circle seems to be LOTR. I skimmed the Hobbit when I was 11 and was extremely bored and confused, and feel no real desire to revisit it, or attempt any other Tolkien.
Same. I am just not interested? Not even a little bit. I have read the first two Song of Ice and Fire books, can I call it a draw?
Dude, fuck Tolkein. THERE. I SAID IT.
THANK YOU
Seriously. SO BORING AND SELF-IMPORTANT.
I LIKE THE MOVIES BETTER. TAURIEL AND ALL. *gets on motorbike, crashes through window, leaves*
Yep. Me too.
SO BORING. SO MANY TALL GREY EYED MEN.
YES. WHY SO MANY MEN. And all the men have fathers and grandfathers and we have to hear their nicknames and histories. And all their horses have nicknames and histories. And all their swords have nicknames and histories. Let me tell you something: if it had been a fellowship of nine women sent on a mission together to destroy this ring, they wouldn’t have given so many nicknames to their swords.
I read the Hobbit and the first book and a half of LOTR and frequently nod along in conversations as if I am an expert at all of it.
Why is so much of classic fantasy so, so boring? How do they make wizards and dragons so boring? Tolkien is actually one of the only classic fantasy writers I have read, along with one book of a series that I can’t even remember except that the main character had leprosy I think? I do remember people saying I had to read it to understand fantasy.
YES. I love fantasy, but I always have to clarify that I don’t like ‘hard fantasy’ (I’ve heard it called that) And then I have to convince the men (it’s always the men) that I DO know what I am dismissing when I say I don’t want to read books by authors like Tolkein, Robert Jordan, George Martin.
Too damn boring!
I have a well-meaning male friend who keeps telling me I should read ASOIF.
I keep telling him I’ll read it when GRR Martin gets an editor. Until then wikipedia is just fine.
Oh man, I’m pretty sure that leprosy series was The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson. I stopped reading very early in the first book when he raped the girl who was acting as his guide. Fuck this series. It does sort of have status as a classic because the main character was an antihero and that was revolutionary at the time? (At least, that’s what I’ve gathered through osmosis.)
Yes! That was it! I’m pretty sure it was recommended because I told someone I didn’t like “classic fantasy” or “regular fantasy” or something, and I guess they interpreted that to mean “I need more assholes and rape to go with my wizards”. That was…pretty well the opposite of what I meant.
I also HEAVILY skimmed the LOTR books… Technically I “read” them in the sense that I flipped through pages and got from the front to the back, but I’d already seen the movies and reading the whole thing just felt like such a CHORE.
That is pretty much how I “read” much of the last two Game of Thrones books. I had forgotten/hadn’t noticed the big plot event at the end of the 5th book until I read about it on the internet.
I haven’t read any tolkien. This is… an unpopular choice among my friend group.
We had to read The Hobbit for 9th grade, and that has always been weird to me.
I got assigned LOTR in 8th grade advanced lit probably because the movies were coming out and the teacher wanted an excuse to read them and our class was mostly boys who like drawing detailed pictures of swords. It was an interesting choice and I never actually finished Return of the King, I probably skipped about 100 pages in the middle where it was just battles and such. I definitely read all of the Two Towers, though.
I think assigning any of these books to a class is a weird idea.
Oh, man. This is one of my big ones. I cannot finish The Hobbit (I tried paperback and audiobook, no good) and when the first LotR movie was coming out I tried to read the first book, but then I got other books for Xmas and read them instead and never looked back. I had read so much other fantasy that was Tolkein-esque but actually interesting (and with women!) that his books seemed boring and derivative.
ETA I am really annoyed with Peter Jackson for turning the Hobbit into three movies because I was really hoping I could just watch one and then I would know how the story ends without having to read it, but I don’t feel like committing 9+ hours of my life to it.
Watch the cheesy 70’s TV movie! It’s pretty close to the book from what I remember, although I haven’t seen it since high school. This one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077687.
A friend once told me she got through LOTR by only reading the first and last sentence of every paragraph.
I enjoyed LOTR but for the life of me I can’t get through the Silmarillion.
Yeah, can’t do Tolkien. The “cool” group of boys in my fifth grade class refused to hang out with anyone who hadn’t read the entire trilogy plus the Silmarillion, and when I finally tried to read it, I decided they were all completely pretending to have read them. I still haven’t read any Tolkien book in its entirety.
I had to do a book report of The Fellowship of the Ring in 5th grade and it is still the only time I have ever wussed out and resorted to looking up a synopsis instead. I should note that this was prior to the easy availability of this kind of stuff on the internet, so I had to convince my parents to take me to a bookstore and find the cliffnotes for it; such was my desire to not read another word of this book.
Boromir never died for me, and never shall.
(Tolkien’s writing style makes me want to thrown things. Thankfully my fellow nerd friends are all the non-judgemental types so I don’t have to lie about this).
Tolkein is so tedious. All those white guys doing very little with jewellery. Also The Hobbit is the best one. It totally goes downhill from there.
I have never felt the siren song of LOTR – so, not touching that, I told myself.
Then came this semester’s syllabus: must read the trilogy.
I have never read Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm, or Lord of the Flies but I have picked up enough knowledge about them through cultural osmosis that I am comfortable making quips referencing them in casual conversation.
saaaame
Yeah, Lord of the Flies is one I managed not to get assigned in school ever. I think I know the basic plot, but I feel like it comes up in pop culture an awful lot so I feel left out.
Animal Farm! So much guilt. It’s not even a long book but it’s like I’m incapable of reading it.
I read it when I was far too young and had no idea it was an allegory. Took me ages to get over my dislike of pigs.
Like Adrian Mole! “From now on I shall treat pigs with the contempt they deserve. I am boycotting pork of all kinds.”
Lord of the Flies! I got a few pages in, skimmed a bit more, and got such an overwhelming sense of misery and evil that I put it down forever. (Meanwhile I love Wuthering Heights, which is one big misery-and-evil fest, so go figure.)
Somehow got through high school without being forced to read anything by William Goldman. Also Cry the Beloved Country, The Red Badge of Courage, and Ethan Frome – but can engage in earnest discourse about any of them.
I especially deplore the way schools push Ethan Frome because Edith Wharton is SO good, but that book puts everyone off wanting to go near her for life.
I have never finished Catcher in the Rye. I have tried to read it a few times, and it just ends up tossed against the wall in annoyance, because why is this book.
Did none of you go to middle school jeez
I genuinely can’t remember if I’ve read the hobbit or not.
I know I read the Hobbit, but I never finished the Lord of the Rings books. By which I mean, I only read the beginning of the first one. I always make like I have completed all of them, though. I think I’ve even claimed to have done so “multiple times.” Awful.
I have not read a single word of Jane Austen. I will never read a single word of Jane Austen.
I’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye, but I somehow correctly identified quotes from the book at trivia this past Monday.
I wrote a paper that involved a lengthy discussion of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers and Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t get further than a quarter of the way through each book. This paper won an award. I don’t know what is wrong with people.
Feel you on Austen. It just never ever appealed to me, or maybe it was the girls I knew in high school who were super in to her never appealed to me. In any event, at this point I will probably never bother.
I will never, ever read Joan Didion. I hear her interviewed ALL THE TIME on NPR and I cannot stand her.
And now for my worst confession: I only read about the first chapter or so of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I’m sorry. I know I should. It was assigned in honors english in high school and I would probably have loved it. I just didn’t bother, or something.
What IS wrong with people?! I once wrote a paper on Sinclair’s The Jungle and I had only read half of the introduction. I was like, “Yep yep…gross working conditions, gross handling of foodstuffs, got it.”
No idea but I definitely got an A on my Caged Bird paper….
Me too on Austen. All my bookish friends think P&P is just *the* *best* *thing* *ever* and assume I think so too and that I have deeply held opinions of which miniseries/film/YouTube adaptation is best. I do not disabuse them of the idea. I *want* to read and love P&P; it’s just that every time I sit down with it I get a chapter or three in and then just gradually drift away to other books.
I’ve already commented something similar upthread, but this is pretty much the situation I’m in. I’m surrounded by people who think Austen is the greatest writer of all time and I’ve never read any of her books.
I implied that I had because it was the first week of college and I was shy and trying to make friends and now it’s far past the time when it would have been reasonable to admit I haven’t.
I’ve never read Jane Austen either, and I always fall asleep during the movies.
I only was able to complete P&P because of that horrible “P&P&zombies” version of it. The zombie version is NOT GOOD, mind you, but it was only just compelling enough that I was able to stomach reading all of P&P, a book that I had felt absurdly guilty for never having been able to complete prior.
Same about Austen. I simply don’t care. I love the era but I want to read about battles and secret gay affairs aboard a man-of-war, not balls and tea parties or whatever the fuck Austen is about.
I have also never read Wuthering Heights. Most of my knowledge of its plot comes from someone’s essay comparing the whole Catelyn Stark/Petyr Baelish/Sansa thing to Catherine and Heathcliff.
I have also never read a single Dumas book, despite being into historical adventure stuff as a kid. I just really, really hate the 1600s. They had stupid fashion and terrible hairstyles.
I have nodded knowingly during conversations about books by the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin; I have never read a word any of them ever wrote. See also: the catalog of Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Technically, I have never physically said I read any of them, when asked directly. But that never happens. I’m just very good at nodding, I guess.
In my mind, all of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen are the same writer (and all of their books are the same book), which I have never read. It makes me feel so lacking in culture… but man, it feels good to confess!
YOU’RE NOT ALONE
This is such a great relief. I have also not read a lick of Austen or any Bronte. To me, the books just feel like they’re in sepia tone or something. I hate sepia.
The entire 18th/early 19th century is that color in my mind.
I, too, am good at nodding. And saying Isn’t that the one where… , leading them to blather on more.
Good god, I thought I was the only Toast reader who never got into 19th century women writers. This warms my heart.
I do try them again periodically, but it’s not happening. I have now officially given up.
Of most of the 19th-century-woman-writer pieces, I really only like Wuthering Heights. Everything else is just the very same thing over and over again.
I’ve put WH on my kindle after the post here about it but I haven’t read it yet.
I have never read the Anne of Green Gables series; even as a child they struck me as unbearably twee. I have also avoided the Redwall books for the same reason.
That is fair. But I have to say that I always thought I didn’t like anything by any of the Bronte sisters, and then I read Anne’s book The Tenant of Wildfell hall, which I loved. Anne is so different from her sisters! Kate Beaton knows: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=202
Love Tenant! And the BBC adaptation has dreamy Rupert Graves in it.
Oh god yes!
YEP. Austen and Bronte are just not in my wheelhouse, which is frankly odd given that “my wheelhouse” seems to be centered somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales (thanks, fiance who hails from aforementioned Dales). I just found P&P/Eyre/etc to be dreadfully, painfully, appallingly boring.
I will HAPPILY read virtually anything else set in Regency or Victorian or Tudor or Plantagenet or [fill in era] England/Scotland/Wales/Ireland, though.
I have read no Orwell, save 1984.
I refused to read Catcher in the Rye when I was a teenager, because I determined it was too cliche to be a disaffected teenager and also to have read/be reading Catcher.
My girlfriend has told me enough about Les Miserables that I am able to trick people into thinking I have read it myself.
I know just enough about The Great Gatsby to be witty and/or dangerous.
I FORGOT: also I have never read the Narnia books
I’ve read one or two of the Narnia books and found them soooo borrrring as a fifth-grader.
I read the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, started one of the others, got bored, and then puked on it when I was sick and it was by my bedside. Literary criticism at it’s 10ish-year-old finest.
I’ve read two nonfiction books by Orwell, but not Animal Farm or 1984, which is a little odd.
I can sing the entire Boubil-Schönberg score to Les Mis. That’s plenty.
I read about half of Notes from the Underground and two or three chapters each from Crime and Punishment and The Possessed.
I nevertheless do not honorably demur from discussions of Russian literature, and instead nod sagely and say, “Oh yes, sure,” a lot.
Ah, a comrade in my distaste for Dostoevsky! Don’t hold back in discussions of Russian literature; remind everyone that Nabokov thought he was banal and mediocre!
Oh yes. Sure.
We had to read Notes from the Underground in AP English and my teacher actually went around the room and pretty accurately guessed which of us liked it and which did not. I was in the latter group. When we had to read Crime and Punishment I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t.
I always wonder when it is literature originally written in another language if the original is just as bad or if it is suffering in translation, but I’m not about to learn Russian to find out.
I’ve failed to complete any Dostoevsky — in high school, I skipped probably half of C&P (but made sure to read the ending), while as an adult, I’ve just petered out partway through a couple of others (Notes, The Double) — but I’ve been saved so far by blaming the translation for everything I disliked about the experience.
I will say that there *are* a lot of bad, older translations of FD out there, and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s modern ones are excellent. But—as someone who loves him and even wrote my senior thesis on Bros K and The Idiot (my favorite)—I concede that in any translation he probably works best if you’re a God-hungry Russophile, which is a pretty niche category of reader and person.
I am very, very good at giving the IMPRESSION that I have read books, without actually outright lying about it. So while I have never OUTRIGHT LIED about reading any Hemingway, Jonathan Franzen, Chuck Palahnuik, Brett Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh, or David Foster Wallace, you would be forgiven for being under the impression that I had.
I have never read any Russian literature other than War and Peace. I have never read Dune. I have watched the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica (twice!) but I quit both times because I found it too grueling. I often pretend to have seen it all.
The one thing I always lie about … is having seen The Goonies. Why, I do not know. I have never seen The Goonies.
Yeah. I have never outright lied about Ulysses or a huge swath of white-male books. I have read some, and sometimes I dismiss them as though they are all.
Sometimes I dismiss them with jokes I read on The Toast.
omg someone else who has never seen The Goonies, I feel so much less alone.
My husband THINKS he’s never seen the Goonies, but we have watched it no less than four times when it’s been showing on TV. Only, he’s always been drunk/falling asleep/ ill.
I KNOW I saw the Goonies when it came out, but remember nothing about it, which really leaves me at a loss when the rest of my generation (at least the ones I like) think it’s the BEST EVER. *Sigh*
You are not alooooone, I am here with youuuuu…
My ex boyfriend left some Palahnuik book (couldn’t tell you which one, they’re all the same just about) in my car once and I read the first ten pages and couldn’t understand why people thought he was such a fantastic writer/storyteller. It is crap and he is crap.
This comment could also appear in the “How to Emotionally Devastate a Very Specific Type of Person” thread. ::Scurries, sobbing, into the corner, clutching Invisible Monsters to her chest::
I feel like this entire comments section could easily appear in the “How to Emotionally Devastate a Very Specific Type of Person” thread! Everyone really likes to hate on books that I love, apparently 🙁
Oh, agreed. How could something designed to get shameful lies out in the open make me feel even worse about the things I *have* read?! Oh, because I’m emotionally fragile and apparently that very specific type of person.
I never felt worse about liking Dickens and Austen. Luckily, I’m sure I’ll find something else to devastate me soon enough…
Are…are you me?
Share your deception tips?
I mean, there is the standard “Mmm-hmm”ing and nodding and so on, but I will also read articles and essays *about* books that I have not read and cheat that way. Like “Oh I read X interesting opinion about that and I agree” even though I have no real basis for agreement as I have not read the book. I will also tease out the broader themes that the book is addressing, or that are being discussed in this conversation, and then talk about those in relation to other books.
Like Mallory, over the last couple of years I have committed myself to NOT doing this, and just outright saying “I have not read these books because they do not interest me” instead, but it is a process.
I feel like if you’ve read War and Peace you’re excused from any further attempts at Russian literature.
I’ve tried three times, failed three times.
I have also never seen The Goonies! I think. Or perhaps I have, and I’ve forgotten?!
Yeah, Battlestar Galactica. I just can’t get into it.
living as I do in the Allston Spur, I make one reference to Infinite Jest PER HOUR basically, but I’ve only read the first 50 pages.
but I’ve read the first 50 pages THREE TIMES!
also I never read any of the required Middle-School texts (Animal Farm, The Giver, Lord of the Flies) because we spent the entirety of the 8th grade reading Anne Frank, and the entirety of the 7th grade reading HAMLET of all things
When I used to live in the spur, I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly where the tennis academy would be. Also, before Allston, I lived in Inman and though a lot about which Portuguese restaurant one of the characters ate soup in.
Apparently, other people care even more about this than I do. http://infiniteatlas.com/
I haven’t outright lied about many books, but I have pretty low-brow tastes and many friends who consider themselves pretty literary so I have implied familiarity with loads of authors whose books I can’t even name, let alone have read. Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Austen, Twain…I haven’t read most of the “greats” and I mostly don’t care to. I have, however, read many many romance novels that I don’t admit or will only admit with a combative “come at me bro!” tone.
Coming at you only to high-five the romance novelin’, because who has time for Tolstoy when there are manhoods to be unsheathed and womanly cores to be explored?
