What's some literature that you've NEVER read?

[lordsmurf]

Spawned from the movie topics, it got me thinking about books (or authors) I've never read ...

Søren Kierkegaard
Franz Kafka

... I did buy a book from Kafka finally, but not yet had time to read it.

Although not a dummy by any means, only recently has Kierkegaard come under my radar. I think I may want to hunt down some of his writings, too.

[redwudz]

Never read 'War and Peace' by Leo Tolstoy, but I've read most of the classics of English literature, though that was mostly a few years ago. Some of my favorites are still 'Ivanhoe' by Sir Walter Scott and 'Tale of Two cities.' by Charles Dickens. I like all of Dickens books. And I like 'Don Quixote.' by Cervantes. It translates very well from the Spanish. I've read some Kafka, mostly short stories, but never really related to it. Not sure it translates that well from the German.

Thinking of movies, I'm not sure I have ever seen a movie that even comes close to the images one gets in his own mind from a good book.

(And yes, I was an English major in college for a while. )

[gadgetguy]

There's what, like 20 million books in the Library of Congress alone and you want to know what we haven't read?
OK, here's a few...

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Emma-Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare

[yoda313]

I have to agree with gadgetguy's list.

You need to add MOBY DICK. Though I have read like half of it. Never finished it.....

Though I have read many of Chrictons movie books (the original versions that is).

So I've read Sphere, Andromeda Strain, and both Jurassic Parks.

I've also read Hunt for Red October - thats CLANCY right?. Damn fine book and EXCELLENT movie. Interesting choices that were made to make the movie. I mean really pumping up Jack Ryan's importance in the story.

However I have read tons of Star Wars books. Not to mention the complete Robotech set by Mckinney. And countless (I do mean COUNTLESS) Star Trek books. Mostly original series and TNG books. I have read a few VOYAGER books and I think one DS9 book.

[gadgetguy]

I've read Moby Dick, so I couldn't include it in my list. I also left out Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. I've read part of it, but could never finish it. I could add all of the rest of her books though.

[Tearren]

I was going to do a book report on Moby Dick in High School, I read about 10 pages, then went out and bought the cliff notes.

I did the book report and got a C. Since I thought the book report was good and I tailored it to my level at the time, I went to the teacher and mentioned it. She told me I must have read the cliff notes. I just acted like I didn't know what she was talking about, but she said there was no way I read the book. She was a cool teacher and we got along really well so, after a short while I just asked 'how did you know?' She told me the book was an assignment for her in college and she couldn't read it either and did the same thing I did.

[lordsmurf]

I always cheated with Shakespeare -- I read the "Shakespeare made easy" series that translated it into more modern English. After that was done, I'll have to admit the stories are pretty good. There's something to be said about language barriers. It's one reason I can't read Dickens.

I can seriously read Spanish easier than I can understand old antiquated English.

[redwudz]

It's not easy to struggle through some books written in archaic English. Though with Shakespeare, I would at least read a synopsis and then view the play. There are several levels and themes in the plays as they were written both for the 'common folk' and the more sophisticated viewer. The words are also poetry, to add another level to them. Fate is a predominate theme, where the characters have no free will and everything is preordained.

I enjoy the classics as it gives the mind a bit of exercise. But I also have read a lot of Azimov, Philip K. Dick and other SF writers.

What's important to me is if I can immerse myself in the story, otherwise I lose interest fairly quickly.

I've read most of the classics listed in gadgetguy's list, but not many of the modern novels. Too many books, not enough time.

[bigsam]

The Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas and Hamlet of William Shakespeare

[ranchhand]

Hey Lordsmurf.... beware of Kierkegaard, I tended to read too much Sartre in college and concentrated Existentialism can lead to sterility of emotion.

[lordsmurf]

Hey Lordsmurf.... beware of Kierkegaard, I tended to read too much Sartre in college and concentrated Existentialism can lead to sterility of emotion.

Without getting into details ... let's just say women can do that to you anyway.

Too late.

[smearbrick1]

Hey Lordsmurf.... beware of Kierkegaard, I tended to read too much Sartre in college and concentrated Existentialism can lead to sterility of emotion.

I did that one time. I accidently hit myself in the crotch with a drumstick. Long story.