Yes on all five. I read War and Peace the summer after I graduated from college. I had a commute of almost 90 minutes each way to a job I hated, and I finished it in a couple of weeks. Great Expectations and Catcher in the Rye were part of a reading project I undertook in my early 40s to go back and read books I felt I should have read but hadn't. To this day, I don't get what people see in Catcher, but Great Expectations was very rewarding at that age. I read 1984 in high school but didn't like it as much as Brave New World, and regulars of this forum know that I often cite Forster's book as a prime example of contrasting and conflicting cultural viewpoints. I read The Fellowship of the Ring and part of The Two Towers until I decided that I was tired of falling asleep. I do not pretend to have read the whole series, nor do I pretend it was great literature. Read it in my first year of high school. It was the first book I ever raced ahead and finished ahead of the class. It was also the first film in which I knew one of the actors. It was assigned reading in my senior year of high school. But, as I was in the midst of my first serious romantic relationship, I relied on the Cliff Notes. I do not claim to have read it. However, I did read The Idiot as part of my 40s reading project. No to both. Not sure why, I guess I just never got around to it. One of these days... @Lemex - Moby Dick was also part of my 40s reading project.
Not sure that's necessarily damning! I know someone not a million miles away who has read five of those books and could barely tell you the slightest thing about them. Looking up at my bookshelf I see I read Roth's Nemesis within the last six months and I will only say: no questions please! Can't recall a single name or scene. Moby Dick is beautifully written but skipping bits of it is absolutely ok, as you say. Some writers do tend to go on a bit - the dear old Victorians more than most - and you can often skip stuff without losing the gist, the flavour or the beauty.
Yes. And in Moby Dick, Melville at times dedicates chapters to telling the reader about whales and whaling, which would have been fascinating to contemporary audiences who had limited access to that kind of information, but which has nothing to do with the story itself. Those are the chapters you can skip if you're not interested in them, and you don't lose any of the story in the process.
Read: War and Peace - once. LOTR - many times. Pride and Prejudice - twice. I'm really bad at names, so I forget even the names of my favourite characters (and my friends and relatives).
LOTR - A couple of times to understand what was happening. Pride and Prejudice - Once in my lifetime thank you very much. Jane Eyre - Once, but I found it quite forgettable. 1984 - I read it to avoid reading Animal Farm. Great Expectations - Thrice (After each time I forgot I read the book before and somehow the words looked vaguely familiar...)
Books that I've read that somebody might lie about. 1. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte 2. 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas Jules Verne 3. Villette Charlotte Bronte 4. Several works of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer's Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth) 5. Of Mice and Men George Steinbeck Most of these were for my Literature Classes during highschool but I enjoyed them all to varying degrees. I never finished the first Lord of the Rings book. I just got bored about 1/2 way through it. I'm just one of those weird people that loves the 19th century style of writing.
I've read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I didn't know that someone named George Steinbeck had written a book with the same name!
I've read 7—ish. To Kill a Mockingbird is my current bedtime read. Austen, Bronte and Dickens were on my reading list at school. (As was the Hobbit, which led me to read LOTR's.) I love E.M Forster, no ifs, ands or buts. Read Salinger to see what the fuss was about. I read Nineteen Eighty Four in 1984. I tried War and Peace... no joy. And Dostoevsky I haven't attempted. Yup... I was given a copy of Atlas Shrugged by a friend, and it remains unread because I get eye strain due to the teeny-tiny font. It's so small, I need an atomic microscope rather than glasses.
There are three I've read on that list, 1984, the Lord of the ring series and Pride and prejudice. I started reading Jane Eyre, years ago and actually enjoy it, but for some reasons I never finished it. The only one I found boring is LOTR,lol. I know it's supposed to be this great fantasy piece, and it is in a way, the world is beautifully construted. But some parts are just very dull and boring. But how could people not love 1984? It was an AMAZING book, lol. It scared me a bit, though.
I've read nine, though the other two, War and Peace and Pride and Prejudice are to-be-reads. Despite two degrees in English there are still some classics I haven't read. There was a time I felt embarrassed by this, but rather than lie I simply avoided the discussion and merely nodded when others discussed the finer points of Lolita or Hard Times or name-that-classic-everyone-else-seems-to-have-read-but-me. Now, how many of you are pretending to have read every post in this thread?
I'd like to add Nietzsche to the conversation. Many people quote him or reference him without having ever read any of his books.
Now that you mentioned him; could someone please tell me one or two of his most famous work? I found quite a few and this one pops up the most time: Thus spoke Zarathustra : a book for everyone and no one Has anyone read it? I've been playing with the idea of trying to read one or two of his books and was just wondering which ones are the best.
It might be better to start out with Basic Writings of Nietzsche. It's a 900-page collection of 3 of his famous works (The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals) as well as some lesser known works. The Birth of Tragedy is I think a good place to start. Of course, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is good as well, but it's a bit more difficult than The Birth of Tragedy. So I would save it for later.
Funny. I'm a guy, yet I always follow the instruction booklet. I pretend to read Rousseau's Confessions if that counts.
I tend to think that Birth of Tragedy is one of the Nietzsche books most people interested in literature should read, because half of it is not philosophy, but instead Classical literary criticism. It's in fact a brilliant piece of commentary on Ancient Greek drama with some Wagnerian philosophy-lite thrown in at the end, apparently to get in to some famous composer's good graces. Now, I wonder who that 'famous composer' could have been?
I've read 1, 4, and 7. Didn't finish LOTR, but I believe I've lied (to myself and others? XD) that I did. Didn't complete Great Expectations either.
no No, but I think I may have it. No. Yes, class read. No. Hobbit and Fellowship, yes. I think so. If I did, it was very long ago. This is the one I have and not read. Not "War and Peace." No. No.
Isn't that women?? I certainly do. And every man I've ever known has just assumed he knows how the thing works without even glancing at the manual ... Come to think of it, I don't think it has anything to do with sex, just whether you're bored by manuals or not. I constantly lie about having read books if I know even the slightest thing about the plot. Seeing as most people around me don't read at all, it makes me feel like a genius to say 'Oh yes, read Pride and Prejudice many years ago!' when in actual fact I read about twenty pages and thought this is the most boring piece of waffle I've ever attempted to cram into my brain. 'Yes, yes! Quite the ironic social commentary that book!'
A lot of people seem to lie about having read Lovecraft because they are so in love with the concept and the endless cultural references made to it on the internet.
Maybe some of those who claim to have read Lovecraft do so because they think he was a good writer. Lovecraft is a strange case - a terrible writer who created a fascinating mythology. His prose is ridiculous, but he understood his genre. Some of his horror is really horrifying, but I wouldn't take any writing lessons from him.
Few of his stories I think can be said to be well-written, but he had the prose style of the 1700s at the most modern. Lovecraft did actually start to modernize his style toward the end of his life, like The Thing on the Doorstep, but it was too little too late.