I have read quite a bit of Margaret Atwood and admire her prose, but I promptly forget everything in her books the moment I close them. I retain hints of Handmaid’s Tale, but more from passionate discussions during high school than the text itself.
Despite numerous efforts, I haven’t been able to get through Crime and Punishment. I am too lazy and fond of The Master and Margarita (Russian lit cred for life) to attempt War and Peace or Brothers Karamazov.
I own histories by Herodotus and Plutarch and various other eminent ancients; I pick the books up once in a while when I need a brushing-my-teeth read, gaze vaguely at a couple of pages while deploying the Crest, and then put them down and don’t touch them again until it’s time to dust.
[ETA: Oh! I gave up on “The Metamorphosis” in high school and cribbed from the discussion. Not many pieces of writing make me nauseated, but that one did the trick. Filed under “life’s too short” and haven’t looked back.]
Most people in my life know I love Russia/Russian things and just assume I’ve read all the greats. I do not disabuse them of this. I love Master and Margarita and references to that give me a lot of cred. I’m trying to read C&P right now but I keep falling asleep. I’ve never finished a Dostoevsky though I did visit his St. Petersburg apartment once. I loved Anna Karenina and hope to one day read War and Peace.
My love for M&M is limitless and bright, and then I found this t-shirt.
I have that shirt! It’s so great and gets really strange looks at the gym. Bonus.
Whoa I want to be your friend! This comment applies to me 100% (even the Dostoevsky apartment visit!) except that I did eventually finish Crime and Punishment. I stalled out on War and Peace after like 200 pages in college (the war parts were boring and I couldn’t figure out what was going on because at the time I didn’t know anything about the Napoleonic Wars), but I have a really nice edition and do want to read it.
I also have Anna Karenina in Russian. Just in case I need to take on an enormous ordeal someday.
Yes! Friends! I am going to follow you which I just learned is a thing in this commenting system.
“I also have Anna Karenina in Russian. Just in case I need to take on an enormous ordeal someday.” Replace AK with Gone With The Wind and this is me. I’ve read GWTW so many times I thought I’d have a decent shot at figuring it out? Not really.
I followed you back! I don’t know what that entails, exactly, but I guess we’ll find out.
And haha, Gone With The Wind is actually something I pretend to have read, but only to Russians. I do that with all the weird English-language literature that Russians love (in addition to Gone with the Wind, Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Jack London, and Jerome K. Jerome come to mind). Once an intellectual babushka rewarded me for knowing that Charley in “Travels with Charley” was a dog (have not read it, but faked it adequately) by proclaiming me “not like other Americans” and lecturing me for an hour about Brodsky. With musical accompaniment.
I got three pages into An Untamed State and just…couldn’t. So brutal. I’m sure it’s amazing and I recommend Roxanne Gay’s work highly based on her other stuff, but I can’t handle it.
Also I own From Margin To Center and have lent it to other people but hooks’ style (at least in that book) is so densely academic I gave up about a third in. It’s only like 100 pages!
It broke my heart a little to give up on An Untamed State (for the time being; I’ll go back) because I was starting it along with The Toast’s book club and I was so looking forward to conversation threads about it! But I got a few chapters in and realized I just couldn’t right then. It was a wise decision.
Same. I have recommended it to others and will continue to, and I plan to go back to it, but I haven’t read it. Same with Bad Feminist, although that one I do thoroughly intend to read as soon as possible – I just haven’t had a good weekend for it at yet.
I read it all at once and kinda wished I hadn’t. I feel a lot of the descriptions of what happened to her wasn’t really necessary but I’m not sure. Still debating that.
I also read several books as a child that I later learned were part of an abridged classics line, so I spent a great many years believing I had read Robinson Crusoe, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, The Secret Garden, and several others, when in reality I had read extremely bastardized kid-friendly versions of these. Yet I will look you in the eye without flinching and tell you that I have read these books, and I would dare you to find one single crease of dishonesty in my face.
Were they the Wishbone versions?
This was pre-Wishbone!
It was this series:
I HAD THAT EXACT BOOK. I read it to bits. It fell apart at some point.
Oh, man. I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in this series when I was a kid and for the longest time, I didn’t figure out it wasn’t the actual book. Seems like an odd choice to make into this type of abridged kid-version.
Oh, not the same things I had.
But I maintain to this day I read The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Moby Dick because I read some kids expurgated version.
(I’m pretty sure it was by Ladybird, or similar)
my son read all of these and now won’t take a look at the legit versions; he’s already done that. Hoping to break this before he goes to college and has a sanitized view of all classics stuck in his head.
!!! I read SO MANY of these books growing up.
Oh yup, because of these books, I have “read” Mutiny on the Bounty.
OMG WISHBONE. I had the plush toy with the different outfits! My favorite was the Sherlock Holmes cape. Anyway, yes, I guess I would still claim that I’ve read Ivanhoe even though technically I’ve just been read the Wishbone version by my momma.
Ivanhoe is the one that sticks out for me too, for reasons I CANNOT SAY.
(We had a Jack Russell growing up, I was convinced that show was made for me.)
Because of Wishbone I didn’t have to read either The Tempest or Cyrano de Bergerac for my theater design class in college, which was great, because I could spend the time I saved drinking and mooning over boys (and girls).
Why would they abridge The Secret Garden?
Especially when you can just watch the movie!
*runs away*
Maybe I read the full Secret Garden and now only think it was an abridged version? I have no idea at this point. Have I read anything? Am I literate? Is The Toast a fever dream of an imperiled mind?
Emby, do you have children?
Not as far as I know…
I am the biggest problem facing feminism today 🙁
We all are, really.
The Secret Garden was definitely in that Illustrated Classic series! Little Women, too.
Last year I downloaded what I thought was The Charterhouse of Parma from Project Gutenberg. It was actually a ten thousand word synopsis of the plot.
“Wow,” I thought, as I flipped another virtual page. “Gotta hand it to old Stendahl. This thing is fucking flying.”
This is how I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and I’m sticking to it.
Oh, I had a truncated copy of Little Women for YEARS and I never understood what the big fuss was about! Nobody died!
I was FLOORED when I received an actual copy (protip: what we usually call Little Women is actually two novels or halves of novels or whatever) and Beth died. Just floored.
NOBODY DIES IN THE TRUNCATED VERSION??
It’s only the first half of the regular book! It stops before Beth dies and just….ends. I was so confused.
That is…what? No.
I’m pretty sure I read the first half (in Spanish class) for this very reason! I don’t remember it all that well though.
This is because I guess sometimes the first two books in the series (in the UK “Little Women” and “Good Wives”), are considered to be just one? Beth dies in Good Wives, not Little Women… However the film of Little Women with Winona Ryder etc finishes where Good Wives ends. If you’ve read up the the end of the first “half” you’ve read Little Women – no fear!
INTERESTING. So there were four in the series? (Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Jo’s Boys?)
Yep! Could be an international publishing choice to split them, if the first two are always sold as one in the US? It’s the same in France – where the translated titles are even more horrifying. (“Les Quatres Filles du Docteur March” et “Le Docteur March Marie ses Filles” – “The Four Daughters of Doctor March” and “Doctor March Marries off his Daughters”). The man is barely in the bloody things! Oh, France…
Those titles are amazing.
This happened to me when I was reading Daniel Deronda. I picked up a library copy, and when I got about 30 pages from the end, I started to worry that it didn’t feel like anything was drawing to a close. Then the book just ended and nothing was resolved. I was confused, so I went to Wikipedia for a synopsis. Turned out the library copy was only Book I, but the ending sounded sufficiently not-interesting that I actually never went back to read Book II.
It confused me too! In the UK Little Women is generally just the first part, up until Mr March returns, and the second half is published as a separate book, Good Wives. So I read Little Women and then could not understand why everyone said Beth died in it.
I had all those books and I still pretend I read them even though what I mostly did was color in the black-and-white pictures on every other page.
Pretty much all of my knowledge of the bible comes from reading a copy of Bible Stories for Children when I went through my mythology phase as a kid, in between the book of Norse myths for kids and the one of Celtic myths.
We had an old Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare that looked hidebound and important enough to be the real thing, when I was ten.
I wish they did something like this for adults.
I read an abridged version of Dracula, gave myself a pat on the back for reading a “classic”, found out about the proper version and couldn’t even get halfway through it.
So. Much. Taaaalking.
Also Lucy/Mina are pretty much only there to keep things heterosexual because neither one really does anything except be virtuous and whatever.
It’s all about the railway timetables! I love Dracula but can totally see why people don’t. There is an online version of it that blogs each entry on the appropriate day, which entertains me. http://infocult.typepad.com/dracula/
I absolutely HATED abridged classics books when I was little, and attempted to read my way through the English literary canon in middle school. I couldn’t finish any Dickinson except David Copperfield, and I just skipped through all the “Huck went to this town and met these assholes” parts of Huckleberry Finn.
My policy is this: read book, get really angry about book partway through, throw book across room and proceed to rant fluently about the read section when asked. Everybody seems to think that if you’re angry and convincing enough about it, you’ve really grasped it.
Yup.
I thought I had read The Three Musketeers. Turns out it was an abridged children’s classic and I have not. (But it’s still really long and confusing! The thought of trying to slog through an even longer version is dispiriting.)
I got a BA in Philosophy and I’m fairly certain I never actually read a complete book that was assigned to me, including Either/Or which I had listed as my favorite book on fb for a while.
Lord of the Rings, A Clockwork Orange, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – these were all big hits with my friends a few years ago but I just could not get through them. Said friends would take this as a personal affront, so I definitely halfheartedly read the Wikipedia plot summaries to finally get them off my back.
I STARTED all those books, does that count?
I never want to read Hitch Hikers or really any books that take place in space. Sometimes I just nod at people who talk to me about them though.
I started Hitchhiker’s Guide but about a quarter of the way through I had to quit. I have seen the film so many times that I couldn’t stop comparing the two and sadly, the film wins.
I haven’t made it through an Ayn Rand book, but I played Bioshock. So it’s basically the same thing only with bees coming from your hands.
Same. And now, thanks to Mallory, I can confidently make jokes about Ayn Rand and no one is the wiser.
I played Bioshock about five times, which is definitely the same thing as an in-depth study into Randian philosophy.
Likewise, my obsessive Skyrim play makes me an expert on Norse Myth.
Oh my god, no wonder I kind of hate Bioshock a lot. (I mean, 2 is….fine. All copies of Infinite should be dropkicked into the sun.)
I loved Infinite – though I haven’t actually finished it because that last big fight is a nightmare and uses literally none of the skills you have collected so far.
I only know how it ends from youtube.
My fella is a runner, and he’s doing a 200-mile relay this weekend, called the Ragnar. Every time he talks about it I start humming “Ragnar the Red”. I… I can’t help it.
DOWN WITH ULFRIC
THE KILLER OF KINGS
ON THE DAY OF YOUR DEATH WE WILL DRINK AND WE’LL SING
(different song, I’m sorry)
I’ve never even started an Ayn Rand book, yet I feel very confident when I talk shit on them.
I’ve never read any Kurt Vonnegut or finished any George R. R. Martin.
You poor unfortunate human.
Vonnegut is a treasure of the human race. I heartily recommend his entire canon.
Dude, read the tags.
“The first person to say “you’re not missing anything” grandly and generously in response to this list gets hammerbanned + books + lies”
So saying they are missing something gets me the opposite of hammerbanned is?! Cool!. Cool cool cool.
Are we really going to do this?
Okay, so it’s not in the tags, but right below them, straight out of the editor’s mouth.
“FOR THE RECORD: much as the “books you hated” post was not to create a venue for you to argue with people’s hated books, this is not a venue for you to go “OH BUT YOU REALLY MUSTTTTTTT” at people, we are here for HONESTY.”
Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind, and calling a person unfortunate for not caring about a particular author’s work isn’t very humanist of you. Grumblyqueer out.
I see what you did there.
Yeah, life without Vonnegut has been just fine thanks.
Come sit next to me.
I’ve also never read any Vonnegut despite him being my mother’s favorite author. I’ve definitely pretended to be a fan, though.
I have not disabused people of the notion that I have read Lord of Flies. I’m hesitant to actually read it as Catcher in the Rye as a book I must read was such a disappointment.
I have also not disabused people of the notion that I have read Infinite Jest. But only people who seem to love David Foster Wallace and who I otherwise respect. I gave the book 200 pages and just couldn’t shake the impression it was a cut rate Pynchon.
Lord of the Flies was one of the most boring books I ever completed.
Catcher in the Rye. I was assigned this for summer reading but only got about half way through. I still got an A on the test just from listening to what others said in class. I pretend that I have read it just to stop all the men telling me that I have to read it because…
I do this more for movies than for books, for some reason. Often, when someone asks if I’ve seen a movie I’ve never watched, I’ll say, “Oh, I’ve seen parts of it”–as if I watched some scenes of it on cable once? I don’t know why, but I do this compulsively. I should stop! There’s nothing wrong with not having seen “Jerry Maguire”!
I do this too!
Because saying you’ve seen parts of it usually keeps people from attempting to convince you that OMG YOU HAVE TO READ IT/WATCH IT RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I am a marginally functional adult, if I wanted to watch Jerry Maguire, I would have by now.
THIS. People are always stunned when I say I haven’t seen The Godfather. They don’t seem to understand that I haven’t seen The Godfather because I have no interest in seeing The Godfather.
My friends also made me watch Ghostbusters when they found out I hadn’t seen that either. It wasn’t as good as I’d been told *creed arms*
I had to watch the Godfather for a freshman seminar; did not really like it.
We were supposed to watch The Boondock Saints but I forgot and missed the screening, so instead I read the screenplay. I have never regretted this.
My coworkers gently tease me at irregular intervals because I have not seen any of the Godfathers or Goodfellas. I keep telling them that I am just Not a Mob Movie or Westerns person (so many dudes).
I’ve also never seen Casablanca nor do I want to. Bogart in non-detective roles makes me embarrassed for him because I just don’t think he’s a terribly talented actor.
Casablanca is mostly jokes. HB sitting around making sarcastic jokes. I remember watching it on long airplane ride and flipping between it and Along Came Polly and realizing Casablanca had way more jokes.
A friend of mine made a group of us watch The Godfather when I was about fifteen. It was a sunny afternoon and we just sat inside with the curtains closed, while the film went on forever. It was one of the most boring afternoons I have ever spent.
I do this too, or sometimes it’s more ridiculous cousin, “I watched it, but I was mostly asleep.” What? Why? I guess somehow I/we feel it is the *intention* to watch X thing that is important?
Ohhh, that I do all the time. Mostly because I don’t really like most movies and if I say that people think I’m weird, but there’s no other way to explain why I don’t want to watch their favourite move because I’m 85% sure I will not like it and spend most of the time wishing I was doing something else.
I think I do this with movies and not with books or TV because I love books and TV more, and am much more likely to spend my “cultural consumption” time reading or watching a show than watching movies. So the gaps in my movie knowledge are bigger, and I’m more embarrassed about them? I’ve never seen the Wire or Breaking Bad or the Sopranos but I have no problem admitting that. (I am embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read any bell hooks. I am a Bad Feminist.)
Ooh bell hooks is mine. I’ve never lied outright, but I have done some fake-knowing nodding about her writing. Also embarrassed by this.
I have read a lot of bell hooks quotes on the internet. That has to count for something, right?
I’m also not at all a movie watcher and it just gets tiring to explain that to people. I tried so hard as a teenager and college student to be Into Films, and suffered through a ton of ridiculous shit, so I’ve seen loads of these really esoteric “films” while wishing I was doing/being anywhere else.
I get a lot of “but you’ll binge watch a TV show for hours, how is that different than a movie?” I don’t know, it just is.
IT JUST IS. Gah, I don’t know exactly why but for me, it feels like it’s about the pacing of the plot arc. I basically watch my tv shows for that feeling of closure, and for escapist enjoyment. Therefore, I enjoy shows that are witty and engaging but deal with light subject matter, have defined plot arcs for each plot (although some overarching plot is fine), and that are no longer than an hour broadcast (e.g., Poirot, TNG, Psych, X Files). Movies tend to be a lot longer, and a lot of art films have no clear resolution (shut up Run Lola, Run). So top trying to get me to watch your three hour movie about drug addiction, infidelity, murder, and the hopelessness of life or whatever and leave me alone with Twilight Sparkle.
YES. I hate watching movies. I adore TV. Perhaps because TV seems more character-driven, which is what I enjoy? And yeah, the pacing is a lot easier to handle. Watching a film is such a COMMITMENT.
ME TOO. TV forever; movies practically never.
My people! I also flat out refuse to watch stressful television (which for me includes Mad Men, House of Cards, and pretty much all of those other “great television” type shows). I will unrepentantly read spoilers, though
As someone who loves both TV and movies, it definitely is. They are related media, but they are different. Short stories, novels and epic poems are all print-based media, but they are all also different forms with different ways of telling stories. The same is true for TV and film. There are significant differences in pacing and character development and overall storytelling. You are allowed to prefer one medium over another.
