This is truly great. Some books clearly give you much more when you ignore them.

I have not read Abraham Joshua Heschel's Man Is Not Alone:  A Philosophy of Religion three times.  Which is odd, considering I've read and enjoyed his The Sabbath, The Prophets, and Man's Quest for God.  But I've never been able to get past the first twenty or so pages of Man Is Not Alone.

Leigh's relationship to the Tonight Show is my relationship to the entire Lethal Weapon franchise.  I find it imperative to avoid them, and I'm pretty sure that if I ever DID see one, my entire life would change.  Once, in high school, I left a party because someone insisted on popping in Lethal Weapon 3.

Is there a word for this phenomenon?  There should be.

As a kid I was an insatiable consumer of fantasy/sci-fi, but never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and loudly announced that fact more times than I think was strictly necessary. In adulthood I've made a point of not seeing the movies.

Also, when I travelled around India I didn't see the Taj Mahal. I suspect this is a related phenomenon.

Anchorage Agra,

Joey

Try out the Decameron. It's actually a lot of fun and not at all stuffy. I think you'll be surprised.

--Aaron Hamburger

You write rather interestingly but what are you doing pouring your energy into all that crap?

Oh, I haven't read Moby Dick at least 10 times. No matter how hard I try or how committed I am the beginning, I just can't seem to make it through the novel. As an aside, neither have I seen the Star Wars movies, nor will I. Why, I ask you, why???

I haven't read the davinci code, or seen the movie, likewise with the harry potter series. I don't think I could get anything new out of it that could help me influence culture in any meaningful way.

For decades, I have not read Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

...because I've not read The Catcher in the Rye at least 5 times. I even brought it to uni, along with only about 20 books, and it continues to sit on my shelf being calculatedly snubbed as I work my way through my Eng Lit course.

I got an MA in German Studies from Stanford without ever reading Faust, Part Two. This has not interfered with my career as an editor and writer.

"But I've never been able to get past the first twenty or so pages of Man Is Not Alone."

You ain't kidding. And I spend a good percentage of my life reading books about Judaism.

You should try Robert Gordis' "A Faith for Moderns". You'll probably have difficulty getting to p. 5. And I'm speaking as someone who likes his books on the Kesuvim.

"Also, when I travelled around India I didn't see the Taj Mahal. I suspect this is a related phenomenon."

I suppose that I have been to the Louvre about ten times, and have never seen the Mona Lisa. I have seen the Venus de Milo, though (or whatever you want to call her). She is a lovely lady, and definitely worth looking at. I have also seen the Victory of Samothrace. An interesting little curiosity, of almost as much artistic importance as the more obscure works of Benozzo Gozzoli.

I didn't think there was anything special about not reading the Talmud until I discovered the Daf Yomi -- perhaps we could organize something equivalent for Wordsworth, but in reverse -- like the Andaf Yomi? (there just might be two horrible mistakes in that neologism.) English aficionados the world round could all ignore a different page of The Prelude every day. We could even write ASP scripts that generate pages and pages of blank commentary on it.

I loathe Wordsworth. I further loathe Rousseau and have passed his confessions over in silence on any number of occasions.

I did, however, read ALL of Remembrance of Things past and I LOVED it.

James

I know one or two people who couldn't bear the Prelude and are affronted by its existence, but I am fascinated by it and may very well spend the rest of my life not reading it. Thanks for the boost!

--ineffabilliken

I've not Wuthering Heights at least seven times. The furthest I've gotten - chapter three. I give up normally after the second paragraph. This battle will continue for the rest of my life, I fear.

.... David Lodge's Changing Places? Cause there's a really cool part about people who haven't read books they should have.
i also haven't read wordsworth at least five times, so i can totally relate. "A Portrait of the artist as a young man" is another example. Haven't read that at least 3 times. i also actively avoid The Star Wars.

Amazing story about how you fight the pain of reading a boring book.

Nor me.

This is actually two distinct phenomena.

The first is just not liking something enough to read it (or see it, whatever) despite what Society tells you. It's a deep-down instinct to conform coupled with an apathy to do so. You feel you SHOULD read a book, but you can't really be bothered. It's normal and it applies to many things. I've never read Catcher in the Rye either, although I hope to get round to it one day.

The second is, slightly strangely, the complete opposite. So anxious are you to reject the herd instinct and prove your independence that you choose to rebel by denying mass opinion or convention. You deliberately avoid seeing the Taj Mahal just because everybody else sees it. You deliberately avoid seeing the Lord of the Rings Trilogy just because everybody else has seen it.

