Anti-Climacus

LINK: Maybe it's just that I've mastered the art of living without regret (or possibly the art of living without embarrassment), but when I tried to come up with a list of books I'm embarrassed not to have read (following the exercise proposed by Alex Massie and continued by Megan McArdle), and I got:

Anna Karenina
Jane Eyre
...and that's pretty much it.

A number of things which would otherwise be on this list get categorized in a different manner. The list of writers I will get to eventually is manageable at this point in my life (possibly because I've read a lot, more likely because of how many have moved into the second category), and includes Cervantes, Goethe, maybe Thackeray and, uh, probably the other Shakespeare tragedies I've not yet read (I will perhaps out myself as a philistine by saying the comedies all run together in my memory, The Tempest possibly excepted). Then there is another category of people I have basically no desire to read--Proust from Massie's list and Dreiser from McArdle's would be on there, as Saul Bellow (though I may read him eventually), Nabokov, and perhaps others.

I suspect this feeling derives, in part, from the fact that, as a graduate student, I frequently run into people who have read lots of things I haven't (and I've read lots of things they haven't). As a consequence, I'm used to having to explain to people who Grotius was (though still not very good at it), and having people explain things to me I'd otherwise not have time to read. This is one of the fringe benefits of grad school, I think: I'll get a better exposure to Simone Weil, Jane Addams, John Milton and the Confessio Amantis than I otherwise would because I know people who are all working on those (and occasionally find otherwise worthwhile things to read because of these connections).