People are absolutely FLOORED when I tell them I haven’t seen Mean Girls/Titanic/popular movie X here because…I just don’t want to?
Ooh! I’ve never seen Titanic, and at this point I definitely will not. I did read Lindy West’s delightful recap, though, so I feel like I’ve done my due diligence.
Me too! I don’t see any point in watching Titanic now. I know what happened to the actual ship. I know a lot of what happened in the movie. Why bother?
I hadn’t seen Titanic until the age of 21, when my friends dragged me to the 3D re-release. It was not worth the 3 hours, much less whatever ridiculous amount of money we spent on the tickets.
I do this for TV shows and movies *all the time.* Books I’ll at the most nod knowingly about, but TV shows and movies…
Same. To be fair, I have seen a lot of snippets of things on cable. Or I got the gist from watching I Love the 80s or something. Close enough.
I always say, “a long time ago, I think?” because sometimes I’m embarrassed about how few “classic” movies I’ve seen, and sometimes I don’t want to hear about how I HAVE to watch it, and sometimes I have seen it but forgot it entirely. It leaves room for people to talk about it or not, as they want, without badgering.
Yep, I definitely do this more for movies. Films I have outright pretended to have seen include The Breakfast Club, The Shawshank Redemption, The Goonies, Clerks, and The Shining. I’m sure there are a lot more.
Mine is The Big Lebowski. I have attempted to watch it several times and always fall asleep partway through. I can make jokes about rugs that tie the room together with the best of them, though.
Margaret Atwood. Oh, Margaret Atwood. I want to read her, I really do! But I… I just haven’t yet! And now I’m caught in my many, many lies.
A friend came up to me a few years ago to thank me for recommending a Handmaid’s Tale. Apparently I told her it was my favorite, but I don’t remember saying that. (It was a lie then, it would be a lie now. Still haven’t read it!) I couldn’t let her know that I haven’t read it, so I just kept building on the foundation of dishonesty and recommended a few more by Atwood. And then she read them and wanted to discuss them! So I did!
I just keep lying!! We’ve had about a dozen Atwood conversations and I still haven’t been caught! I don’t know how! (ok, wikipedia, but still)
I’m the worst. Oh, it feels so good to get this off my chest.
Okay, this is not meant as criticism at all, it’s just to help with the subterfuge: it’s not A Handmaid’s Tale, it’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
(It’s the little things that trip you up)
I lost interest in Atwood while trying, and failing, to get through Alias Grace. Happily, the last two decades of her writing can all be summed up with, “So well written, but so bleak!” Saying those words like you’re sharing a half-embarrassing confidence works every time!
Haha, thank you for the tips! Sounds like I’ll be able to get through a few more conversations without suspicion.
I took a Margaret Atwood class my senior year in college and it was one of the best courses I’ve EVER taken.
I say this not as a brag, but as a preface to this admission: had I not taken that class, I probably would NEVER actually have read an MA book. Since then I’ve picked up, without finishing, several of them.
If you’re Canadian, not liking Atwood is way worse than not having read her, because she is A National Treasure. I’ve read lots of her fiction, and finally just gave up, I really don’t like it. I can usually defend myself by saying I prefer her poetry, which has the virtue of being true. I love her poetry. This doesn’t help if the conversation turns to A Handmaid’s Tale, though, because hating that makes me not only A Bad Canadian, but also A Bad Feminist.
At some point in high school English class I just snapped and stopped doing the reading and used Cliff Notes to write all my papers from, so a lot of “classics”: A Tale of Two Cities, Bartleby the Scrivener, probably more that I’ve forgotten about.
Not sorry, tbh.
I did that with the Communist Manifesto. It’s dense, and I wanted to actually, y’know, understand what the hell it was talking about because I had to write a ten-page paper on it. So, to Google I went, not sorry.
I was supposed to read Anna Karenina for a 12th-grade English project, but I made it about 300 pages in, cursed myself for not choosing a shorter book, and Sparknotes’d the rest of it for my final project.
Five years later and I have still not finished reading the book, but I have seen the movie and a miniseries of it, so I figure I’m good on that front.
That’s about how far I made it into Anna Karenina a few years ago.
I don’t know if this counts, but I read every word of James Joyce’s Ulysses (in graduate school) and comprehended MAYBE 19% of the book.
I FEEL like I’m lying when I say I’ve read it.
Everyone is lying when they say they have read Ulysses. Even if you have read it, you haven’t. Exceptions MAY include Joyce scholars, but even then…
The secret to Irish lit scholars as a group is that there’s a whole lot of alcohol being consumed there. The Joyce scholars, I’m certain, imbibe on a higher than average level and thus are better placed to comprehend Ulysses than most.
I’ve tried to read Ulysses so. many. times. but I’ve just given up. I also rarely drink. Coincidence? I think not.
I listened to an In Our Time episode on Ulysses, which is as close as I plan to get.
I’ve got a number of books like that, including some that are probably a lot more comprehensible than Ulysses. I feel like most of the books I read in school I rushed through without actually processing anything. A couple of times I’ve gone back and re-read something that I hated in school and been floored by how much more books make sense when you’re not trying to finish them by deadline.
Yeah, my Master’s focus was 19th century Brit lit so I’m GENERALLY pretty good at reading huge books quickly but I will FULLY admit there were some I did NOT read some of the middle chapters (sorry, Our Mutual Friend) and I know will appreciate them more if I go back and read the middle bits.
I think 19% sounds top tier to me. I read 3 pages of it and scuttled away from it forever. I think I understood maybe 3%.
I not only read it in college but I took an entire semester on it, where we discussed every chapter, in depth. I still don’t think I remember/understand more than 10% of it. I remember something about masturbating on a beach, because that made me uncomfortable. And I remember the Molly chapter, but I’ve reread that one since college.
Dude I have a friend who only needed to write a 10-page paper on Ulysses to graduate college and instead opted to not do the paper and delay her graduation by an entire semester to take another course. Fucking Ulysses man.
It is well I never had to make such a decision myself.
I’ve never even picked it up, but I went to a Bloomsday reading at a bar once and had a great time, which appears to signal to others that I’ve not just read but *appreciated* it.
I dunno, seems like understanding 19% of it is pretty damn good.
I started it. And I felt as if I were reading the book in very bright sunshine, and I was squinting very hard, but still couldn’t quite make out what was going on.
Maybe I’ll get around to reading it. I don’t know. When I retire, or something.
I was reading everyone’s confessions here and I was wondering when “Ulysses” would turn up – it is the perfect ‘pretend’ reading 😀
I had it as a compulsory reading in college, I managed to finish it (falling asleep on it most of the time), I don’t remember much from it. the only memorable thing about the whole thing is that when the professor asked me if I liked, I said “NO” and he concluded I was a masochist. As a result I never read Faulkner.
Now I only read what I like and I refuse to pretend.
Lolita. Always Lolita.
YUUUUUPPPP…Always Lolita.
I read enough of Lolita to get the gist, okay? It’s a pretty gettable gist, that’s all.
#1) every bullshit book in high school. I still averaged A’s or A- at least on those book reports, so what does that tell you? mostly, that CHWM “classics” are largely simplistic and boring.
#2) I completely condone this practice for the purposes of expressing hate for a book or series. I have seen ~3 episodes of GoT and read maybe a third of the first book. But against a hardcore fanboi, I will double, triple, or quadruple these numbers to give myself the credetials to make the (very valid) argument that these works of fiction are utterly intolerable.
TLDR: any crime is justifiable in service of avoiding being told “what? you *have* to stick with it! it gets so good!” Just No. It never gets good.
#3) lastly, and most justifiably, is lying about having seen children’s movies from your youth once you are an adult. It’s really hard to explain to people, “no, I don’t *have* to see Home Alone; it’s a crappy kids movie that you only like because of nostalgia for your own childhood. Since I didn’t see it then, I will simply see it for what it is: terrible.” Much easier to just say you saw it.
“The first three seasons/300 pages are terrible, but the last part is so good!” is something that will never, ever convince me it’s worth it.
My dad did that to me with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I told him I’d tried to read it and found it dull. “It starts out that way, but once you get 3/4 of the way through the book, it gets really good!”
Why would I read a book if only the last 1/4 of it was good?
I would argue passionately for a 1st season pass with tv series, because so many great shows only truly find their feet post- or midway-season 1 (Wire, Community, Parks & Rec etc.). But am behind throwing a book away if first 3 pages are not goddamn pristine.
You shouldn’t HAVE to “stick with it”. IT SHOULD BE GOOD FROM THE BEGINNING!
People FREAK OUT when I tell them I’ve never seen Home Alone. I don’t get it! If they didn’t appeal to me as a kid, why do you think they would now?
And all those people who goad other (adult) people into watching Home Alone because they loved it in middle school and it’s so funny are only pretending to like it as adults. They’re secretly disappointed that this cultural icon of their youth is actually a turd.
Tristram Shandy. I’ve read the first chapter about 11 times. Very funny but not compelling enough to tackle Chapter 2.
I only watched the first 20 minutes of the movie, and only because Gillian Anderson was in it. And then I turned it off because SO BORED.
Oh man, you reminded me: Moll Flanders! And I helped make a video of it, too, and we got an A (mostly, I think, because the teacher admired us for using NIN’s “Closer” to score Moll’s years as a prostitute) despite writing, shooting, and editing it between watching episodes of ST:TNG.
I’ve never seen Star Wars, The Godfather, or basically any movies from the 1980s that were not from Disney.
I don’t recommend watching Star Wars for the first time as an adult.
*shudder* ugh, I can imagine… Every time I re-watch the series, it gets campier and campier.
Have also never seen any of The Godfather movies. My parents and brother watched them together when I went to college and now they sting of familial betrayal.
Add me to the list! The shock people go into when they hear I haven’t seen The Godfather only slightly dwarfs the shock that I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs.
it is so much easier to pretend to have seen those movies than to confess the truth and endure the “WHAT HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE” discussion.
SAME! I’ve been forced to watch several films because of this and it’s incredibly awkward. You’re watching the film, they’re watching your response. ugh
Bleh, Tarantino is garbage.
I have never seen Star Wars either (except Episode 1 in the 5th grade)…and I kinda have 0 desire to see them. Maybe one day. I’ve probably seen all of the Godfather movies (more or less) because my father watched them constantly during my childhood. Watching The Godfather on Thanksgiving kind of became a weird unspoken tradition in our family.
Walden. IDGAF.
Oh man, me neither! I carried it AROUND with me as a teen but I only read like…4 paragraphs tops.
I really can’t with the transcendentalists, sorry/not sorry
I received a BEAUTIFUL copy of Walden as a prize for some high school thing, and I love it, and I will never open it.
I read maybe six pages as part of my AP US History curriculum. That was more than enough. (Dude lives “self-sufficiently” on his friend’s land with food and factory-woven clothing bought from a nearby town with physical currency. Pay your fucking taxes, Emerson.)
That bit where he’s all self-righteous about the people he got the cabin from is just utter garbage.
I have also never read Infinite Jest but I have QUOTED it out loud to others because I looked it up on Goodreads.
I have never read finished any Tolkien book after seven failed attempts to read The Hobbit and getting so goddamn bored with the camping and the mountains and the camping and the mountains, but I won’t admit this often because “How dare I call myself a fantasy fan.”
I stopped reading The Goldfinch eight months ago with 150 pages to go, but I strongly recommend you should read it, it’s so good.
Things I have read and finished: 127 “regular” Sweet Valley Highs, 12 SVH Super Editions, 9 SVH Super Thrillers, 5 SVH Super Stars (including Todd’s like WHO CARES), 12 SVH Magna Editions (Team Evil Twin Margo 4eva.)
I have definitely intimated a thorough reading of IJ when in actuality I read the dust jacket and that’s it.
Oh, Sweet Valley. I LOVE the saga series, where the book takes you through the lineage of all the various SVH characters and the trials and tribulations (and beheadings!) that eventually begat Lila Fowler/Bruce Patman/etc. So, so good.
I FORGOT ABOUT THE BEHEADINGS!! Five generations of sexiness begatting sexiness, I need to find those at the dollar shelf of my local Half Priced Books ASAP.
The Patmans of Sweet Valley was my favourite. So much drama!
Oh God I think about Evil Margo ALL THE TIME.
I was recently tagged on Facebook in the “name ten books that are important to you” thing, and everyone I know who has posted a list has had loads of highbrow, intellectual books which Really Meant Something to them. I read constantly, have an English degree and am studying to be a librarian, and yet all I can think of when trying to name books I have read are things like Sweet Valley High.
I’ve never read any LMM past Anne of Green Gables
ME NEITHER. NOT MY BAG.
I didn’t even get that far.
Thing is, I LOVE Anne of Green Gables. Read it many, many times. But just…never continued.
I…don’t know if I’ve even read that one. I had an Anne of Green Gables cookbook as a child though, so I know there was something with a raspberry cordial and a liniment cake and maybe some lemonade??
Did this cookbook have legit recipes or was it like “Plum pudding with dead mouse in sauce”?
No it was legit! I think the plum pudding was in there sans dead mouse. The liniment cake recipe was for what the cake would have been if she hadn’t linimented it all up. It was actually my birthday cake every year for a good portion of my childhood.
The only LMM I’ve read is Jane of Lantern Hill, which I legit loved. I just didn’t feel the need to read her books about anyone else. I definitely pretend that I’ve read the Anne books, though.
I find it oddly really impressive that you’ve read Jane of Lantern Hill but you haven’t read Anne of Green Gables.
Lying about watching TV series started when I was 5 years old and we didn’t have a TV at home. All throughout primary school I would join in playing Power Rangers (I figured out I should like the pink one), Captain Planet, Sesame Street, talking about The Simpsons, and so on.
My deepest pop culture shame is that I have never seen an entire episode of the Simpsons. I probably should have made a burner account for this admission.
I’ve never watched a complete Seinfeld episode – I really hated that show. But I can quote Seinfeld (“serenity now, insanity later”).
I call myself a Buffy fan but I stopped watching after the third season. And never got around to watching the rest. But I’ve read a lot of commentary and recaps.
I have also never seen The Wire. My husband has read Infinite Jest, and frankly that seems Good Enough.
Yes! Since my partner and I combined bookshelves eight years ago, I’ve been taking credit for all the books he’s read, too. I mean, we’re starting to look alike and often make the EXACT SAME joke at the EXACT SAME moment, so it seems by extension, we have a sort of hive mind where all the Literature is stored.
When you narrow down the list of books I’ve ever opened to only books I’ve finished, and then narrow that list down to only books I can remember anything about, and then narrow THAT list down to books I have enough thoughts about to make interesting conversation– the list is really short, and the odds that any title will come up in conversation is low. Better to just cop to the fact that I mostly read nonfiction.
There are so many books I have technically read that I remember nothing about. Sometimes reading my Goodreads list is a surprise to me, because I don’t remember some of the books AT ALL but I gave it three stars so I guess I read it?
I haven’t yet been caught actually lying about reading a book, but I have a terrible memory for things I’ve read, so I have experienced the embarrassment of people thinking I’m lying about reading something, even though I really did slog through every painfully boring page of The Brothers Karamazov. Why did I bother?
The only thing I remember about The Brothers Karamazov is that it was really boring.
Isn’t that the only important thing? I read it because I actually enjoyed Crime and Punishment, or maybe I just enjoyed imagining I was the kind of person who enjoyed it (I was 16)…
I think I mostly enjoyed reading Dickens when I was 12, but it’s entirely possible that I was mostly enjoying reading a VERY LARGE book (and also possible that since it was a collected works thing the books were also abridged? Likely). Haven’t the slightest idea which Dickens I read, though.
I have actually read most of this fiction being cited. So, non-fiction here:
I said I would read both Treatise of Human Nature and Critique of Pure Reason for a philosophy essay. I read about ten pages of Critique and ripped the rest from Wikipedia. I did quite badly, as I recall.
I have never read 1000 Plateaus (maybe the first chapter) but regularly assert the main thesis in aesthetics discussions.
I haven’t read more than an essay or two of Hegel.
I haven’t read Being and Time but trash it a lot.
I have read, I think, 100 pages or fewer of Foucault, and I know I’m missing important things (either to laud or trash, whatevs) but I just caaaaaaaaaaan’t.
I have skimmed some new-age-y pseudo-science books (like This Is Your Brain On Music, that’s my perennial example) and hated them, and constantly button my lip when other people recommend them to me.
Fiction I read or I don’t read but I’ve never fudged anything there, but non-fiction? I just now this moment realized that I consider a >50% completion rate to be enough to talk about it as if I actually have read it. HAHA SUCH SELF KNOWLEDGE YOU HAVE BROUGHT ME.
I feel like Deleuze and Guattari would be ok with that use of 1000 Plateuas, based on my reading of the first two chapters?
Hey, I did the same thing with Critique of Pure Reason in college! And also did quite badly. Tuns out it’s hard to bullshit a Kant essay.
