Looking rather daunting ... and that's just four essential books. Photograph: Graham Turner
"I've never read Cranford," said Sunday Times critic AA Gill in the arresting opening sentence of his TV review last Sunday, "and, just between the two of us, neither have you." (I've just examined the spine of my yellowing 20-year-old Penguin of Cranford - and Cousin Phillis - and, just between the two of us, I fear he is right. Ditto Mary Barton and North and South, which sit on either side of my disintegrating Cranford.)
Gill then went on to make a series of statements which may or may not be true - I want your help to decide. "It [Cranford] is on our list, though, and has been since we were 18 and first discovered we had a list. Everywhere else in the world, literate people have a list of books they've read; only the English have a list of books they haven't read. Like an embarrassing line of intimates hanging out on the back of your intellectual presumption, Mrs Gaskell is a large bra, right at the top of our unread laundry."
Let's deal with the last point first. It doesn't especially bother me that I haven't read the novels of Mrs Gaskell. I've read plenty of other early-Victorian social realist novelists, and did at least once dip into her life of Charlotte Brontë. Frankly, I've got bigger fish to fry; more of which below.
Gill may also be wrong about the English (what about the rest of the UK for a start?) being alone in having hang-ups about unread books. The estimable editor of this site has drawn my attention to How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, a professor of literature based in Paris. This surely suggests the French, too, have a literary guilt complex, and I bet your average German frets about not reading Goethe and Schiller just as we agitate over Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Keats's Endymion. This literary pain is surely international.
The point I'm trying to make is that, pace Gill, I don't think we should feel guilty about list-making - even if we do feel anguish at what remains to be read. We are at least trying to correct our years of backsliding. An inveterate literary trainspotter, I revise my list every couple of months. Irritatingly, it just keeps getting longer. Even books I have in principle read - War and Peace, Ulysses, Crime and Punishment, Vanity Fair, The Red and the Black, Sentimental Education - I've decided I didn't read properly and have to "do" again. I'm basically starting from scratch (at an absurdly advanced age) with the whole of literature - and Harold Bloom's list of "must-read" books - staring me in the face. It's a nightmare. I may never sleep again.
I've been reading volume 1 of the collected Paris Review interviews recently (published earlier this year; volume 2 is just out, with a third planned). The interview with Hemingway is wonderful. At one point, the interviewer asks him to name his "literary forebears". Hemingway launches into a grand collection not just of writers but of painters and composers too (on the grounds that his inspiration came from all art forms): "Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora - it would take a day to remember everyone."
A day to recite them; a lifetime - and then some - to read them. But it's fun to map the mountain ranges. How do you do with the list above? What's your favourite bit of Quevedo? Let's play that Lodgian game of "Humiliation". I'm going to name 10 books and 10 writers it embarrasses me to say I have not read, and without which I can be called neither educated nor civilised. Then I expect you to do the same - doesn't have to be a total of 20; as many as you like. Do you feel guilty about the gaps in your reading? Will you ever fill them? Do you make lists? Should we just accept that reading well and completely is a Sisyphean task that we will never complete?
Books:
Gilgamesh The Bible (I've dipped, no more) The Koran (ditto) Saint Augustine's City of God Dante's Divine Comedy (more blind, braindead dipping) Boccacio's The Decameron Vasari's Lives of the Painters Thomas More's Utopia Proust (several failed attempts) The Brothers Karamazov (several failed attempts, including one three weeks ago that ended in me almost shooting myself on about page 212).
Writers:
Goethe Schiller Francis Bacon Rochefoucauld Gogol Goncharov (several attempts to get to grips with Oblomov) Pushkin Brecht Pound Borges (apart from a few short stories, now obliterated from my mind)
Now your turn. Can anyone top this list of shame?
