The Emperor’s New Mind, by Roger Penrose
Dubliners, by James Joyce
Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
Lectures on Physics (v.2-3, read v.1), by Richard Feynmann
I have, however, read The Island of the Day Before. I feel like such an outcast.
–sublight.
raises hand the very book that came into my head when i saw the subject of the thread! if we keep it up, somebody should send umberto some kind of award- i’m sure he’d get a kick out of it. i read foucault’s pendulum two or three times a year, but island of the day before? can’t even hit the tenth page.
also, le ton beau de marot by douglas hofstadter… i should love this, but i can’t read it because i know his wife dies in the middle and for some reason that fills me with infinite sadness. i always end up going back to metamagical themas.
-fh
The Illustrated History of Africa
Oh, I had a plan for James Joyce. I got myself a set in (cheap) paperback, decided I’d start with Dubliners, then work up via Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses until I was sufficiently into Joyce to tackle Finnegans Wake.
Unfortunately, although Dubliners is a great collection, it’s also a very depressing one… by the time I’d finished it, I didn’t have the heart to carry on.
I’ve also got a copy of War and Peace. Every evening I come home and see that one standing unread on the bookshelf. Taunting me. Mocking me. I swear, I can hear it sniggering.
The motivation is, Eco’s newest novel Baudolino is already out in Italy, and should see its English translation by the end of the year.
For what it’s worth, I thought The Island of the Day Before was great (I love Eco), but not his best. You know how it’s said that a book should have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Well, Island had two out of three. Which isn’t bad (according to a song I heard), but I still rank Foucault’s Pendulum as Eco’s best.
I’ve been trying to read Butler’s Analogy. It was enormously influential in the nineteenth century, but to my modern sensibility it is as dry as dust. I haven’t even made it to the end of the first chapter.
I picked up a version of The Cantebury Tales at a used book store for a quid. It turned out that spelling was all Old English which made it far too much work to enjoy. Also had a book on cosmology that I gave up on and sold. I thought it was one of the ‘popular science’ types, but it turned out to be a graduate level text.
“About Time” by Paul Davies.
“The Demon-Haunted World” By Carl Sagan (On reccomendation by Uncle Cecil himself I might add. I’ll read it one day but i just cant get into it right now.)
“The Lord of the Rings” (It’s one book in three parts, not a trilogy as commonly believed. Regardless, I loved the Hobbit but i couldnt get into this.)
Too many more to list.
I’ve read it. But I didn’t like it as much as Midnight’s Children or The Moor’s Last Sigh. The Rushdie novel currently gathering dust on my bookshelf is The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I love his stuff, but I couldn’t get in to this one. I’ll have to try again some other time.
Other books (just to name a few) I’ve either never started, or started and never finished:
War and Peace
Truth–Emile Zola
Gargantua and Pantagruel–Rabelais
Bleak House–Dickens
Swann’s Way–Proust
Focault’s Pendulum–Eco (Loved The Name of the Rose, can’t make a dent in this one. Tried–and failed–to read The Island of the Day Before, too)
Rabbit, Run–Updike
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath–Lovecraft. Also a book of short stories by the same.
The Late Mr. Shakespeare–Robert Nye
The Bible
Me too.
The City of God St. Augustine
The Zen Teachings of Jesus Kenneth S. Leong
The History of the Church Eusebius
The Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life The Theological-Historical Commission for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000
The Koran
The Thousand and One Nights, volume 1
Then there are a couple of books that were given to me that I haven’t gotten around to yet.
I tend to buy books three or four at a time, then go and buy another book or two before I’m finished with the ones I have.
On the upside, being the voracious reader that I am, but not always having the money to buy books, I still have a small library of unread books to get me through the financial lean times.
I was talking to my catechist, who is also always buying books that he doesn’t have time to read, and he told me, “You bought it for a reason. Who knows, someday you’ll need to read something that’s in one of those books that’s sitting on your shelf.”
A sales clerk at my local Borders told me that buying more books than you have time to read is the sign of a true book lover.
The only one I really feel guilty about is The Mists of Avalon. I like MZB a lot, and have been ashamed, especially since just about everybody else I know read it and loved it.
But I just can’t get past the fourth or fifth chapter. I’ve started it five or six times, I get a few chapters in, and then I put it down in favor of something else.
I wonder if I’m just burnt out on Arthurian stuff?
Tisiphone