FOUCAULT OMG
Seriously, I did a doctorate in a literature field without ever touching more than a bare minimum of Foucault. My advisor was definitely from the “if it wasn’t written in dead languages, IT’S CRAP!!!” school of thought, and I learned to nod knowingly at events where comp lit people would be present. No regrets, except that maybe if I’d been able to BS more convincingly about theory I’d have been more competitive on the academic job market, which is like saying, “Maybe if I’d been wearing flippers, I would have been able to navigate the pond full of crocodiles more effectively.”
(whispers) I’ve never read bell hooks. I take that back. I read that article she wrote tearing apart Lean In, and I’ve read her wikipedia page and lots of articles about her and how foundational many of her works are for feminist theory. But I’ve never actually read any of them myself.
….me too.
I’ve never seen Seinfeld and really don’t think I’m missing all that much. I’ve also never watched Titanic or Mean Girls for the same reason.
Books I have pretended to have read: Catcher in the Rye, Great Expectations. I somehow managed to be in the English class that always managed to avoid all of the ~*super greats*~ that were assigned to us, probably because the English teachers I had had better taste than that.
I have not watched much Seinfeld OR Simpsons…I used to feel bad about it because I thought I was missing something, but now when I catch reruns on tv I just kind of shrug…
Oh no, you are missing SO MUCH by not watching Mean Girls. So much. This is so more important than ever reading War and Peace, please see Mean Girls.
I have refused to watch Titanic on principle (though I have forgotten what principle it was, I stick to it).
Catcher in the Rye is stupid, at least once you’re not a whiny kid anymore. So do keep skipping that one.
I have only read A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist by Dickens and never intend to read any more. I haven’t read Catcher in the Rye.
I haven’t read Madeleine L’Engle (maybe one book when I was a kid) or Ursula le Guin except Lavinia and some short stories.
I’ve never lied about having read a book, but only due to fear of being caught. I HAVE lied about books I’m intending to read, though. I will happily tell someone to their face with no blinking or shame that I’m totally going to tuck into the large, terrible book they’re going on about as soon as I’m done with whatever crap I’m currently reading. I worked at a bookstore for a long time.
I’ve never bothered my head to read David Foster Wallace or any bro like that. I couldn’t reliably tell you what he’s written. I can’t particularly tell him apart from Jonathan Franzen. Who’s that guy who’s married to Ayelet Waldman? I had to look it up just now–Michael Chabon. I’ve never read any of either of their books other than Bad Mother. I’ve never touched a copy of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or even The Hobbit. Never read Les Miserables or A Tale of Two Cities, not very clear on what happens in either other than Anne Hathaway becoming a prostitute (??? maybe???) and in the latter….a woman knits and people get their heads chopped off. I think.
I’ve never read an entire book of poetry. The only poetry I’ve ever read was required in school. Never touched anything by Vonnegut. The last time I read anything Greek was a version of The Odyssey in eighth grade. I didn’t read The Grapes of Wrath. I didn’t read Of Mice and Men. Huge chunks of the “Classics” section at any bookstore is a gigantic avenue of BOOKS I HAVEN’T READ.
I’ve never seen The Office, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Weeds, or anything else anyone tells me is “ohmygod SO GOOD.” I have little patience for TV with few exceptions, same with movies.
You know what? I don’t care! I do not care if I never read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union or whatever it is, I care not even the tiniest bit if no scrap of antiquities-era story ever leaks into my brain. I’ll read what I want to read and all other are delightedly invited to bite me. (I’m looking at you, college boyfriend who told me that I couldn’t understand the world until I read Catch-22!)
I am absolutely 100% the same way with TV/movies. If I want to watch something, I will watch it, I don’t care how critically acclaimed it is. (Aside from the ones both you and I mentioned above, please see: It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Arrested Development, Orange Is The New Black, Parks and Rec, Community)
I really enjoyed OITNB and Parks and Rec I will love forever.
Arrested Development is not funny to me. I sat through the entire thing with friends and just….I didn’t laugh once. It’s not funny to me. Stop trying to get me to watch it. Stop.
I will probably cave and watch Parks & Rec and Community, because those look like shows I may actually enjoy, but I just cannot derive humor from humiliation (having lived it for so long) so that removes so much from the pool of “comedy shows that might actually be funny to me.”
Most of Parks and Rec is really really not like that, which is why it’s one of the few “sitcoms” I can watch. Later seasons kind of start to go to a mean place with the Jerry character though, so YMMV.
Parks & Rec is as close as we’ll ever get to a truly live action Simpsons. They share a lot of the classic season’s writers and the cast is amazing. Very little if any of the humor is mean spirited.
YEP. Every single one of my friends wanted me to watch Arrested Development, so I sat down and watched six episodes in a row and was like “….nah.” And I’ve never looked back.
I also hate Family Guy.
Family Guy is the worst. It really is terrible.
My problem with Arrested Development is that I come from a dysfunctional family, and while mine is in almost no way worse than the Bluths, I can tell you for a fact that if I were Michael, I would have left a me-shaped hole in the door after about episode 3. That show is surprisingly AWFUL to binge watch.
The most recent season, however, was actually pretty enjoyable. I suspect this is because they tweaked the format.
I always get David Foster Wallace confused with Daniel Wallace who I read for a couple of classes in college. So I’ll get into a conversation with someone, say that I’ve read his stuff and love it, and then I’m trapped.
I either have to admit that I can’t keep my authors straight or keep going and risk sounding like an idiot who doesn’t deserve to call herself an English major.
I do that all the time with the Brooklyny Jonathan writers – Franzen/Safran Foer/Lethem, plus Joshua Ferris sneaks in there too. I’ve read a handful of books between them and have a great deal of trouble remembering who wrote what.
Similarly, I have several times alleged that I have read Colm Toibin when I was actually thinking of Colum McCann.
I listened to like 3/4 of an interview with Colm Toibin thinking it was Colum McCann, so that is entirely believable.
Irish writers with similarly toned books… eh whatever, close enough. (I did like everything I’ve read by both of them!!)
WHY do all the Jonathans (and one Joshua) have the same name and the same writing?
To Kill A Mockingbird y’all. I haven’t seen the movie either.
I have tried to read this book five times. I’ve even bought myself a copy. Somehow, I just can’t do it.
Ooh, I was a bookseller for five years, so I kind of lied for a living? Or at least I often recommended books I had/would never read. When pressed, I might admit it…and I learned the handy euphemism “A lot of people loved it!” when I meant “Good Lord, no, I would rather claw my own eyes out than crack this one.”
And I’ve never seen The Wire or Gilmore Girls (the latter at least I can remedy soon). I cannot overemphasize my lack of interest in The West Wing.
see: “I’ve heard great things about it from customers!” and “It seems to be very popular, we’ve sold a lot of copies!” when both of those are bald-faced lies.
“We can’t keep it on the shelves!” (and thanks be to Jesus, because I’m not gonna read Eat, Pray, Love until I’m damn good and ready). I did eventually read it, though.
When I was in high school I desperately wanted to be more well-read than I actually was. I seemed like a bookworm, but mostly I was reading sexually explicit fanfiction. In between fics I carried around books I wanted to be seen reading, where I read the pages but barely comprehended what I was reading and gained nothing from it. It is in this manner I read two Dickens, Jane Eyre, Animal Farm, Huck Finn, the Lord of the Rings, Lolita, Anna Kerinina, On the Road, Catcher in the Rye, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Great Gatsby, The Bell Jar, and probably more. Occasionally I would read a Cliffs Notes so that I could hold a conversation about it. And now I can’t remember any of them at all, and it was a huge, pontificating waste of time. I also still continue to read sexually explicit fanfiction more than I read actual books.
Oh my god, high school you and & need to be friends. I am cringing about it but in hs I totally remember reading Sailor Moon slash OMG
If I need to cover for not having read something, I usually say something like “Oh, I haven’t read that in ages, I really should read it again.”
“Disprove reincarnation if you want to call me a liar!”
I have never read a word of GRRM nor seen more than the occasional screen-shot of the show, nor have I ever read anything by Joe Abercrombie or whatever, but I generally don’t tell people about that when I embark on a rant about pseudo-grim-dark pseudo-edgy rapey crap in modern fantasy written by men and use them as my key examples.
Also, whenever anyone mentions any of those big-deal mid-20th century writers like Mailor and Updike and Roth, I nod and look like I am having deep thoughts critical thoughts, and if pressed, say things like, “oh, I haven’t ever read *that one* for some reason.”
I couldn’t reliably tell you who wrote what novels with regard to most 20th-century male writers and do not care EVEN A TINY BIT. Updike? Is he the one who wrote Main Street? NO IDEA NO CARE
-I started 1984, got halfway through, and never picked it up again. I tell people I’ve read 1984.
-I have read SOME Audre Lorde and bell hooks, but apparently I give off the impression that I’ve read EVERYTHING they’ve written. I have made no attempts to correct this assumption.
-I’ve never read The Hobbit, but I say that I have so people will stop trying to tell me I *have* to read it.
Also, I never saw Friends AND I HAVE NO INTEREST IN EVER SEEING IT STOP TRYING TO GET ME TO WATCH IT
Here in Germany, I have a number of friends (hah) who are REALLY into Friends , like have bought the DVD set and get all excited about watching it. By now, I have probably seen every episode at least 3 times, because it is/was aaaaaaaalways on TV. So I’m just meh about it, and don’t understand the excitement AT ALL.
I’ve seen episodes but I have never purposefully watched it and do people get ever so angry if I tell them I have no interest in it.
I have a few friends whose opinion I otherwise respect who have regular meetups to watch Friends and talk about Friends and who always nag me to watch Friends. “It’s really good!” they say. “It’s funny!” they tell me. “Just watch it with us!”
I wasn’t interested in seeing it when it was one, the few scenes I’ve caught by accident indicate it is exactly the sort of thing I don’t find funny, and the more you nag the less likely it is I will ever watch it NOW JUST STOP.
Yes, this!!
I had a roommate in college who loved both Friends and Sex and the City and I really hated both of them. Friends is built on embarrassment-based humor and just no no no no no stop
This confuses me on many levels. I’m confused that people like Friends enough to try and talk you into watching it, but also that you’ve somehow managed to avoid it. I’ve seen probably 50 episodes of Friends without every making any kind of effort to see Friends, it’s just around, like stop signs and grass.
It’s required deep dedication to turning the channel over with an verbalisation of utter disgust.
It helped that we didn’t have cable in the 90’s when it was first on, and I always opted to leave the room and read a book if people who did chose to watch it.
I’ve maybe seen parts of about 10 episodes, but only by accident.
Props. I should probably try harder to avoid it, because my name is Rachel and my best friend’s name is Joey and the number of comments we get about that are enough to turn you off the entire show forever.
SAME. Friends and also Sex and the City. Please stop trying to get me to watch them. It’s not gonna happen!!
I’m finding Friends doesn’t age well— I imagine that in another 10-15 years it’ll be a pretty dated cultural reference — kids born 1994 or later don’t care about it (in my experience).
Aside from writing papers on books I never opened in college, I never claim to have read something I haven’t read. See, if I haven’t read a book it is for one of three reasons:
1. I have never heard of it
2. I don’t want to
3. I want to but haven’t gotten around to it
If the reason is 1 or 2 then I do not under any circumstances want to end up in a conversation about it because that would be really boring, and if the reason is 3 I don’t want to end up in a conversation about it because spoilers.
I am about to have lunch with a mentor/ colleague/ friend who I have repeatedly lied to re: reading all of Proust
It was my opinion in college that no one actually read Proust; everyone just said they read Proust. I got at least four or five people to cop to doing that. Now my friends are in grad school and claim to be reading Proust again, so either they’re actually reading it now or they’re more inclined to lie.
I am weird and kind of LIKE telling people that I didn’t read a book, especially if I didn’t finish it cuz it is terrible. (It takes a LOT for me to stop reading a book, it has to be pretty bad.) It usually makes dudes very sad, and that’s where I get my power. This is probably why I like writing critically about video games so much.
I am very open about getting halfway through Game of Thrones and putting it down and not ever picking it up again. That is information I willingly volunteer.
Also: “It usually makes dudes very sad, and that’s where I get my power” is the most wonderful thing I’ve read all day.
Dudes get so mad if you mention dropping Game of Thrones! Especially if you did it because you prefer the show, and extra bonus points if you did it because the female characters are more fleshed out than in the books. Naturally I bring this up as much as possible.
I have one friend who keeps insisting I have to read the books. He always says that if I like the show I’ll like the books even more, then he says, “I mean, some of the books are kinda boring and nothing really happens but you should definitely read them!”
He’s baffled that I haven’t been convinced to read them yet.
Game of Thrones sucks. I’ve managed something like 50 pages in the last two years. I never would have even picked it up if a good friend hadn’t given it to me for my birthday. But I do not give one shit about scheming family dynamics. (This is also why I don’t like Jane Austen. Putting a bunch of swords in doesn’t help! Give me rocket ships or vampires. Or possibly both. Then we’ll talk.)
Yep. I mean, I read fantasy novels to read about FANTASY: magic and dragons and monsters and so forth. Not to read about the political intrigue of horrible people that just happen to own swords. I gave it a couple hundred pages while on a train ride and never picked it back up.
I like Game of Thrones but I think this is a fair reason not to want to read it.
Any time a man tells me to read any kind of dicklit and I say ‘No,’ and they get angry at me, my heart fills with vicious glee.
DICKLIT omg
I GAVE UP ON THE WIRE AFTER THE SECOND SEASON.
And I’ve never seen The Sopranos or Mad Men and I never intend to!
I gave up on Mad Men midway through the first season because every character is a monster but not in an interesting way.
This. Exactly. The costuming was lovely, but everyone was awful. When I figured out that every episode made me angry and unhappy without actually being interesting. So I read the TLo recaps on the costumes and don’t ever, ever watch the episodes.
Yeah. Me too. It’s all just depressing!
Ugh, Mad Men. I tried but what is it about this show that everyone loves so much? Because I don’t see it.
The other day another woman told me to watch Breaking Bad and I said, “I’m not very interested in the inner lives of men” and she was pretty shocked. I’m calling it a win.
I am often encouraged to watch Breaking Bad and I am stealing your line for sure! Perfect.
SAME HERE. I am so glad I am not the only one. I don’t even think I finished the second season of the Wire. I don’t understand the appeal of Mad Men/Sopranos either.
I have never read a word of Dickens. Not one single solitary word.
I have not read Orwell, Wuthering Heights, any Hemingway, or Steinbeck other than East of Eden. I don’t know if I read Little Women when I was wee, or if I’ve just seen the movies a lot.
Oh, or Moby Dick. Skipped that one, apparently.
If there is any defense to offer, it is that my 9th grade English teacher was a drunk and I don’t think we read even one book during that seminal year in my reading career.
I almost feel proud to tell people I’ve never read Moby Dick? Like, I just want to recuse myself as soon as possible from any discussion about it and I don’t care that it’s apparently about Big Oil or Industrialization or the Search for the Self of WHATEVER.
I was told by an English teacher NOT to read Moby Dick. So I think we are both absolved.
This is good news.
I heard that the last person who hasn’t watched all of ‘The Wire’ gets murdered Shirley Jackson-style.
I don’t do this that often.
I did rank Warbound on the Hugo ballot despite having only read the prologue, but that was because I figured that needing two tries to get through the prologue told me more than enough about where I wanted to rank it.
The only David Foster Wallace I’ve read is “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” but sometimes at bars I pretend to have read everything he’s written so bearded Bushwick boys will like me 🙁 🙁 🙁
I’ve read a bunch of articles but no books, and DGAF, that’s okay.
I’m fairly sure the only thing I’ve read by him (aside from like 5 pages of Infinite Jest before giving up) was a piece in Gourmet about lobster. I definitely DGAF.
I’ve read “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”. I understood some of it and enjoyed none of it. I’m using this as an excuse to never read “Infinite Jest”
I will loudly insist that his best work is in Consider The Lobster, which disguises the fact that I have never read anything else.
I do this with songs. I’m culturally illiterate when it comes to music- I was raised on NPR and old folk music so i have barely any clue who was popular when I was a nerdy little kid. I especially don’t know the names of the songs or the people who sang them even if they did filter dimly into my awareness. People are always being like “I’m do you remember the somebody something song” and I’m all, “me too….man, that song. It’s been a while!” To this day, I couldn’t tell you what “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sounds like, though i’m sure I have heard it many times and I know it matters to know. I don’t pretend I’m actually familiar with the works of anyone anymore, but I try to avoid being put in the position of having to explain that I only know about 4 musicians from each decade. I am not a seeker out of music either. I like to listen to it, but I usually forget that I do so I do not seek new music to hear.
Plato. Anything Plato.
I got an A+ on a paper on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and I only read a few paragraphs. I like to think that I have the air of someone who’s read Roth and Updike, without actually having to go through that.
