Open thread: What are the great unread books?

Umberto Eco has admitted there are some books he's saving for another life. How about you?

"Who has actually read Finnegans Wake I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?" asks Umberto Eco, alongside script-writer Jean-Claude Carrire, in a new book on the future of literature.

"There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life."

Do you agree? Is there a collection of books lingering on a dusty shelf in your living room, never to be looked at? What is your paper white whale?


guardian.co.uk Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poetry puzzles

Who is Ozymandias? Why is Coleridge's Lime-Tree Bower his prison? And what is the proper spelling of The Waste Land? The solving of a poem's puzzles is one poetry's greatest pleasures In the late 1990s the indefatigable John Sutherland produced a series of entertaining books about puzzles in fiction (Why is Frankenstein's monster yellow? Where does Fanny Hill keep her contraceptives? Who gets what in Heathcliff's will?). The books were initially linked to reissues of novels in the Oxford World's Classics series, and I was struck at the time how beautifully these little inquisitions of Sutherland's, often on apparently absurd or marginal issues in the text, got readers reading again, with attention and interest. What Sutherland was doing, in effect, was smuggling serious literary criticism into an apparently superficial form of writing. Perhaps, in a sense, he was even re-inventing literary criticism. In this era of academic theorising and the downsizing of m...
Keep reading

BAFFLING BINGO MYSTERY DAY: 10TH ANNIVERSARY - A REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

Image
WELCOME TO BOOKIN' WITH BINGO'S " BAFFLING BINGO DAY " I'M EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE THIS WEEK'S SPECIAL MYSTERY BOOK CHOICE IS..... 10TH ANNIVERSARY BY JAMES PATTERSON & MAXINE PAETRO ABOUT THE BOOK: For every secret... Detective Lindsay Boxer's long-awaited wedding celebration becomes a distant memory when she is called to investigate a horrendous crime : a badly injured teenage girl is left for dead, and her newborn baby is nowhere to be found. Li! ndsay di scovers that not only is there no trace of the criminals--but that the victim may be keeping secrets as well. For every lie... At the same time, Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano is prosecuting the biggest case of her life--a woman who has been accused of murdering her husband in front of her two young children. Yuki's career rests on a guilty verdict, so when Lindsay finds evidence that could save the defendant, she is forced to choose. Should she trust her best friend or ...
Keep reading

CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed by Frdric Chaubin review

These images of Soviet architecture from the Brezhnev era are simply out of this world Soviet brutalism is not something traditionally thought of as beautiful, but Frdric Chaubin's stunning photographs, published under the facetious title CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed , should go some way to changing this. Fascinated by the massive scale of Brezhnev-era architecture, the French photographer has toured the former Soviet Union since 2003, in search of dramatic examples of these sculptural buildings. The 1970s-1990s was a strong period for Soviet architecture, especially in the peripheral republics, where outlandish designs were an expression of the striving for independence, an early inkling of the break-up of the USSR. Architects at this time picked up where they left off following the suppression of the avant-garde by Stalin in the early 1930s, and were able to capitalise on advances made in engineering in the interim period, producing buildings with enormous in...
Keep reading