{"id":128329,"date":"2018-08-07T11:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T15:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=128329"},"modified":"2018-08-07T14:51:02","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T18:51:02","slug":"seven-books-ill-never-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/07\/seven-books-ill-never-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Books I\u2019ll Never Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There comes a point in every reader\u2019s life when they must make peace with all the books they\u2019ll never read. This is true even for the most voracious reader in the world. They say Alexander Pope was the last person to have read every book ever written. Given today\u2019s publishing release schedules and the advent of e-books, a newborn in 2018 who lived to be eighty and did nothing but read their entire life would not even read a small fraction of the world\u2019s library, an exponentially growing Babel straight out of Borges\u2019s most fevered fantasy.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re younger, you know logically that you will not, cannot, read every book. Yet youth\u2019s convincing illusion of immortality is not confined to the realms of romance and illegal substances\u2014it informs your reading as well, and it does so in two senses. First, all books possess a nimbus of potentiality, however faint. True, it may not be likely that you\u2019ll read Finnegans Wake<\/em>, but it\u2019s possible. Second, believing you possess an infinite amount of life, you can fritter it away on books both trivial and great. A nostalgic rereading of The Hitchhiker\u2019s\u00a0Quartet? Sounds fun! An abortive yearlong stab at 2666<\/em>? Why not!<\/p>\n

But as holds true for many other things, these illusions begin to fall away around the age of forty. You don\u2019t have time to waste on bad books, and you know yourself better than to seriously think you\u2019re going to learn French in order to read\u00a0\u00c0<\/em>\u00a0la recherche du temps perdu\u00a0<\/em>in its original language. You know yourself well\u2014too well, maybe. Your tastes can easily become circumscribed by habit, and you venture less frequently afield to the strange shelves that turned up unexpected favorites in your youth. These tendencies should be countered whenever possible, but aging unavoidably shapes a reader.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One manifestation, for me anyway, is an increasing willingness to abandon a book if it isn\u2019t very good. For instance, a recently published and heavily praised novel that stunk like two-day-old fish and that I gave up on after a chapter (I wrote about that experience here<\/a>). Now that I think about it, I may not even have gotten through the first chapter. I just knew. I knew it wasn\u2019t good, and I knew it wasn\u2019t going to get a lot better, and I knew myself, and I knew there were other books I\u2019d rather be spending my time on. I think when I was younger, I would have finished it, as I finished many other books I hated. When you\u2019re young, hating books (and music and art and film and TV) is important. It\u2019s a vital means of shaping your own artistic taste\u2014I owe a lot as a writer to books I\u2019ve hated over the years. But when you\u2019re older, hating art is an indulgence, a vice, and, worst of all, a waste of the time you increasingly have less of.<\/p>\n

More generally, as I\u2019ve gotten older, I\u2019ve become aware of the fact that I simply won\u2019t get around to some books. Perfectly worthy books: books with many admirers, by authors of stature and importance. It\u2019s a sad feeling, a little like being in a crowded party and scanning the scene, aware of all the interesting, funny people you might be friends with but will never make the effort to know.<\/p>\n

Here is a more or less random list of some of the books I\u2019ll never read:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. Lawrence Durrell\u2019s The Alexandria Quartet<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have owned a handsome boxed edition of this since I was in high school. I don\u2019t know where I got it\u2014if it was a birthday present, it was a strange birthday present for a sixteen-year-old. I think I actually once read a little of the first volume, Justine<\/em>. I have a sense of it as antique and mustily erotic, and it brings me pleasure enough as an object: the sturdy box, the color-coded volumes, the original artwork of a domed mosque and minarets. I don\u2019t plan to ruin a perfectly good thing by ever opening it again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. Minor Joseph Conrad<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Secret Agent<\/em> is one of my favorite books, and Heart of Darkness<\/em> is an influential and prescient\u2014if problematic\u2014part of the canon. But The Arrow of Gold<\/em>?\u00a0Am I going to read The Arrow of Gold<\/em>?\u00a0It seems unlikely. Likewise minor Henry James. I\u2019ll be lucky if I get to major Henry James. An embarrassing admission: I\u2019ve never read Henry James, except The Turn of the Screw<\/em> and various fragments. He\u2019s \u201con the list\u201d as they say, or as I say, but the list is long, and life is not. I fully intend to read The Ambassadors<\/em> and What Maisie Knew<\/em>. But will I read The Princess Casamassima<\/em>? Come on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. To the Lighthouse<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I read this one in college, but did I really read it? I opened it many times, and my eyes followed the words on the page, but did the words jump from my optic nerves to my brain? Clearly not, as I remember very little of it. Is there actually a lighthouse? I think there might be. A mother inside a country manor? Maybe. Really, this is an example of a larger category: important books that I technically read in a state of adolescent torpor and will now probably never actually<\/em> read.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4. The Bible<\/strong><\/p>\n