I had a violent disinterest in Tuck Everlasting as a child, based on people really pushing it at me, and now I usually pretend I read it and liked it ok because it’s easier.
I had a poorly set up crush on a PhD and was in this super intense marxist class and I cant remember the name of the class, but it was awesome….maybe like… “Violent Ecologies: The construction of race, gender and class in late stage capitalism” or something….here’s a thing from my professor’s bio: considering theory-praxis boundaries spurious, she attempts to bring about social change by addressing issues of power related to gender, race, and historical location, wherever she finds them – in the scholarly literature, in the classroom, and in various academic and institutional settings.
Basically I wrote a literature review interrogating the use of scientific disciplines to aid subjugation of women and non europeans during the formation of the age of rationalism. This was a class where people really threw the word “ontology” around. So my confession is 1. Even though I cited her. I never really understood Donna Haraway and the cyborg manifesto, and all I know about Heidegger I learned in the comic book about marx and wikipedia.
First, no one really understands Haraway, except maybe her spirit animal. I am not her spirit animal.
Second, I have successfully conned my way through several presentations (as both student and teacher) on 20th-century man-theorists relying solely on those comic books about them and wikipedia. This is as it should be, when the primary value of a theorist is to serve as a backdrop for better work that interrogates or shreds or generally addresses the insufficiencies of said theorist’s work.
“I do this with songs. I’m culturally illiterate when it comes to music- I was raised on NPR and old folk music so i have barely any clue who was popular when I was a nerdy little kid. I especially don’t know the names of the songs or the people who sang them even if they did filter dimly into my awareness. People are always being like “I’m do you remember the somebody something song” and I’m all, “me too….man, that song. It’s been a while!” To this day, I couldn’t tell you what “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sounds like, though i’m sure I have heard it many times and I know it matters to know. I don’t pretend I’m actually familiar with the works of anyone anymore, but I try to avoid being put in the position of having to explain that I only know about 4 musicians from each decade. I am not a seeker out of music either. I like to listen to it, but I usually forget that I do so I do not seek new music to hear. ”
I have EXACTLY this issue. I never lie about not having read things (sorry, Mallory!), but I’ve just given up trying to get people to understand that you really CAN live in and grow up in the world and not know which greatest popular hits are which. I was raised by parents (controlling Narcissists, not that that was the sole reason) who disliked popular music and only listened to NPR, folk music, and classical music (and mostly obscure classical music at that). I tried to rebel in middle school by liking Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul (that’s how old I am), but I was brainwashed too early and just don’t have a taste for most “normal” stuff. People are usually so shocked and disbelieving and sometimes offended when they’re like, “oh, you went to high school then! Remember X group?” And I’m like, “who?” Sometimes, I just say, “…yeah,” and change the subject, because it’s easier than trying to explain that I was listening to Finnish folk fusion and medieval song cycles about Robin Hood.
I read a lot of classics in my high school English class, but the only Dickens I’ve read was A Christmas Carol, despite owning five of his other books and having them displayed on bookshelves. I read A Christmas Carol with my family, every year since I was nine, and that is the only reason I got all the way through it.
I have never read The Invisible Man, anything by Daphne du Maurier, or most of the Russian authors. I hated Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles so much I told my reading companion at the time that if he made one more oblique American pop-culture reference for no good reason I would throw the book across the room, and then he did, and so I did. I never picked it, or anything else by Murakami, up again. I own quite a lot of Ian McEwan and I feel I ought to like him but I don’t, not really, and I’ve never finished one of his books.
More than the books I haven’t read I’m displeased with myself for the ones I powered through to the end because they were supposed to be masterpieces, but I didn’t like them and now can’t even remember the main plot because they were so god-awful dull. Life’s too short for books you hate-read because you’re supposed to know them.
I’ve only finished the first four Harry Potter books. I don’t actually lie about not reading the rest but based on the looks people have given me when I say this, I guess I should start.
I’ve never watched Breaking Bad but I’ve told people I’ve seen the first episode and didn’t like it if they find out I didn’t watch it.
SAME OH GOD OKAY I FEEL BETTER NOW
I read maybe an eighth of the fifth book but it was like Harry Potter and the Gosh You’re Emo Today Chronicles and I just couldn’t do it. The way I tend to explain it is that I love the universe that was created (which is true, the wizarding world sounds really interesting!) but the characters are so boring I just can’t get into it.
I really got into LOTR between the fourth and fifth book because I think there was a really long break? So I read all of Tolkien instead, and by the time Harry Potter came back, I just had no interest left.
My mother adored the Harry Potter books, but used to read The Hobbit to fall asleep. I admittedly got into Tolkien through the movies, but I loved the trilogy and read The Hobbit as part of my 11th grade summer reading. Loved it.
I’m with you on Breaking Bad! Bald Walter White looks like an older version of my boyfriend so I just can’t do it.
It took me a couple of tries to watch all of Breaking Bad and that was only because I’ve super loved Bryan Cranston since his Malcolm in the Middle days and the creator, Vince Gilligan was my hands down favorite X-Files writer.
In the end I’m not exactly sorry I watched it? But I wouldn’t exactly recommend it either. It’s just gets relentlessly bleaker and bleaker and everyone is acting their faces of but oh god so depressing. Plus it’s hard to discuss online because Walter White fanboys are the woooorst.
I never watched the final episode of Six Feet Under for similar reasons. After seasons of watching awful things happen to everyone I was so depressed that I just couldn’t.
I’ve read Hamlet, but in a language I don’t speak, technically. Not sure if it counts, then.
Klignon? Please let it have been in Klingon!
Sadly, no: Ukrainian. It’s all I could find on short notice!
Що?????
I have never read A Wrinkle in Time, even though my mother loves Madeline L’Engle and I think we had several copies in the house growing up, because I spent most of my life convinced it was a different book which I had already read. If asked, I will still answer “oh, yeah, I think I read it as a kid”.
I’ve also never played a video game other than a few minutes of Wii Mario Kart with my husband and Animal Crossing on the NIntendo DS, and I never care to. Video games hold less than no interest for me. I never played Mario, I never had a GameBoy, I barely even know how to work my husband’s PS3 and that’s only because the Netflix comes through it. I find it too difficult to remember which button does what and frankly most video games seemed to be centered on things I don’t care about anyway. I have spent more time sitting outside EB Games reading a book while my husband browses, I swear, than I’ve spent doing MANY other things. I just have absolutely zero interest there and people always look at me like “You never had video games growing up? You deprived child!” No, shut up, I preferred to read books and play with my stuffed animals and run around outside.
I can’t even remember the (many) books I pretended to have read—or implied I had read, or intimated oh-so-gently I had read—when I was younger. There must be dozens. Certainly there was a lot of great Russian literature on that list, and I still have never read any of it.
If I were to nod along to the presumption that I’d read anything these days, it would probably be intersectional feminism… but pretending to have read those, while still not absorbing the principles and narratives of them, would just make me look dumber! I’m not tempted to pretend to read Audre Lorde; I just want to read her.
And these days, I’m much more likely to say (to someone I give a damn about) “No, I’ve never read that, tell me about it.” Because that is so much more fun and engaging, and sometimes I learn something really neat—either about the book or about the person.
MALE CANADIAN WRITERS.
I have been carrying around “In the Skin of a Lion” by by Michael Ondaatje for like four months and cannot finish them.
Same for Sinclair Ross, W.O. Mitchell, Mordecai Richler.
Yes, I only want to read Canadian women for some reason. I’ll make an exception for Leacock.
Sound and the Fury, Old Man and the Sea , and Huckleberry Finn would be the top three on my list. I do this way more with TV shows, from the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Scandal and more that I can pretend to have at least seen a few episodes of.
edit: How could I forget that I still haven’t seen all of Firefly. I’ve seen like 3 episodes and I’m good on the rest.
I almost never read the whole articles on Link Roundup but proceed to comment on them anyways.
the shame
i’m not aloooooooone
sometimes i read it later?
The tabs are open, and stay open all day, which is what’s important.
that is basically the same thing as reading them.
I did not read probably half of the books I was assigned to read as an English major in university. This means, for example, that I have never read anything by Henry James, I only read Great Expectations by Dickens and I read maybe two chapters of To the Lighthouse before giving up. I have proceeded to never read anything by Virginia Woolf, even though I actually really like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Also I haven’t read Animal Farm but have definitely said I’ve read it because what else am I supposed to say to someone who asks if I have read Animal Farm?
I am FINALLY watching The Wire now, because I am tired of people yelling at me for 10 years about it. I just finished season three and it was good, but has not changed my life.
Pretty much everything I was supposed to read in 12th-grade English, because my teacher would split our reading assignments up into cantos/chapters/random chunks, assign groups to present on each part, and tell us “Now, you still have to read the whole thing!”, which obviously was my cue to think I DO NOT, read my assigned ten pages or whatever, and go on my merry way.
I CHOSE TO DO A REPORT ON HENRY JAMES AND THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY IN TENTH GRADE. I HEARD IT WAS A GOOD BOOK. I DID NOT/COULD NOT FINISH THE BOOK. I DIDN’T LIKE IT. I GOT AN A. I HAVE NEVER TOLD ANYONE THIS UNTIL TODAY.
I CHOSE THAT BOOK IN THE 10TH GRADE TOO, and it was soooo boring.
I still have the book with all the post-it notes marking where I left off (60 pages in) and where my “goals” were (every 100 pages thereafter) from when I freaked out 5 days before the paper was due and tried to trick myself into marathoning the rest of it.
I wrote the paper entirely based on quotes from literary criticism online, and stealing *their* quotes from the book itself, complete with page numbers that didn’t even match the copy I had.
are you me?!?!?
Edith Wharton > Henry James ALWAYS AND FOREVER.
MY TIME TO SHINE. So many confessions.
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Likewise, 1984.
Four years of Latin education. Never finished the Aeneid.
“Maybe because she had sparkling eyes…” YEP! GUILTY! This summer. “Oh, well, not Americanah yet, but uh, the other one, Yellow Sun, yeah, I liked that book.”
I have quoted Seamus Heaney to people. I have read exactly one of his poems. I don’t remember what it’s called.
Nabokov. I read interviews, I read wiki…never read a book.
I tell people I love Faulkner. I’ve only ever read As I Lay Dying and the Nobel Speech.
I have probably read 100 words of Fareed Zakaria, whom I snark regularly to my friends, ever.
This one I fessed up to recently, but I’d never even heard of Things Fall Apart until I finished high school.
Oh my god I feel better.
Also I have not watched Game of Thrones and I’m not going to watch Game of Thrones, idgaf.
Me neither. My other half made me sit through some episodes he was in the middle of not long ago, and after one horrible scene right at the beginning i got my book out.
People become so upset when I tell them I have no interest in it for some reason. They’re like, offended I’m choosing to miss out on it. There are approximately a billion other people you can discuss the goddamn red wedding with, just leave me alone!
Yes, what is it with people getting so upset about it? I watched half of the first season because everrrrryone was talking me into it but I just realized halfway through that I liked maybe two characters and it wasn’t worth watching the other 48 minutes of the episode just to see the bits I maybe would enjoy.
I marathoned the first three seasons only so that I could finally understand, like, the entire internet again. It was enjoyable enough, and I do understand the internet again, but I have no interest in reading the books or watching the fourth season.
I saw Guardians of the Galaxy for the same reason, except I didn’t really enjoy that.
See I feel like I know all the main things about Game of Thrones because of the internet anyway. Winter is coming, dragons, whatever. Don’t care.
I definitely saw Guardians of Galaxy because everyone everywhere was talking about Groot. I didn’t haaaate it, but also it was just OK. I did like Groot.
I have never read On The Road, not even in high school, because I think I was in AP the year the non-AP class read it? I don’t remember. I also have never read Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson or pretty much anything that a white man in his twenties has read. Although I have read lots of Ginsberg, even though he is a scumbag like the rest of them.
I only regret this because I am not as quick and able to make jokes about them.
Same, and same. Except I haven’t read any Ginsberg either.
I abandoned On The Road sometime in college but just recently re-started it and made it all the way through. I only read it because this woman I know was saying how great it was and how “it’s just like jazz, you know? you have to really feeeeeel it to understand it. A lot of people just don’t really GET it.” Obviously I took that as a challenge and read it and, no, I understand it. It just sucks.
I managed to get through the first two paragraphs of On the Road before I was rolling my eyes so hard it was making it physically impossible to read. And I recently managed to break the little man-heart of a Kerouak worshiper by telling him this.
The expression on his face was glorious and completely worth the pain of reading those two paragraphs.
The Voyage Out, Anna Karenina, A People’s History of the United States, The God Delusion, Ulysses – all *prominently* displayed in my bookshelf, yet unread.
My collection of Elizabeth Peters mysteries is exceedingly well-thumbed, though.
So yeah I’m a low-brow fraud.
Two days ago I lied about having read A Confederacy of Dunces. In reality, I have checked out A Confederacy of Dunces several times from the library, and proceeded read a few pages, give up, and return the book two weeks later. I just can’t do it.
I used to (aspirationally) tell people that Dostoevsky was my favorite author, despite having only read Notes from Underground. I’ve read about half of The Idiot, about a third of The Brothers K, and selections from C&P and a few others. Despite really loving those parts I have read, I always peter out.
I have never made it past like five pages of Confederacy. I don’t lie about it though, although I have definitely broken out Jeopardy answers because I remember like, the cover and the guy’s name.
Until about two years ago I had never seen The Sixth Sense, and yet when I told my friend this, he asked, “Wait, it’s 2012 and you still haven’t been spoiled for that movie????”
And I went, “Wait, what spoilers?” He kindly explained that it had a HUGE TWIST ENDING but not what it was.
Finding that out actually made me interested in it. I would never have given it the time of day back when I thought it was just a scary/sad movie about a kid who saw dead people.
My tenth grade English teacher was required to teach us Dickens. She hated Dickens. She divided David Copperfield into 3-chapter segments, with the intention that we would read small chunks of the book over the course of the year. After three or four chunks, she gave us a pop quiz: write one paragraph in the style of Dickens. She deemed our efforts sufficient to meet curricular requirements, and we moved on. Needless to say, she was a fantastic teacher.
In 12th grade, I managed to convince another English teacher that she must have misplaced my reading response journal for both A Room of One’s Own (which I read about three times) and Heart of Darkness( of which I read about three pages, because I was too busy re-reading AROOO), as my passionate in-class discussion of Woolf cold not have possibly been so brilliant had I not written extensively about her book, and I would never ever turn in an incomplete assignment so I must have written about Conrad as well. She concurred and gave me an A for the journal.
I can’t stop giggling at “AROOO”. Excellent acronyming!
I skipped a lot of the war sections of War and Peace.
That is the only way to read War and Peace and not hate it by the end. The war sections are just sooooooooo long. Also, all the pages where they inexplicably speak French throughout? I mean, I like French but knock it off, Tolstoy.
Can I also say that all throughout the first books, I was convinced that Count Volkonsky was the main character, so when SPOILER he died in the fourth book, I was hella confused. And then I read some helpful notes and realized that we were supposed to root for Bezukhov and I had not cared about him or his struggles one bit.
When I read War and Peace, I was in my “obsessive Napoleon fangirl” stage, so I paid more attention to the war sections than I probably otherwise would have.
But YES, I was madly in love with Prince Andrey and was heartbroken when he died! I was waaaay too invested in his relationship with Natasha. It was such a bummer to find out that stupid Pierre Bezukhov had been the protagonist all along. Hated him, HATED Natasha ending up with him.
I had a mad crush on Prince Andrey as well and his death almost made me stop reading because what was even the point when he and Natasha didn’t get to be happy!? Of course, the point was that Bezukhov was the main character but seriously, I loath that that happened. I couldn’t picture it and it felt a bit like he was a getting a prize in Natasha, like his whole being was rewarded which is ugh. I just did not believe it at all.
I’m so glad it wasn’t just me.
Yeah, is Pierre a self-insert for Tolstoy or something? I just don’t know what possessed him to decide “well, I’ve got this handsome, brilliant, noble, angsty romantic hero all set up…NAH, let’s toss him out and focus on the nutjob Freemason that thinks he’s destined to assassinate Napoleon, who is obvs the Anti-Christ.”
I read War and Peace in college, except for the second epilogue, and felt bad about it until the professor mentioned in class that he had not read the second epilogue until he was not only done with all his formal education, but hired, tenured, and preparing to teach this particular class. The professor also offered us all certificates saying that we had read all of War and Peace (exception made for the second epilogue). I felt better about it. Still haven’t read the goddamn second epilogue. Tolstoy can take his mystical theory of Great Man history and stuff it.
I can’t recall if I’ve ever pretended to read books I haven’t, but I definitely pretend not to have seen movies that I have. Mainly just to fuck with people. (and by “people” I usually mean Star Wars fans.)
Does everyone have those certain friends with whom you have to pretend you’ve read all books ever, because otherwise they’ll berate you, push their copy into your hands, or spend the next half hour recapping like they think they’re Alan Sepinwall?
