Before I get to my list though, I should mention that the books on my reproachful shelf are constantly changing.  Several years ago, thanks to a 45 minute commute on foot and books on tape, I managed to “read” about 80 percent of Hemingway’s work. After reading Fast Food Nation, I immediately read The Jungle. I expect to peel one or two off the list below within the next year or two.

The List:

1. Any novel by Faulkner. I share this one with the author of the NPR article.  I’ve read a story or two (notably, “The Bear”) but I’ve never managed to get more than a few pages into his novels. A while back my wife bought me a Faulkner collection and I’ve yet to crack it.

2. Democracy in America, deTocqueville. Someone once told me that every political science major owns this book, quotes it at length, and has never read it.  I’ve started it several times, even once in French, but never got more than a quarter of the way through volume 1.

3. Candide, Voltaire. Somehow I managed never to read Candide, although a collection of “Romans et Contes,” with its bright yellow dust jacket, stares down at me from my bookshelf as I surf Facebook.

4. Remembrances of Things Past, Marcel Proust. Since John Updike died, I can’t seem to escape Proust. Several eulogizers have drawn a comparison so I’m curious. Are they really that similar?

5. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. This is my Achilles heel. We had to read this book in my high school senior English class. It was the only time I ever used Cliffs Notes. My English teacher will be happy to know I still hate myself for that – especially since I’ve liked very much all of the other Steinbeck I’ve read.

6. The Odyssey, Homer. Okay, this is my real Achilleus’ heel. I went to Reed and the year I took Humanities 110, we only read The Illiad. Four years later and a degree in hand and I still hadn’t read it. Yet I’ve read The Illiad a half dozen times.

I’ll close with a paraphrased quote from a poem Sam Danon, a former professor of French at Reed, wrote:

You don’t admit that you have never read a book,

You only haven’t re-read it, lately.

I’m puzzled by the inclusion of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I think Cory Doctorow is a plenty talented writer, but I struggled to get in to this book and never finished it. I suspect the attempt to get Boing Boinged may have had something to do with it.

Unlike my previous list, I’m not going to try to make my own, as I don’t think my Sci Fi reading history is up to the task. I’ll leave that to the Heron.

However, the writer includes a list of several more books at the bottom and I probably would have elevated A Canticle for Liebowitz but I’m also puzzled by the inclusion of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. There seems to be a groundswell of support for this book, and while I found it entertaining and workmanly written, it was also a rehash of Starship Troopers and virtually every army movie ever made, plus Gomer Pyle.  The fact that there is a twist, that all the soldiers are genetically modified old people, does not a classic make.