Look, I know it\u2019s important. I know it\u2019s the wellspring of the Western canon. I know I should read it, and I\u2019m not going to. You can\u2019t make me. I\u2019ve read Ecclesiastes, which is totally great, and when I was a kid, I was fascinated and terrified, as most kids and credulous adults are, by the prophecies in Revelation. But I just don\u2019t see myself diving into Corinthians, let alone Colossians. I confess here that I\u2019ll never read it, and I won\u2019t ask for forgiveness.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

5. Infinite Jest<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried it a few different times. I can\u2019t do it. I don\u2019t sense enough reward. The risk, however, is obvious: having to read Infinite Jest<\/em>.\u00a0David Foster Wallace may well have been a genius, but I like geniuses who edit their work. The signal-to-noise ratio is simply too low for me. Yes, I\u2019ve read \u201cA Supposedly Fun Thing I\u2019ll Never Do Again,\u201d and yes, it\u2019s pretty good. Still, I\u2019m happy to die without ever trying this supposedly great book again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

6. To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I somehow never read this one as a kid, and I can\u2019t imagine sitting down with it as an adult. It isn\u2019t so much that I feel too old for the book now, though there is that. It\u2019s more that\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>\u00a0has been so thoroughly absorbed by the culture that I feel like I\u2019ve already read it. It already exists in my mind, a m\u00e9lange of plot points and character names and historical details and Gregory Peck pacing a courtroom. I\u2019ve made my peace with this version standing in for the real thing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

7. Moby-Dick<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is another embarrassing one to admit, but what the hell? We\u2019ve already come this far. Obviously, I should read it, and I intend to\u2014I do!\u2014but I harbor a lurking suspicion that I won\u2019t. Like To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, I know a lot about it. Is that good enough? The names alone\u2014Ishmael, Ahab, Pequod<\/em>, Queequeg\u2014somehow ward me away. They manage to simultaneously evoke the Bible, nineteenth-century New England deprivation, and fish. My intention to read Moby-Dick<\/em> feels like the equivalent of my intention to clean out my office closet\u2014well-meaning and more or less sincere, yet too easily averted by things that are more fun (a category that includes almost everything).<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This essay is not purely bittersweet\u2014there\u2019s relief in being too old for certain things. I still shudder at the thought of twelve-year-old me and the phone-book-size edition of Atlas Shrugged<\/em> I hauled around for a year (in a briefcase\u2014could that be right? I may have retroactively embellished the memory for maximum shame). I had no idea what it was about, but the cover was cool, and it seemed to mark me as the intellectual I was (which is to say not an intellectual at all). God only knows what my teachers made of this affectation. I dutifully read On the Road<\/em> at eighteen, and my Bukowski phase was paired, sommelier-like, with my early twenties. There are simply ages when certain books and authors work best, and if you miss your window, you\u2019ve missed it.<\/p>\n

In my later twenties, out of curiosity and perverse hipster irony (with a dash of self-loathing thrown in), I tried Battlefield Earth<\/em>,\u00a0The Da Vinci Code<\/em>,\u00a0and Ender\u2019s Game<\/em>. I\u2019m here to report that Battlefield Earth<\/em> is every bit as bad as you assume it is. I snobbishly wanted to see why people liked those books, and I came away unenlightened. In any case, I would never do that now. I have long since made peace with other people\u2019s taste and the fact that reading doesn\u2019t\u2014shouldn\u2019t!\u2014serve the same function for everyone.<\/p>\n

The culling of a potential library is a pleasurable, if melancholy, exercise. I appreciate my friends far more at forty than I did at twenty, and I appreciate books more as well. What a pleasure it is to read a great book! What a joy it is to shed the weight of all the should-have-reads\u2014and admit they\u2019re never-wills. And who knows\u2014maybe I\u2019ll get around to Finnegans Wake<\/em> after all. But please stop telling me to read Infinite Jest. <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adam O\u2019Fallon Price is a staff writer for <\/em>The Millions and the author of two novels:<\/em> The Grand Tour and <\/em>The Hotel Neversink (Tin House Books, 2019). His short fiction has appeared in <\/em>The Paris Review, Vice, t<\/em>he<\/em> Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and many other places. His podcast, <\/em>Fan\u2019s Notes<\/a>, is an ongoing discussion about books and basketball. Find him online at adamofallonprice.com<\/a> and on Twitter at @AdamOPrice<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  There comes a point in every reader\u2019s life when they must make peace with all the books they\u2019ll never read. This is true even for the most voracious reader in the world. They say Alexander Pope was the last person to have read every book ever written. Given today\u2019s publishing release schedules and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1038,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[9084,10001,34967,154,32574,2681,4720,1968,952,10900,34969,5505,34971,34968,34489,13117,5818,34970],"class_list":["post-128329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu","tag-atlas-shrugged","tag-battlefield-earth","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-enders-game","tag-finnegans-wake","tag-heart-of-darkness","tag-infinite-jest","tag-moby-dick","tag-the-ambassadors","tag-the-arrow-of-gold","tag-the-bible","tag-the-princess-casamassina","tag-the-secret-agent","tag-the-turn-of-the-screw","tag-to-kill-a-mockingbird","tag-to-the-lighthouse","tag-what-massy-knew"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSeven Books I\u2019ll Never Read<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Look, I know it\u2019s important. 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