Basically all of my friends, but with movies.
That would be my mom. For the longest time she kept buying me multiple copies of the same Dostoevsky and Tolstoy books because she loved them and wanted me to read them so I read 2 and then lied about the rest. I’ll get to them eventually maybe
My mom’s like this with Heinlein. Except I have no intention of ever picking up another book by him
No.
(Those friends need better reading of social cues.)
Wait I’ve never lied about not reading a book but because I’m arrogant, not self-actualized. I have no problem announcing the Infinite Jest was annoying nonsense based on 50 pages of it, the complete work of Nietszche is a crock of shit based on a couple of pages of “On the Genealogy of Morality”, and that Ayn Rand should never be read under any circumstances by anyone even if it’s just to ‘know your enemy’.
Never read LOTR, No David Foster Wallace fiction, ( his nonfiction is delightful), no Cormac McCarthy. I refuse to read 50 Shades of Grey.
True confession: I did not finish Great Expectations, but got an A on my paper by instead bringing tea cakes and tea and sandwiches to class, and sewing a dress like Miss Havisham’ s. The professor was delighted by my “creativity”.
I’m sorry if this is TMI, but a friend of mine left a copy of 50 Shades of Grey and I’ve been reading it in bits in pieces– and by that I mean, it’s become my backup when I run out of toilet paper.
I made it through the first three Harry Potters fifteen years ago. I am completely at ease with never consuming a piece of HP-flavored media again.
Me too! I was in teen rehab at the time and it was one of the only things available. For this same reason, I’m uncomfortably into She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb.
The only book I do this with is Moby Dick. I started it three times and stopped halfway each time, but I feel that this entitles me to have OPINIONS about this book. It also makes me a bad person.
BUT: as a sort of side category, I definitely buy books just because they will look good on my bookshelf, like I’m the sort of person who would have read that sort of thing. No, I have not read Finnegans Wake, although it is displayed in a conspicuous location.
Oh definitely guilty of your second point. I recently bought a book at Goodwill for this very reason, and even put it briefly back on the shelf before buying it, thinking, “but will I actually read this? Or am I buying it to look cultured and superior?” Obviously I want to look cultured and superior because it’s now on my bookshelf.
I don’t usually pretend, but it feels like a lie of omission to not start out every introduction with “My name is Jessica, and I’ve never read Little House on the Prairie, or Anne of Green Gables, or Pippi Longstockings, or Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret.”
I’ve also never seen the first Nolan Batman film, or the entire series of Twin Peaks.
The first Nolan Batman film was the only one I’ve seen. I had absolutely no interest in watching any of the others.
Maus. And yet I constantly point to it as the best example of a graphic novel that isn’t sci-fi or superheroes.
I was required to read Plato’s Republic for no fewer than four classes in college. I have never read Plato’s Republic.
I just had to resist the urge to lie to you about having finished Great Expectations, and having it be the only Dickens book I’ve ever enjoyed. I have never finished Great Expectations, though I did enjoy what I read. I hate Dickens.
I tell people that Vanity Fair is one of my favorite books. I’ve never finished that either.
I’m currently rereading The Night Circus for, like, the eighth time.
My favorite books are probably just novel-length fanfiction.
I am so ashamed.
FOUR classes? That’s just poor planning on their part.
Gen-ed seminar called “Wisdom & Deception” that was mostly about lies and leadership. Freshman writing seminar on art forgery that drew heavily on the Allegory of the Cave. Philosophy & Politics. Intro to Greek Philosophy.
My college was REALLY into The Republic, and then I decided to be a philosophy major (before I realized the error of my ways). Womp womp.
I am never going to watch Firefly.
I watched two or three episodes and have no plans to watch another one, but it feels safer in conversation to just tell people I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I caved to the social pressure this year but really, you’re not missing anything. People act like it’s the best thing since sliced bread, and no, it really isn’t, and I really wish Nathan Fillion would stop making everything about a show which ended 11 years ago.
I tried an episode or two, maybe?
I cannot stand Joss Whedon or anything he’s ever done and I will vigorously defend my opinion that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie is the best Buffy not only because Whedon hated what they did to his script but also because Kristy Swanson is a gem.
I loved the Buffy TV series, but that was 99% because I was head over heels in love with Giles as a teenager. For the rest of his stuff…if Anthony Stewart Head ain’t in it, I’m not watching it.
[Deep breath] The Scarlet Letter. The Crucible. 1984. Catch-22. Slaughterhouse-Five. Crime and Punishment. War and Peace. Anna Karenina. Othello. Actually, all of Shakespeare’s history plays with the exception of, like, the St. Crispin’s Day speech in one of the Henry plays. Of Mice and Men. The Grapes of Wrath. The Shopaholic series. Bridget Jones’ Diary.
You have to understand, I have conversed knowledgeably about ALL of these. I have expressed strong opinions. I have used them in arguments, and school papers.
Books I can legitimately claim to have read (because my eyes did indeed pass over the words) but truly DID NOT GRASP OR UNDERSTAND: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I was 11. Maybe 12. It seemed like a Thing to Do. And I did it.
I also read Gone With the Wind at age 8, because it was the biggest book in my house. I should not have done this. My parents didn’t know enough to stop me, because they hadn’t read it either; it came included in the leatherbound classics series my dad bought to make the bookshelves look nice. I missed a lotttt of what was happening, because I was 8, but even then I knew Ashley was worthless and Scarlet was pretty terrible herself.
Oh god, I thought of a mortal sin to confess as well: I HAVE NEVER READ WATERSHIP DOWN. I did see the very scarring cartoon version at a young enough age that I can remember that there were rabbits and it made me sad. THAT IS ALL.
I have never read Watership Down, but I often use a phrase from the rabbit language as a swear: “silflay hraka,” which means “eat shit.” It’s useful for situations where you can’t actually swear, but you want to convey hostility. When I explain what I’ve said, I never actually mention that I haven’t read WD.
I also read Gone With the Wind at way too young of an age, because no one ever paid attention to what I was reading. It…probably had a big impact on me, now that I think about it.
It led to me saying the very worst thing that Little!Lilah80 had ever, ever said.
At dinner a week or so after I’d finished GWTW, my dad (who was very into the Civil War) said something about slavery to the table at large. Bewildered 8-year-old lilah80 then said (OH GOD, THIS IS THE WORSSSSST THING THAT’S EVER COME OUT OF MY MOUTH): “But Daddy, some of the slaves loved their masters.”
I cannot describe to you in words the expression on my father’s face. He was an actual civil rights attorney. I realized instantaneously that I’d said something truly, truly terrible, although I wasn’t sure exactly what, and burst into heaving sobs.
My aghast parents gently worked out of me that I’d gotten this impression from reading Gone With the Wind, vigorously corrected me, and immediately committed themselves to paying more attention to what their child was reading. This resolution did eventually fail, because of the sheer volume of books I plowed through, but it’s been 25 years and I still think that that is the most appalled I have ever seen them.
THANK GOD YOU WERE AT HOME, though.
And that you did this at age eight and people assumed that this came from misinformation and not a Genuine Opinion Based On Facts! Because I have definitely heard some adults voice this opinion, and while I would like to believe that GWTW is the only exposure to history that they’ve ever had, it seems unlikely. *shudder*
Wow, you just affirmed my desire to never read Gone With The Wind so, so hard.
Oh my gosh I totally lied last night about having read The Crucible because I was talking to a fellow grad student and I wanted to look smart and not be all, “Well, I saw the one with Winona Ryder in it…”
I feel with plays you get a free pass for having seen it performed, stage or screen, because it’s a play, it’s meant to be seen, not read. I have never read The Crucible but feel fully justified in deeply hating it based on having seen one stage and one screen version.
With both this and the “books we hate” thread I expect that it’s going to be fun to read but then I get all upset and I’m like “WHAT NO YOU HAVE TO READ LORD OF THE RINGS OR I WILL CRY”. Who knew I was so sensitive about literature?
Confession: I read LotR and hated it. Like, I genuinely want back the eighteen hours of my life it took for me to read that series (which I did one summer when I had the swine flu in 2009). Mostly I want it back so I can spend that eighteen hours watching the movies.
Well I might as well confess that while I love the books, I really do enjoy the LOTR movies more. And that’s despite having grown up with the books, with my parents reading them to me as a good night story. . .which led to a childhood fear of wolves that lived in trees, because I think I got confused about the scene in the Hobbit when they all climb trees to escape wolves (oh and to clarify, my love for the movies does NOT include the Hobbit, what the actual fuck did they do to the Hobbit and WHY).
I said I read “At Swim Two Boys” two days ago but I really meant “At Swim Two Birds”.
I fervently believe anyone who says they’ve read all the Lord of the Rings books, including all the supplemental material, is a damn dirty liar.
There is NO END to the supplemental material and the appendices and all that nonsense. Even if you think you’re done, there’s someone out there digging more out of a desk somewhere.
I agree, because I think most of the people who have actually read everything including the supplemental material are a little embarrassed about it and don’t flaunt it. . .at least, my ex-boyfriend was when we first started dating and he told me that he wrote in his journals in a language he made up himself, because he was too embarrassed to admit it was Elvish.
I read 1.5 of the books and then got super duper bored. I am a filthy liar because I like to allow people to believe that I read them all, mostly so they won’t berate me for not even finishing book 2! How could I know they are boring unless I finish them!
My partner and my sister got in a huge fight on my birthday about whether you can really claim to have read all of LoTR without learning Elvish (Sis is Camp Elvish, Beloved is Camp Don’t Be Ridiculous).
It was a long time ago, but I think I at least skimmed all the appendices. I seem to recall that compared to the story, they were enjoyably concise.
Never managed to read the Silmarillion, though. I read the first page or two once, but that was it.
I HAVE NEVER SEEN STARWARS not any of them
There’s a whole TV show about that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I've_Never_Seen…
I love the original trilogy, but that’s because I grew up with it (Star Wars was the first movie my parents ever took me to. Apparently there was a guy in the theater lobby dressed as Darth Vader and I saw him and started crying).
Honestly, you’re not missing much. They’re not earth-shattering, there’s apparently one woman in the entire galaxy, and the acting is…not the greatest.
You’re so lucky.
I have never pretended to read a book. If I haven’t read something I’ll admit it. There are books a lot of people have read that I won’t, but I won’t pretend to have read them just to fit in.
please don’t take this the wrong way but when it comes, I hope your death is particularly humiliating and undignified
Congratulations, how wonderful.
“I find that books I have read continue to exist in my memory, and don’t feel the need to lie to anyone independent of me.”
— postpostmoderndad, AKA Helene in Paris
BUT HAVE YOU EVER PRETENDED TO NOT PRETEND
I spent last year studying abroad in France, which led to me doing a lot of disassembling about books. My two main categories of lies were:
a) English-language books my French friends expected me to have read (I would always nod along and be like, of coooooourse I’ve read Graham Greene!)
and b) French novels my literature professors expected me to know (of course I’ve read L’education sentimentale and Le Rouge et le noir!) One of my classes was on Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes and I spent a loooot of time pretending I’d read other novels in the Comedie humaine.
The most lyingest conversation about American literature I ever had was at a conference where I ended up sitting between a French academic and a British academic at dinner, and they quizzed me about Twain, Faulkner, Pynchon, Hemingway, etc. etc.and I kept desperately trying ot turn the conversation back to Willa Cather, who is pretty much the only Serious American Writer I have read.
I have never read Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables. or Wuthering Heights.
And I have no plans to.
I have read the first 30 or so pages of Atonement at least three times. That is all I have read of Ian McEwan, despite everyone’s continued insistence that not loving that book or him = not appreciating Great Literature. (Seriously, that book comes with SEVEN PAGES of excerpted critical acclaim and I still cannot with it.)
I remember being horribly, horribly sad reading that book. I remember none of the plot. I’m not really sure why people go around recommending that book to other people, really. I definitely don’t have plans to seek out more of his writing, what with the horrible sadness. I think I’ll be okay without it.
Murakami. I have definitely read some of it, but I honestly cannot remember whether or not I have read Wind Up Bird Chronicle, but I know I’ve read Norwegian Wood, so I just pretend that I’ve read both. Sage nods, etc etc.
This is just one of the many reasons I claim to be a terrible librarian. Being banned from my public library in 1st grade is another one.
STORY TIME
I checked out a Babar book in the first grade on a school trip, and damnit I loved those imperialist elephants so damned much I refused to give the thing back. Hid it, threw tantrums, the whole bit. The librarian was not at all kind and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome back to the Eastchester Public Library ever. Luckily I have an aunt who’s a librarian at the much better Scarsdale library and she hooked me up throughout high school. Pulled books for research papers, never got a single fine, could keep them as long as I wanted.
Also, is this the space where I can admit that I hated Bad Feminist? Like, had to stop in disgust 40% of the way through? And then unfollowed RGay on twitter? I couldn’t stand being lectured at, I got enough of that at Smith. I am hoping the fact that, as a “fun librarian” and therefore Mallory’s ideal reader, this fact doesn’t get me hammerbanned. I’ve been feeling too many feelings about the whole thing for too long.
The only Murakami I’ve ever gotten through is a collection of short stories and even then it was rough going.
Everything in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle was excruciatingly overdescribed, his characters often seem to be sadsack middle aged dudes with either harradin or milquetoast wives who just don’t ~understaaaand their specific manpain.
He’s basically John Updike but with more cats.
I’ve never read Murakami because my parents are Japanese and I know enough of the language that I feel like I should really read it in the original. But I hate reading in Japanese because I’m slow at it so I never do. However, a prominent literary critic wrote a review of Murakami’s latest for a major newspaper, in which he mentions me because I advised him on certain points of Japanese culture. He misinterpreted one of the things I said but never mind since I still feel I’ve earned enough Murakami points that I don’t have to read him anymore.
I pretended to read the entire bible one time. But, I kind of doubt anyone has read that thing.
Oh! I was making a ~valiant effort~ to read the bible once. I think I made it through Genesis before I gave up. BUT while I was still trying to read it, I also had to buy a new car. And I ended up going to this super Christian used car dealership with a super Christian owner/salesman. And we conversed at length about the bible (though I am myself an atheist, but I didn’t reveal that information) and then he gave me a great deal on the car I bought. And when I got home I discovered a bible in the backseat, his preferred translation I think. I still get Christmas cards from him.
I had a comic-book Bible!
It dropped most of the lineage and everything in the way of prophecies and acid-trips. And replaced them with modern-day morality tales about kids on skateboards helping old ladies across the street.
But I read the whole thing, dammit.
My boyfriend has read almost all of the Book of Mormon, even though he is agnostic, because it was fun to discuss with the Elders. One of our Mormon friends tried to explain to him that that’s not really what people do.
Every human being who was brought up Catholic is with you. I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings when I was elevenish, and during the part where she talks about making sure she’s following Deuteronomy, I had to drag my parents’ NIV off the bookshelf to see if the Book of Deuteronomy existed.
Bet Ned Flanders has.
I have, two years ago–it took me about six months. (It helped that for two of those months, I was spending seven hours a day on a train with only my Kindle to entertain me.) I tried to start over with a different translation this summer, but I got distracted; I think I’m still on Genesis.
For most books I haven’t read but want to pretend I have, I have a go-to line of saying ‘Yes I have, a long time ago though’ to cleverly (I thought) ward off any questions from suspicious people. I haven’t used this approach since being asked a couple of years ago whether I had read Howard Jacobson’s ‘The Finkler Question’. I used my standard response, adding adventurously ‘Not since I was very young’, only to be informed that the book had only been in bookshops for a couple of years.
This is beautiful.
I’ve never read any of Neil Gaiman’s work. I had to unfollow him on Twitter because I didn’t even want to read his tweets.
I’ve only read Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, and I hated the latter. I still cite Vonnegut as one of my favorite authors.
Infinite Jest is currently holding down the lid on my automatic cat feeder. I do think I’ll read it. Maybe. Someday.
Pynchon and Dickens. Well, that actually sounds hilarious out loud.
I’ve also started The Hobbit eight or nine times. Finally, before the movie came out, I page-flipped through something about barrels then skipped to the end to figure out who died.
I made it halfway through The Crying of Lot 49 because that was supposed to be the “easy” one. It wasn’t.
I had to read that for a class, and seriously, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK happened in that book? I am never reading any other Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49 was short, at least!
I make constant jokes about books awarded major prizes, such as The Giller or The Booker, but due to a limited tolerance for being made sad by media, have never read any of them – especially not the Blind Assassin, I just couldn’t see myself enjoying it.
I have read either Love in the Time of Cholera or One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have no idea which, so I just say yes if asked about either.
