In his 1970s campus comedy, Changing Places, David Lodge invents a memorable literary parlour game called Humiliation in which players confess to embarrassing gaps in their reading. One of the characters in the novel, in his determination to succeed, becomes so obsessed with winning that he admits to never having read Hamlet – as a result of which, he is promptly fired.
Let's face it: when it comes to reading, everyone lies a little. Mostly, we exaggerate. Yes, we've read Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. No, we prefer Proust in the Vintage not the Penguin translation. Yes, we've read the latest Booker prize short list … and so on. Full disclosure: I've certainly referred, in newspaper copy, to books with which I have, shall we say, a fairly distant relationship. Now I'm going deeper into the confessional.
Today, as the summer reading season of August heaves into view, and in the spirit of Humiliation, I hereby declare that I am taking Middlemarch with me on holiday. Yes, that's George Eliot's Middlemarch. The mid-Victorian classic. It's long been my ambition to devote a period of sustained reading to this great English novel – and now that moment has come. No turning back.
Now I'm inviting readers of this blog to play Humiliation and to confide the books they deeply regret never having read. Oh – and what about the books we're supposed to have read, and can't be arsed?
(Fair warning: I will devote a blog to my experience of Middlemarch on my return from holiday.)