The key difference here is that you HAVE to tell people. You only avoid the Taj Mahal so that you can tell people you deliberately avoided it. You only avoid the Lethal Weapon trilogy so that you can tell people you've never seen it. You do this because you are desperate to prove your independence, to prove that you're unique and can think for yourself, although the fact that you're resorting to a cosmetic and somewhat shallow rejection of this sort would suggest that you're not very secure about it.

So... Leigh, good blog, but the fact that you've reached the point of deliberately not reading The Prelude and have felt the need to tell us all about it rather puts you in the second category. I suggest you read the book to exorcise your demon and get on with something that is genuinely rebellious and independent!

this is my second time not reading your blog. Both times I just read your comments, like cliff notes. I would have said something earlier, but rich b suggested that the need to tell people in fact disproves my independence/act of rebellion. Or something like that. I kinda skimmed his comment as well.

you actually grow up in one culture, with its own expected set of books/literature/fiction to read, and you spend your adult life in a different culture with different expectations as to which material should have been digested by age 18?

You won't believe me, but that happens to me each time I try to see any chapter of the Matrix. I just fall asleep at the beginning. the worst part is that all my friends have started discussions with me about the pop topic of the existence of the matrix...

Read da comics is more intersting.

What an ever so clever article! The author must be such a genius.

...a U2 album. Or ever put one of their CDs on by choice. I <i>know</i> they're great and all that, but I just feel the need to resist. Maybe it's because I think they're all t o s s e r s , I can't say for sure. I've never watched Citizen Kane, so put off am I by it being the American Film Institute's no. 1 forever. Nor have I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, despite the fact that I bought it over eight years ago and enjoyed the first couple of chapters enormously. These are but a few examples of the many works of art I have never sampled either out of some sort of misguided rebelliousness, or just sheer and absolute butt-laziness.

And Bob, you make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

 I have tried reading the Lord of the Rings 2-3 times. I've only ever gotten about 20 or so pages into it. Love the movies, though.

In ninth grade, I missed the day when we were supposed to pick out books for book reports, so the teacher assigned me The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. I could not read it. I got to the hundredth page, and just could not go on. This was the only time I ever used Cliff Notes. I did some damage to the book, so the teacher made me buy a new one, so the old copy sat on my shelf for years. I never read it and finally sold it on eBay for 50 cents.

Then there was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. This was the favorite novel of one of the best teachers I had in high school, but I couldn't get past page 40. I'm sure I didn't read Housekeeping at least two or three times.

That said, many books that I have trouble getting into turn out to be the best ones. That's definitely true of E.O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life and Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

What a great topic, armchair psychological comments notwithstanding...

MY "The Prelude" is The Hobbit.  Have not read that over 6 times.  I simply cannot get past the first chapter.  The few times I've mentioned this, I've been glared at like I'm the anti-Christ...

 Nice to discover I'm in great company! :-)

I actually went out and bought a lottery ticket to stop myself telling people that I had never bought one. Yet here I am, bringing the whole pointless subject up again. But "The Prelude"? I was a mere child of four when I read that - in the original Greek, I might add. H.L. Mencken used to borrow my copy because he found the margin notes I had crayoned there "sublime".

Joyce's "Ulysses."

I should read it, I appreciate extracts from it...but I'll never read it. Yet I've read Moby Dick 3 times, Lord of the Rings 3 times...but Wordsworth's Prelude? No. He is dull, dull, DULL.

I have started and never finished every book Virginia Woolf has written.....didn't even finish "The Waves" even though I was 3/4 of the way through and that is NOT an easy book to get even 3/4 of the way through! I'm not sure why....

I think when something has been done a million times by others before you and described in pitiless detail ad nauseum, the actual experience leaves you pretty flat. The most fascinating book that I never want to read is Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur.

Yikes! Check out that one if you haven;t...or don't! 

Something I've always intended to read, if only so that I can quote Latin/Italian phrases in a lackadaisical fashion and seem educated.

Sadly, all I do is skin-read it until I see the quotes, then write them down, then lose the piece of paper, then start again.

So far I have skim-read the first two books of Casanova's life about 6 times.

xxx

Many of the books published today are fictitious stories. They are in-part or completely untrue or fantasy. Historically, paper production was expensive; too expensive to be used for entertainment. [[link removed because it was spam]]

Adria's right. Many books today are fiction. Let us never forget this fact lest we wind up thinking, incorrectly, that all books are entirely true. Thank you for your valuable words.