I have never read 1984, but I bet I could fake it enough to turn an English major on. I once wrote a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost and I don’t think I ever really read it. I suspect I am not alone in this feat. I have read only one thing by Neil Gaiman. I think. I am not sure. I saw the pilot to the Wire, but I think I was doing something else at the time, so I don’t know if that really counts. I have not seen nor read anything related to Game of Thrones. and my greatest most impressive feat is that I am a Mother of two, one of which is a five year old girl, and I have never ever seen Frozen, nor I have I heard a single song from that film. But hell could I fake my position on the movie. Thankyouverymuch.
Not only do I tell everyone I have read Les Misearbles, but I tell them I have read it THREE TIMES because that’s how many times I have checked it out of the library.
I’ve definitely made it up to (and through!) the Waterloo chapter at least three times. Making it beyond the Waterloo chapter has proven…difficult.
I’ve read, maybe, three of Borges’ stories and like two of his poems. None of his novels. I LOVE HIM, I just can only read about 200 words of him at a time.
I’ve never read Moby Dick, and never will.
Despite apparently being a SF/F writer, I’ve never read most of the so-called Golden Age science fiction, because so much of it has boring prose and is annoyingly sexist.
I have not read about a quarter of the books I actually own.
“I have not read about a quarter of the books I actually own.” THIS.
I pretended to read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in an attempt to come across as a precocious and highly literate highschooler. (Instead, I came off as pretentious and insufferable!)
I actually did read just enough of both that today I can say I am GLAD not to have finished reading anything by Ayn Rand.
Pretending to read books is like a mandatory part of an English degree, right? I’ve pretended to read at least half the books on my courses’ reading lists. And then once you graduate, you can continue to pretend to have read them because listening to your classmates regurgitate parts of them during scintillating “class discussions” is really the same thing as actually reading the books, right?
I don’t usually lie to people about what I’ve read, because I’m pretty blunt about my likes and dislikes. But I will smile and nod a lot if I just have no clue what someone is talking about.
However, I lie a whole fucking lot to my Goodreads account. I mark every book I’ve read at least 10 pages of as “read.” I know they have an abandoned category now, but I like seeing terrible books give me something for the time and effort I wasted trying to read them. Even if it was only a few minutes. I also like to pad my numbers, because I am shameless
I am an avid Jane Austen fan. My copies of Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion are battered and dog-eared. I have not finished Northanger Abbey, Emma or Mansfield Park. I have picked them up all, read a few chapters with delight, put them down to do something else and did not feel the need to pick them up again. I am simultaneously baffled and unconcerned with this fact.
I have also not finished Catch-22 even though I recommended it to someone as a good book.
I “read” Crime and Punishment back when I refused to DNF a book. By “reading,” I mean hastily skimmed so that I could get on to reading something way more interesting. I read plot descriptions now and cannot recall any of it from the book.
I wrote my Senior AP English mega-paper on the novels of Jane Austen (whom I love) without finishing Northanger Abbey, and I only barely finished Emma and Mansfield Park before starting. I never told anyone that. I’ve read them all since then, as well as her Juvenilia and Lady Susan, but I hadn’t at the time.
I’ve been pretending to have read Great Expectations for so long now that I might as well have read it
Also, it is horrible of me, but I am at the point where I don’t want to read anything about New York anymore, so I am putting future New York books on my future list of books I will pretend to have read. I am sick of New York, New York literature, and New York writers. If I flip to the back of a book and it takes place in New York, I will put it back on the shelf. If I know the writer’s biography says they live or are from New York, I will maaayyybe read it if it looks really really good. Sorry, New York writers.
+10000
I never want to consume a piece of New York-flavoured media ever again. I do not care a whit about New York.
My family is working-class and immigrated to Queens in the 1920’s. I don’t recognize the New York in New York-flavored media. New York-flavored media annoys the heck out of me.
I feel this way as well. “But,” say the Brooklynite white male writers, “New York is so alive! It’s a place where you need to have a dream to survive, and we’re all just running this crazy race we call life….together, and the rich and poor shop at the same bodega and the elderly black doormen are so wise and–” SHUT UP SHUT UP.
Nobody but members of the New York arts scene have dreams, except for the sad people from mid-Western towns who dream of being part of the New York arts scene.
I felt bad for having such a good time last time I was in New York because I hate New York-centric media *so much*.
I’m FROM New York, and I do not want to read more about it. I want to read about things I don’t know, sheesh.
I have “seen” a lot more movies than “read” books, because most of my friends and family are huge movie buffs. The genres I lie about the most are sci-fi and horror, because I can’t handle most gore and graphic violence and don’t care to explain that every time.
I also feel like, if I’ve seen enough parodies of a movie I can say that I’ve watched it, for example, Citizen Kane.
All of the critical theory you are supposed to have read in art school. Plus everything I was supposed to read in grad school, because I felt like such an imposter without the foundational stuff from undergrad. I made it through grad school by kind of nodding along and going ‘yeah…Benjamin…..simulacra….paintings: flatness…minimalism..’
I still feel like I am about to get caught in my deception by some visiting critic.
I take great pleasure in going, “God, have you even read Judith Butler?” to ignorant straight people, but I’ve only ever read her Wikipedia page and Autostraddle summaries. I am a horrible queer theorist.
I actually read all of Gender Trouble and I want that time back. You’re doing it right.
I don’t think I will ever finish watching Twin Peaks.
House of Leaves. After I’d dropped out of high school and was flirting with older men on the internet, one of my sort-of-paramours bought me a hardcover version of it and had it mailed to me. I bent the cover and returned it for Amazon credit, saying it was damaged.
Later, in college, I struck up a friendship with someone in our program by saying that I’d read House of Leaves and loved it. I bullshitted my way through a conversation about process and postmodernism and she’s still never found out that I haven’t read the fucking thing. (I just…a mirror? Really? All the different ink colors? I can’t. I tried, but I didn’t get further than the bit about the Thumper tattoo.)
I do love the album by Poe though.
The only times I’ve specifically pretended to have read books were for college classes. I couldn’t name many of them now, though I do still have seven or eight of them on the shelf at home. Perhpas soon I will go ahead and read one! (I will not.)
I do nod along with most things though, so probably people have all sorts of impressions that I am more familiar with various branches of literature, film, and art than is actually true.
I have never read Little Women. I’ve attempted it approximately five times, first as a 10 year old (the target demographic for the book!) and later as a teen and young adult. Boring every time.
But I loved the movie with Winona Ride, have been to Orchard House, and think Louisa May Alcott as a person is extremely interesting.
I also have not read Hemingway (possibly I’ve read The Old Man in the Sea? not sure) although I will strongly argue that he was a raging misogynist on the basis of a high school friend telling me so, watching Midnight in Paris, and reading internet comments.
Also super gay. At least in my head canon. This is of course why I love him but I think that everyone “needing” to read x or y author is silly so I support you.
I somehow had the misfortune to read FOUR Hemingway books and a few of his short stories in high school, and I can support this claim. The. Worst. I have read far too much Hemingway for someone who loathes him. And yet I still kind of want to visit his house in Key West, if only to be surrounded by polydactyl cats in Key West.
YESSS to the cat house field trip!
I work with a lot of very well read people who have Very Strong Opinions about books, and so not only do I not pretend to read something that I haven’t (pointless, will get called out), I also take a special delight in expounding upon the many, many, classic authors who I simply cannot stand because their books are BORING. Sometimes if I really want to freak people out, I say something like, oh, I don’t really read books by men. (Not completely true, but I do read more female authors.)
Here is a little exercise for you: estimate the number of books you read a year. Then estimate how many years you have left in your life (US life expectancy is currently about 79 years; women tend to live a little longer than men.) Multiply these two numbers together. This is the number of books you get to read before you die. Do you really want to waste time reading shit that bores you?
War & Peace – never actively pretended to have read it, I guess it’s just presumed?
Infinite Jest- pretended to have read it, in the misguided goal of impressing men (Ha! Men should be trying to impress ME, never the other way around.)
Never finished and/or understood some of the most important theory in my field, but can casually pretend to have had at parties, so, mission accomplie, as Derrida once said
Any Joyce – I think the real problem here is not my pretending to have read Ulysses, but the fact that Ulysses comes up so often in day-to-day conversation
Oh, and I’ve never read ANYTHING by J.M. Coetzee – pretending all over the place about him
The only Faulkner I ever read was As I Lay Dying. I have written papers on The Sound and the Fury and A Light in August. (And somehow passed that class! But just barely, because the professor was not an idiot.)
Use some goddamn punctuation, Faulkner.
Mhm.. I read that short story with the guy who has a really old 20$ bill and pretends to be rich.
And “Light in August” until where the guy gets sleepy sitting by the stream and nothing continues to happen..boooooring.
I keep getting stuck in Moby Dick. I may give up. The only Thomas Pynchon book I’ve managed is The Crying of Lot 49. Gave up on A Song of Fire and Ice mid-way through the first book (the writing is awful and the plot is so slooow). David Foster Wallace and other books that a certain kind of douchey literary guy likes because I just can’t. Huge swaths of popular science fiction/fantasy/mystery. Not genres I really enjoy. And I will admit it, even if it horrify friends. Kind of like how I have no problem saying that after 2 episodes, I gave up on Firefly entirely and I haven’t seen a single episode of Buffy.
Harry Potter- mic drop
I went to an Extremely! Conservative! Baptist! high school (Ask Me Anything) so if it was a great work of literature but had a swear word or mentioned sex, I probably haven’t read it. With the disconcerting exception of Wuthering Heights. I was a total bookworm growing up but didn’t read capital-L-Literature for fun. I read a metric ton of YA.
About 1/3 of the way through War and Peace I asked my dad (whose copy I was borrowing) whether it got any more interseting. He answered: “No, I pretty much just read it so I could say I did.” So I gave up with no regrets. (Ooops, that part was supposed to be a reply to Nicole).
I think most Toasties have more literary social circles than I do. I’ve never really had the opportunity to lie about reading a book, because books don’t come up that often and when they do it’s never with the assumption that of course everyone has read this.
I’ve never read Rebecca. Or anything by Margaret Atwood.
For a long time I pretended to have read all of Jane Austen even though I’d only seen the movies
Villette. When The Hairpin was freaking out about it sometime in 2011 I raced out and bought a copy from my university’s bookstore. I think I’ve read the first 7 pages 7 times. So… boring.
Every two weeks, I hear YOU’RE AN ENGLISH PROFESSOR AND YOU HAVEN’T READ IT HAR HAR HAR and I spit back “But I’m like a writing/RHETORIC guy, I didn’t have to read that in school so it’s ok right love me love me.”
Also: I’ve never read The Iliad, even though I taught The Odyssey to high schoolers.
Also: The only one of Asimov’s foundation books I read was the 2nd one, and I didn’t really like it, and that’s the only Asimov novel I’ve read, even though I sometimes go to fancy conferences for scholars of SF/F.
Also: I DID read lots of Heinlein and hated most moments.
I have never gotten past the first quarter-inch of Don Quixote, though I bought the hardcover Edith Grossman translation and everything. It became a really good place to store important things–cash, a social security card–because it was so findable on the bookshelf.
I mentioned elsewhere that a teacher told me not to read Moby Dick. I’m just remembering that a Spanish teacher (literally Spanish, I was in Spain and everything) told me not to read Don Quixote because it’s boring.
Excellent repurposing of the book, though.
I haven’t finished The Divine Comedy, but as far as anyone knows Inferno is my favorite book. I love it, I just can’t finish it.
Gravity’s Rainbow. I got to the gravity defying boobs of the one female character and was like, “…meh.” I liked Crying of Lot 49 but also found it a little misogynistic when I wasn’t getting distracted by all the wonderful weirdness. So…I probably won’t ever finish Gravity’s Rainbow. Will totally lie about it tho.
I never finished any Jane Austen novel, but I smile fondly and knowingly whenever they are mentioned in a conversation.
(I cannot even explained why I did not finish them. I did not dislike them or something – there simply were other books I liked reading more at those particular times. Will tackle “Northhanger Abbey” in October, though, bc it’s supposed to be kind of mock-gothic and therefore halloweeny!)
I love Austen and yet I’ve started and restarted Northanger Abbey at least 8 times in the last 4 years. I don’t know why, either…because I enjoy it, but I never seem to get past page 100. I always get distracted by other books. It’s the only Austen I have left to finish and yet I CAN’T. I even read Mansfield Park despite not really enjoying it! Maybe I should try to read it in October as you suggested.
last year i carried around a copy of moby dick for WEEKS because i’d made such a big fuss about reading it and didn’t want anyone to know that i’d quit after 100 pages
in my defense it was way less gay than the first ten pages lead me to believe
Yeah my experience with Moby Dick was basically “wait I thought this was about a whale what is with this guy having gay sex in an inn I mean I’m not opposed to that I’m just confused, where is the whale” then I lost interest.
Read that as “gay sex with an inn” and was intrigued until I realized what was up.
The only Vonnegut I have read is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which is like 35 pages long and the only salient part I remember is that two-foot long pube. I don’t claim to have read any of his other stuff, but I have answered in the affirmative when asked, “Have you read Vonnegut.” I am sorry.
Never read a word of Jane Austen. Fuck her. Never got past the murder in Crime and Punishment. Read one chapter of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (I don’t believe anyone on earth has actually completed that book.) Catch 22. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, oh please.
I made myself read the entirety of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and retained exactly nothing so I don’t know, I don’t feel like I get to say I read it, you know?
I have read the Brothers Karamozov. I remember nothing.
I have also attempted to read Hemingway. I am bored by approximately page 5 in any attempt, and For Whom the Bell Tolls has sat unread on my shelves for the last 15 years.
I stopped reading Catcher in the Rye 25 pages from the end and will never finish it.
I have never read any Updike but refer to things as “Updike-esque” all the time.
I have never read a word of the Brontes, but definitely imply that I have.
I gave up on Catcher in the Rye at about the same place and just Sparknotes’d it instead. I think that was the first time I did that in school because I was a goody two shoes. That was also the first time I thought “this is BULLSHIT” about something considered a classic, I think.
I never finished “Crime and Punishment” and I dont’ know why, because what I read was amazing. I have tried and failed to complete many other Dostoyevsky works, too, and all except maybe The Adolescent I enjoyed very much. I think I just get distracted by trying to understand all the cultural references and like, what and why everyone is saying in French and all the names and it gets too much and I bail, fully intending to pick it up later and then… not. I’ve had a handful of conversations about these books I never finished and one of these people I talked with really did not care for me after that so I’m pretty sure she could tell I was faking it, though she never called me out, and that really annoyed me.
I got to Tom Bombadil in Fellowship and then skipped most of it and moved on to Two Towers and never really looked back. I want to re-read it sometime in full because I’m older now and maybe I could handle it more but honestly I don’t feel too bad about this, even though I present myself as a Tolkien nerd.
I also skimmed most of The Great Gatsby and A Separate Peace in high school, the latter I felt okay with because Liss and Mona Simpson mocked it. The former I just could not get into, and I had been sick when I was supposed to read it. Still got a good grade on it because it’s the easiest book in the world to fake reading, and I felt okay with this because I really hated my English teacher.
This I Haven’t Read Any Serious Russian Lit And I Don’t Care bandwagon is getting very crowded, but you guys are going to have to push over.
I have never even touched any of the russians, I don’t think I ever will.
Never finished Lolita.
I have tried three times but to no avail to read The Lord of the Rings. I give up, you win Tom Bombadill.
I’m halfway through 1984 and have no intention of finishing it.
I haven’t read any Zizek.
Infinite Jest is my Kindle for months.
I still haven’t read Gone Girl, I’m so sorry.
Most of the men sucking Chuck Palaniuk’s dick has never read Fight Club either, why should I bother?
I allow everyone to think I’ve read most of Shakespeare, but I only read Hamlet in 7th grade.
I tell people “I looooove Cormac McCarthy,” but I’ve only ever read No Country For Old Men and heard people talk about his other work.
I never finished One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
I suppose this counts, but I was forced to read An American Childhood in high school and got ten pages in, decided I loathed it and gave up. Seven years later, I picked it up by accident and devoured it, so I guess that was a lie I corrected.
I have discussed China Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer at length without ever having finished a book by either of them. I couldn’t even make it a chapter into Perdido Street Station.
I have never read Catcher in the Rye.
I made it through an undergrad senior thesis on The Canterbury Tales without having read all of the Canterbury Tales (I’m pretty sure I read all the good ones with farts though).
I frequently recommend books by John Scalzi that I have not yet read. Some day I’ll be in the mood for Redshirts, I swear.
I have managed to give off the impression that I am an avid comic book reader, but mostly I read Saga and webcomics. I only know about the Marvel comics because the movies have cute boys in them. I am mildly ashamed of this, but not as ashamed as I should be.
I just remembered that I have not made it through anything by Ursula le Guin either, but I have nodded sagely through many discussions of Earthsea. For shame!
I recommended Redshirts to my dad and he loved it and then he bought it for me and now he wants to talk about it but I haven’t read it! Terrible.
