What the well-unread man has not been reading

To my constant surprise, with a few exceptions, the most-read posts on The Joggled Mind have been the monthly book reports. Not by much, but consistently. Several of the longer and more serious essays have prompted more responses, all of them thoughtful and much appreciated, but Jogglers everywhere seem curious about what I read. Or perhaps they are entertained by the brief commentaries on what I’ve read.

I understand. Whenever I come across other people’s reading lists in print or online, I always have a look. There are those who, invited to your house, will sneak a look inside your medicine cabinet. I will sneak a look at your bookshelves. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

For — ah, jeez, maybe 20 months now? — I have been trying to complete a long essay on the books I have not read. I mean to see this one in print, if I can find a buyer, but that’s academic for now because I can’t get the damned thing written. I have no explanation for why I seem stalled, but maybe I can prime the pump by offering a bit of the eventual whole — the opening bit, which to an extent works on its own. The working title is “To Be Well Unread, or the Voracious Unreader.” Enjoy, and please do respond. And watch for the June book report, due any day now.

The main stacks of my personal library cover the long wall of an upstairs room of my house. There are branch locations in other rooms. A set of shelves in the living room houses 171 slipcased volumes published by the Library of America. (LOA just informed me there’s a 172nd on the way.) Another case in the same room holds 106 books, many of them oversized art books. Shelves bolted to the wall of the dining alcove off the kitchen hold more; most of those are cookbooks and cocktail guides. Upstairs, the spare bedroom houses dozens of issues of The Paris Review; every edition of The Best American Essays, 1986 to 2025; and the complete 65-issue run of The Ohio Review. (I attended Ohio University in the early 1970s and knew the founding editors.)

I’m too lazy to count the books in the main stacks. Let’s call it a thousand and call it a day. About a fifth of them have been pulled forward. These are volumes that I have yet to read: Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life. Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Gnomon, Nick Harkaway. Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas R. Hofstadter. Dozens more. When I enter the room, each seems to have stepped forward, silently imploring, “Yes? And what about me?” 

The unread speak.

I was only a few months into my academic career—that is, the first third of first grade—when life changed. At the breakfast table, my six-year-old self was gazing at a cereal box, as I did every morning because I liked the colors and the cartoony illustrations. In class, I’d sped through a half-dozen of the little readers handed out by our teacher, stories told in one- and two-syllable words and three- to five-word sentences. I picked up reading Dick and Jane with the ease of picking up a leaf. But when the words on the Frosted Flakes carton suddenly aligned into meaningful sentences, I felt the force of revelation: I could read anything, and not just in a Matthew Duval Elementary classroom but anywhere, anytime. I couldn’t wait to get to the other side of the cereal box. Or to read Cheerios the next day.

Out of roughly 24,000 days since that momentous morning, there have been maybe 40? or 50? when I have not read something. Were I better at statistics, I might arrive at an approximate tally of the books I’ve read. My guess would be something like 5,000, but please don’t ask me to defend that number.

I am happy to preen about what a reader I have been. But what of all the books I have not read? Do they not define me as well? I have read the whole of William Gibson, Joseph Conrad, Max Porter, J.D. Salinger, Franz Kafka, Bruce Chatwin (twice, once for my master’s thesis), Hermann Hesse, Zachary Mason, and Homer; most of D.H. Lawrence, Tom Wolfe, William Faulkner, Tracy Kidder, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; much of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robertson Davies, Paul Theroux, and Joseph Mitchell; of 31 books by John McPhee, 26. Most of Robert Grudin, including the incisive On Dialogue and the acidly funny Book. A fair number of novels by Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata. Flaubert’s Parrot (though not much Flaubert). The Swann’s Way section of In Search of Lost Time. The Last of the Mohicans, which is all the James Fenimore Cooper I’ll ever need. Of those 171 Library of America editions downstairs, I have not read a single one all the way through, but to be fair, each is an omnibus, many containing four or five novels or story collections.

I am patiently getting to all the unread volumes on my shelves. It is the unread books in my mind that nettle me. I earned summa cum laude honors as an undergraduate. I have a graduate degree from a prestigious school (Johns Hopkins University). I have been a published writer for more than 50 years. So how have I not read Pride and Prejudice? The Scarlet Letter? Any of the Barchester novels? The Magic Mountain or Middlemarch or The Portrait of a Lady?

Would I feel better if I simply declared myself well unread? For that one, at least, I have claim support. I have read nothing by Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, John Milton, Anthony Trollope, T.S. Eliot, Miguel de Cervantes, or Alexander Pushkin. Victor Hugo or Walter Scott, Goethe or Balzac, the Brontës, Émile Zola, Gertrude Stein, Norman Mailer, or Theodore Dreiser. Dubliners but not Ulysses. Billy Budd but not Moby-Dick (though I have tried that one twice). Almost nothing from China, India, the Near East, Latin America, or Africa. 

In 2003, The Guardian assembled a list, “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time.” I’ve read 24. The newspaper followed up a dozen years later with “The 100 Best Novels Written in English.” I did much better here—I’ve read 25.

Mysteries compound. Why have I read On the Road twice, but not Jane Eyre or Don Quixote? Why The Thirty-Nine Steps and Three Men in a Boat but not The Brothers Karamazov or the last two volumes of The Divine Comedy? I need to figure out how I got here. And why it bothers me. 

None of this might matter were it not for the goddamned lists. 

And...there will be more, but you will just have to be patient. I read once that Gay Talese missed a book deadline by a dozen years. I promise it won’t be that long. As always, thank you for reading, and please enliven the comments section with what you haven’t read, despite the literary sophistication disclosed by your subscribing to The Joggled Mind.