I read voraciously. I own something on the order of 14-17,000 books and read something on the order of two to eight books a week. Yet the list of authors that I see discussed or brought up on this forum reads like who's who of who I haven't read. I just did a search on 'best novelists of all time' to create a list of those I haven't read and it's quite daunting. I have started a few, but set them aside because if I had to read another page I would have committed suicide. Farewell to Arms springs to mind. So, with that in mind, if I haven't been able to make it through one of the authors books - then that author made my list. Who's on yours? Here's the list I used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_Best_Books_of_All_Time I've read a total of two authors on this list - Camus and Orwell. It's just easier to list the authors I've read.
I started reading to see if there were any that I tried and gave up on (as opposed to the long list that I never tried, and shorter list that I tried and finished) but was distracted by one: Pippi Longstocking? I enjoyed those books, but, in the best 100 books? What am I missing?
Ach, it's just another list made up of somebody's preferences. I can think of TONS of worthwhile 'favourite' authors who aren't on it. And quite a number of those who are on this list are NOT my favourites, for sure. And many whom I've not read. And many whom I will probably never read, and many I would like to read. It's just a list. Nice to go through the list and pick out authors who appeal to you and whom you might read, but it's not comprehensive and it's only somebody's opinion. I mean ...no Jack London, no Joseph Conrad, no Mari Sandoz, no James Welch, no William Dean Howells, no Willa Cather, no Harlan Ellison, no Ben Bova, or Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke or Mervyn Peake or JRR Tolkien or Margaret Atwood or Robertson Davies or Annie Proulx or Kage Baker or Sherman Alexie .... etc.... I'm seriously out of step here!
A few of those, I must admit, especially those whose author tag is 'Unknown'. I must agree with @jannert however, only one name on there that I've not read that I really have much interest in at the moment is Borges.
The only "best" thing I can see about the books on that list is that most of them are in the public domain, so it won't cost you anything to read them.
The pen-faces surveyed are all alphas with villas and politics. Anyway they can read, but most can hardly procreate they are so entirely erudite. We, I believe, are all mainly betas with our caravan type philosophies, plus a couple of delta firearms maniacs down the dirty pond, oh and old grumpy, of course with his fishing stick. We should best remain with our paperbacks.
Wow! I hope to have a library like that someday. If I posted a list of writers I've never read but want to read, I'd be here all day. But here are some random writers that come to mind after looking at a few lists: Flaubert, Montaigne, Celan, Stendhal, Ibsen, Vargas Llosa, Shikibu, and Tagore.
I've only just noticed that. 14 to 17,000 books? Wouldn't that put your collection among some of the world's biggest private libraries?
Quite a few I read, and a few I hadn't. Joyce and Austen are two I never got on with too well, but I can't say I tried very hard. I prefer Brontes to Austen, for some reason, and Cronin to Dickens, who I found too depressing. The unknowns, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, then Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are well worth a read, as are all Greek and Roman myths, One Thousand and One Nights, Andersen's Fairytales, Dostoyevsky (modern translations), Nabokov, Kafka's 'Castle' is my favourite of his, definitely also recommend Chekhov's short stories and Edgar Alan Poe, both stories and poems.
There are so many authors mentioned on forums that I haven't read, and frankly have no interest in reading. (Quite irritating sometimes when threads wander off into discussions of their books...) But over the past 50+ years I've read enough varied writers that I don't worry about the ones I haven't gotten to or even heard of. I still read based on those I know and enjoy, and new (to me) authors whose books look interesting. I'm happy with that.
LOL Right? That was strange. I've read one book on that list, Blindness, and that only after having had a discussion with @thirdwind, so thanks to him for that. I lived close to Alexanderplatz in Berlin for several years, but never read Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Liked it muchly. Even in its English translation, the sense of latin syntax, how we speak, how we tell stories in our day to day lives, is very much maintained. Any latino reading his work may not even notice his complete omission of quotation marks because in our natural mode of speech, the difference between an actual attribution, paraphrasing, and simply recounting the information - if not the actual words - is often a very hazy zone. That is the nature of Spanish and Portuguese. It's a beautiful example of magic realism told from a modern perspective. The idea that we see everything, thus we see nothing is very thought provoking.