I was assigned Watchmen for my comic book class. I did not wish to read it, but knew I needed to familiarize myself with the plot in order to do well on the final exam. So I did what I had once scorned my classmates for doing: I downloaded the movie, intending to watch it instead. About fifteen minutes in, I glanced at the timer and was startled to discover that the movie was three and a half hours long. “That CANNOT be right,” I thought. “Surely NO ONE was willing to sit in a movie theatre for three and a half hours. Not even Alan Moore fans.” After a bit of googling, I discovered that I had, in fact, downloaded the Watchmen Ultimate Cut.
Reader, I watched the whole thing.
(And then there was only one Watchmen-related question on the exam after all. I felt so cheated.)
There are lots of things I haven’t read – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and all the Russian authors, for example – but I specifically remember studying ‘Hedda Gabler’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’ in high school, and not reading them. Still never have. There may be more high school books I studied without reading them, but these are two that I remember.
Neverr managed to finish the Trial, and fell asleep watching the movie version more than once, but I did read quite a few of Kafka’s short stories, so felt fine to pontificate about Kafka, because I was a teenager at the time,
I earned an honors degree in Latin American Literature IN THE SPANISH LANGUAGE based on papers I wrote analyzing novels I hadn’t read, because they were a) in Spanish and b) sadly not interesting to me.
I have dragged those novels around with me for the last ten years out of a sense of shame and the belief that really! Someday I will read them! (Spoiler alert: I will never read them.)
Also, Television. All of it. I read all of the “spoiler alert” columns so I can participate in casual conversation without watching the shows.
I worked in a book store for four years. The list of books I have lied about reading is probably longer than the list of books I have read.
(One day I will get around to reading The Catcher in the Rye, I swear! And To Kill a Mockingbird. And The Great Gatsby.)
I have started The Lord of the Rings at least thrice but I never get past the counsel at wherever and why are there so few women characters and so many boring songs I quit. Even though I was reading my dad’s pretty leather-bound edition. I am pretty sure I’ve seen only one of the movies, but I have seen some of the dvd bonus materials for them.
Also never finished Gilead even though I would obviously love it and I have a copy somewhere.
I have read every book of the actually really bad Wheel of Time series except the last one, where I grabbed a torrented copy, and used Find to work out who’d died in what manner.
Either Silas Marner or The Mayor of Casterbridge in 9th grade lit. Even at the time I wasn’t sure which one I pretended I’d read, and which I actually read but remembered nothing about.
I basically have read almost no books. I mean, I have started a lot of books. I have gotten well into a lot of books. But I seriously feel like I’ve only finished like… fifty grown-up books in my lifetime. Maybe I’ve finished more. But do I remember them? No.
I haven’t seen a lot of iconic “Teen” movies and only parts of a John Hughes movie. Even as a teen, I couldn’t bring myself to care about suburban teenage angst.
I kinda want to hate watch a couple though.
It seems to me that in the society I frequent it’s a worse sin to admit you have time to read books than to admit you haven’t read well-known ones, but given that… sure, lots of them, of which only Moby Dick and Lord Jim spring to mind at the moment (I’ve read the first page or so of each). Oh, and anything by all the Russians. Or Hemingway. But there are so, so many books I’ve read but remember little or nothing of, such as The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Catcher in the Rye (which admittedly was assigned for English class 37 years ago so I probably have an excuse).
I have not read How to Suppress Women’s Writing though I quote it often.
I made it out of the University of Mississippi with a degree in Southern Studies without ever having read a Faulkner novel. But I could rep some Absalom, Absalom like nobody’s business.
I have never read Catch 22 or A Clockwork Orange or Infinite Jest or…anything by Mark Twain other than maaaybe a chapter; I wrote a paper on Bleak House without actually finishing it; I’ve never even tried to read any of the Russian classics. I was an English major but my focus was mainly on reading Jane Eyre as many times as possible.
The Canterbury Tales. So guilty.
I enjoyed Infinite Jest, it’s a very unsatisfying book and as far as I can tell it is meant to be.
I did not finish A Farewell to Arms. In fact, I did not even finish The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I did read all of The Old Man and the Sea, and it is my firm belief that it’s the only Hemingway worth reading. There are no women in it for a deranged English teacher to hold up as Interesting and Revolutionary when in fact they are misogynistic cardboard cutouts, which makes it a tolerable taste of Hemingway’s Terse Prose.
I did not finish reading Journey to the End of the Night. I read small selections of Blood Meridian and decided knowing what was going on in that lecture was not worth the emotional effort of reading it.
I did not finish A Tale of Two Cities and I am reasonably certain I skipped large sections of The Life of Pi, but they may be missing from my memory due to extreme sleep deprivation around the time I was supposed to be reading it. I did not finish Love in the Time of Cholera, even though I enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude, even though I am not certain why I stopped. I think I read all of My Antonia.
I have not read A Light in August or The Sound and the Fury. I read at least some of As I Lay Dying, but the best thing about Faulkner is how much he hated Hemingway.
I remember almost nothing about Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I think I read it. I tried, anyway, but I liked Dubliners better.
I have not yet read Maddaddam, so if we are talking about Margaret Atwood please do not spoil it for me.
The first book I did not read was some adaptation of Rip Van Winkle. The first book I should have not read because it made me scared to sleep was Hocus Pocus. The first book I stopped reading because I recognized that continuing to read it would traumatize me was Blood Moon.
You know what I HAVE read though? The entire series of The Cat Who… books as of 2004. All of The Dragonriders of Pern. A shocking number of Babysitters Club (the main books and the spinoffs) and Sweet Valley High books. I read the first four Harry Potter books upwards of ten times each. I have read most of the Wheel of Time books, which become at least 10x more interesting if you read (as I do) most of the characters being PoC and many of the women queer. Points lost for the binary gendered structure of the magic system, points gained because there are a ton of ladies and they spend a lot of time being GREAT in a lot of ways and all the boys are like “I DON’T KNOW, HONOR AND DESTINY OR SOMETHING. I DO WHAT I MUST. IT IS MY BURDEN. WHIIIIIIINE.” and then the ladies stick them in corners like okay do that over here, the wall cares a lot about your pain, we have to go get some stuff done so the world doesn’t erupt in evil.
I haven’t seen a bunch of the most recent seasons of Doctor Who but I will, with absolute certainty, talk your ears entirely off about how Amy and Clara and River are bullshit and deserve better. And then I will cry about the second Doctor and what the timelord High Council did to him and ESPECIALLY to Jamie and Zoe because I have a LOT of feelings about that.
the wall cares a lot about your pain = great misandrist motto
I bought a used copy of Infinite Jest and just looked at it. For months, it loomed ever larger and more ominous on the shelf. The pages themselves seemed to grow. I quailed. In the end, I gave it back to the library booksale.
Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” about going on a cruise is delightful, however.
The Aubrey-Maturin series. I love nautical stuff and I’m told they’re delightfully homoerotic, but…I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW!
I have never read House of the Spirits, but I also have not seen the movie, so I feel like that evens things out.
Infinite Jest can go fuck itself. I read the first 7 pages and was suddenly 55 and needed bifocals. No way.
I tell people that I have read The Telephone Book BUT I HAVEN’T! AND I WON”T. I will just keep this proof that I stole from an ex boyfriend forever and ever, eternally not reading it.
My friend lent me her copy of Atlas Shrugged when we were 14, it’s been 11 years, I haven’t gotten past page 10. I also have not returned it. This has not stopped me from participating in intense debates about it.
I have started to read The Plague four or five times, I put it down about 100 pages in and abandon it for a couple of years. I LIKE THE BOOK WHY CAN’T I FINISH IT?!?!
I have lied about reading Where the Wild Things Are.
Seriously, it’s supposed to have like 10 words, who does that?
I made it half way through The Great Gatsby before I dropped it and haven’t read any other Fitzgerald. I’ve never read Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, or Faulkner. I’ve never read any Kerouac or Burroughs, though I’ll talk about Beat lit like I’m some kind of authority on it.
One of the things I love about The Toast is having absorbed enough misandry now to dismiss nearly the entire Western canon with a sniff and a “white men have sure had a lot of feelings”. So freeing.
even though tweeted by a man this is…not inaccurate:
I didn’t just fail to read Mill On The Floss for Intro to English Lit, I went on to argue passionately about it in the following class. I don’t recall what my point was, but I made it and I believe that I got away with it. It was probably some variation on The Author Is Dead, which I was very excited about at the time.
I obtained a BA in English without ever reading Shakespeare. That was 12 years ago, and I still haven’t.
I still appreciate the vision of the future in Infinite Jest but only to the Year of Depends Adult Undergarments. I couldn’t get past a third-ish. It was the tennis players at prep school that stopped me in my tracks. And I am stymied by Brit Lit i find it very very hard to get through the British countryside.
Dante. I have not ever managed to read the Inferno, much less Purgatorio or Paradiso. Every time I pick up an edition in English (can’t read Italian) it’s just so … gummy. If anyone wants to recommend a decent translation, please fire at will.
The Power and the Glory. It was the last book on my syllabus for AP Lit, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t read anymore dead white dudes. The whole class was tailored around English Lit and the ONLY female author we read through the 500 YEARS OF LIT WE COVERED was Austen–and we spent barely two days on her because my teacher didn’t care for her (I, meanwhile, loved her beyond words, and was pretty ticked about how flippantly he discussed her work/influence on British Lit). All the other authors we covered got almost a full week of coverage. AND I had to suffer through Harold Pinter before the year was over. Bah.
I’ve never read Death of a Salesman or anything by Eugene O’Neill. I majored in theatre arts, so that’s really embarrassing. I’m also a comic book nerd who’s barely read anything from the Golden or Silver Age, and a Doctor Who fan who’s never sat through an entire serial from the classic series.
I have pretended to read the entire works of Jane Austen on multiple occasions. I have only read Pride & Prejudice all the way through.
Also, Anne of Green Gables.
(I feel worse about Anne.)
I TOTALLY lied about reading Jane Austen’s entire canon (minus P&P) until I was 27 and found audio versions of them on librivox and then I loved it. But I lied for YEARS because I wanted to be friends with smart women! Ditto Jane Eyre
I had a professor at my undergrad who adored Thomas Hardy. ADORED. He would always recommend that people read Thomas Hardy and talked about how he knew EVERYTHING about women from reading Thomas Hardy’s books.
I refuse to read them unless I find a good reason to do so.
Also, for the same professor: I did an in-depth character analysis and a historical/contextual presentation for the Importance of Being Earnest and Don Quixote (respectively). I didn’t actually read either. I successfully bullshat my way through both.
If everything he knows about women comes from Thomas Hardy books, he doesn’t know much about women. I made it through all of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and I wish I hadn’t.
harry potter + henry miller
I hate people who say variations on ‘You’ve never read Brett Easton Ellis?! But you’re an English student!!’ in tones of amazement and disdain, often followed up by patronising advice.
Yes, of course, not having read Brett Easton Ellis does negate the fact that I’ve read Paradise Lost, pretty much all the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, every poem and play T.S. Eliot ever published and most of his criticism, that I’ve translated Beowulf and all the Anglo-Saxon battle poems into Modern English, read the whole of the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde — yes none of this means anything and I am clearly a failure as an English student because I haven’t read that one cult classic that you happen to like.
I, too, have never read Infinite Jest, though I once took an online quiz that told me that I write exactly like David Foster Wallace, which made me less inclined to read it than ever.
In my second year of college, I decided that I would dedicate myself to never reading Anna Karenina, and decided it would be one of my “things,” like I was a character in a Sundance movie.
Essentially, as soon as someone tells me that I would love something, I refuse to do it, on the basis that I do not want to be predictable.
My boss lent me The Goldfinch, and I lied about reading it.
I read the first two sections of Plato’s Republic, and then realized there was no point. I still bring up the allegory of the cave in arguments, though.
I have never read Judy Blume, but acknowledge that she was so important to my adolescence.
I have only read three books by Margaret Atwood, but I have a strong opinion about her.
I have only read one book by Nietsche, but I have spent so much time around people who have read Nietsche and won’t stop talking about it that I really don’t need to do any work myself.
One of the best essays – on feminism, actually- I’ve ever written was about 2 books I couldn’t be bothered to read!!!
I had a friend who would happen to mention a book he liked and I always would have read it — I don’t know why, I haven’t read THAT much — and he still thinks I am a Legit Genius. Which is fine by me.
I have not read or seen The Help, yet use it constantly as an example for how Hollywood whitewashes non-white history.
I read what interests me, if it’s classical (most of it is not), great, if it’s not, pish posh…… Life is too dang short to waste time reading rubbish that others think you should read when there is already not enough time to even put a dent into the bookshelves full of unread lovelies starring out at you from your shelves everyday!
This thread is making me sad, as it has convinced me that a) everybody hates most of the books that I love and b) people are probably lying to me when I talk about books I like and they say they’ve read them 🙁
So this is why I’ve been waiting in vain for “Texts from Camille Paglia.” Am I allowed to recommend her as a rich vein of satire material?
-I pretended to have read Life and Fate. Important stuff happens, probably.
-I pretended to have read Pride and Prejudice.
-Whether to pretend to have read Sense and Sensibility in an exculpatory remark to the previous bulletpoint was a gametime decision for this reply.
-I have never gotten further into Tractatus Logico Philosophicus than about 2.1.3.37 or so-ish
-I pretended to have read Dune for about eight years before reading it. During that time, I may also have pretended to have read some of the sequels, which I haven’t and probably won’t.
-I have pretended to be reading Word and Object, whereas what I was doing in actuality was staring blankly into the middle distance beyond the pages of Word and Object.
I KNOW that i’ve read some Hemingway, maybe even multiple books, but damned if I remember anything at all about it. He’s being terrible t o the nicest, blandest woman on earth? Something like that.
Well, I haven’t read much either, but The Sun Also Rises is indelibly inscribed upon my consciousness since I read it aloud, on tape, for another student with a disability that prevented them from reading it.
*ahem*
Women are boring except for this one woman who is like the coolest girl around because she’s one of the guys but she’ll break your heart. No one can talk about our feelings because we are drunk all the time and also Bad at Feelings. Bros are the best unless they are Jewish or black. Gay guys are basically ladies OMG SO GROSS but I love my straight male friends that I like to travel with and be alone with and shave with and fish with and no one understands you like another man, no one but NO HOMO THO. BEING IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN IS LIKE BEING CASTRATED LIKE FOR REALS SERIOUS IT’S NOT A METAPHOR BUT NO HOMO THO.
So anyway feel free to interpret on your own but now you have some material to lie about! So yay!
I recommended Good Omens for years to people without having bothered to read it and then I finally read it was like “…eh.”
I don’t lie to actual people (now that I am not an academic and don’t have to pretend to have read all of everything forever at cocktail parties and in seminars) but I tend to fudge on those Great Books quizzes, in that sometimes I only got one-third of the way into a Great Book and yet I pretty much know how that one goes and probably could pass an essay exam on it, if it wasn’t a very specific one.
Being an academic is like advanced training in retaining your own mental version of Cliff Notes out of two quoted references and a plausible timeline.
I do that too! Even sadder, I never post the results, so what’s with my compulsion to lie to the anonymous quiz?
I have nodded knowingly in conversation when people talk about Harry Potter, both the books and the movies. I did read the first one in high school (I think), but I don’t remember anything about it beyond the magical train station, so I may not have actually finished it.
‘Excitable Speech,’ by Judith Butler, which was assigned in a rhetoric course in college. I tried, but come on. I also have never read ‘Don Quixote’ despite saying I did in multiple Spanish courses and graduating with honors in the degree.
When I was in sixth grade, I said that I saw ‘Titanic’ before I did so I would seem cooler and more exciting than the other girls. I also, for reasons that I no longer recall, made up how it ended when my friends asked me and it turns out I made it up wrong. But whatever, I’m a doctor now, the hell with those sixth grade bitches.
I love these book threads. Please don’t ever stop.
I never read the Grapes of Wrath and yet lead my classmates in an intense discussion of it in high school. I do know about the chapters with the turtle, however ,as that is how my sister and I reference the book to one another (“You know, the book with the turtle?”)
Um, that’s adorable!
I never read the Grapes of Wrath and yet lead my classmates in an intense discussion of it in high school. I do know about the chapters with the turtle, however ,as that is how my sister and I reference the book to one another ("You know, the book with the turtle?")
Your made a solid decision. The early chapters at least have some semblance of a decent pulpy mystery, but once the philosophizing happens, it's all downhill. There is a hilarious sex scene late in the book where some characters have sex in formalwear in a train tunnel, but there's also the John Galt monologue, which I'm pretty sure gave me a concussion.
i haven’t pretended that i read something since college. and that was only for assigned reading i didn’t want to do. so you will not want to engage me any further. however, i will say that i have started Ulysses several times. well, 3, to be exact. and, at approximately 150 pages in, all three times, the phrase “fuck this” wafted through my mind.
fuck that book. fuck it right in the dust-jacket.
I read a decent portion of The Catcher in the Rye and found the narrator so obnoxious that I put the book aside and have pretty much vowed to never finish.