Books on your shelf that you will probably never read.

Thé bible.

"Humoresque" and "The Witches of Eastwick". I've tried to read both of them several times and just can't get through them.

Like many, many people, Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace).

OP, I recommend Underworld highly.

The Killer Angels - I wanted to learn more about the Civil War, so I ordered this. I read maybe 25 pages, put it down and that was that. I hate reading about military action, so I will just wallow in my ignorance.

Underworld is fantastic - you should finally read it. I read it in college for a survey class in American literature 1940-present and my professor gave some brilliant lectures about the novel.

Mine would have to also be Infinite Jest. I think about reading it every couple of years, but then I pick something else up.

The Corrections.

The proof copy of the never-to-be-published "The Art Of My Second Term," by djt.

Pale Fire. Who knows, though, maybe in my old age. I love so many of Nabokov's books.

John Milton's Complete Poetical Works

Pale Fire is fantastic! One of my favorites.

Infinite Jest owns this thread.

Has anyone ever read Iris Murdoch’s The Book and The Brotherhood? It’s been on my shelf for many years.

Finnegan's Wake

One day R4, one day!

The Sleepwalkers, and The Death of Virgil, both by Hermann Broch.

The Man without Qualities, by Robert Musil

Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess

Accordion Crimes, by Annie Proulx

Jerusalem, by Alan Moore

It's weird because I love long novels: I've read most of Dickens, many by Thackeray, most of Eliot, all of Proust, all of Paul Scott. But these ones above just don't get read.

The Joy of Sex

Just read the fucking thing and STOP BITCHING, OP.

The first Harry Potter book. I bought it over 15 years ago at an airport store thinking I’d start reading it on the trip home.

Never cracked it open.

The Tale of the Heike

Sidney's Arcadia (the long version)

The Annals of Imperial Rome (Tacitus)

The Quran

I may read pieces and parts of the last two, but probably not from cover to cover.

I have recently learned not to hoard books anymore. After almost 10 years on my shelf I finally got around to reading James Joyce's Ulysses. Any book I don't plan to read again or that I don't consider to be a collectible I have been giving away to the Library or Salvation Army.

Read it r5. I picked it up after seeing Gettysburg because I wanted to know more about the some of the characters. It was fascinating, I could not put it down. I’m not especially interested in the Civil War either.

I also read the “sequel” written by Shaara’s son. It is awful as was the movie based on it.

Books do furnish a room.

I love this video of Umberto Eco walking through his apartment.

He tied with a personal library of over 40,000 books, if I remember correctly.

Earthly Powers is awesome R16. It's hard to belie that a straight man could write book that was so spot on. Burgess was brilliant It's also riot. There is a very good audiobook on it.

Remembrance of Things Past

Ulysses

The Magic Mountain

Les Miserables

David Copperfield

Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance

R16 - Earthly Powers has one of my favorite opening lines in 20th century fiction:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

"I Know The Much is True" by Wally Lamb. It just sits there in one of my bookcases, year after year. I don't know what made me buy it because the first page is nothing great so it couldn't have been that. I know there's now an HBO miniseries based on it but I cant even get bothered to watch it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. Have not even started page 1 yet.

What do we think of the Booker longlist?

The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud

ALL of them. I just like having books, never had any intention of actually reading them.

The novel "The Witches of Eastwick" is a stinker. I finally read it after I saw the movie.

It sat on the shelf forever.

I liked (but did not love) the movie, but how they got a screenplay from that awful book is a mystery.

Rubyfruit Jungle

Well....

Pale Fire is Nabokov's masterpiece, r9. And when you've finished it, read Mary McCarthy's review in [italic]The New Republic[/italic]: [quote]Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel.[/quote]

[quote]One Hundred Years of Solitude

I made it all the way through and it's rather boring.

The 3 volumes of "The Baroque Cycle" by Neal Stephenson: [italic]Quicksilver[/italic], [italic]The Confusion[/italic], and [italic]The System of the World[/italic].

Run, Tip, Run

My partner prided himself on his wonderful book collection—three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves worth.

Over time, however, I noticed he never read any of them.

When we bought a house together, I finally convinced him to get rid of most of them—because he could always buy the kindle versions when he wanted to read them. Don’t think he’s bought a single one

Proust's 'Remembrance of...' aw, fuck it.

David McCullough's "The Path Between the Seas" about the building of the Panama Canal. And I *like* his work! I just can't gin up any interest in the Canal tome, though.

I try to get rid of the ones I have no intention of reading so I keep thinking I’ll get to these, but like an earlier poster said, many of these books have traveled as much as I have without ever having been cracked open. If you want to convince me to read them or pass them on, please do.

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue - Samuel R. Delaney

What the Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers

Clea, Justine, etc. - the Lawrence Durrell quartet

Getting Mother’s Body - Suzan-Lori Parks

Talk Dirty in Spanish (!) - Alexis Munier & Laura Martinez

Do not bother with [italic]A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius[/italic].

The Gormenghast Trilogy, I got about a 1/3 through, and couldn't do it anymore.

Speaking of which, R33; WHET Rita Mae Brown?

Bueller? Mueller? Anyone?

Moby Dick and other works by Melville; Finnegan's Wake and other works by James Joyce. They seem like unsurmountable mountains to climb but I can't bring myself to get rid of them.

I'm definitely a book hoarder, they're my heroin.

[QUOTE] The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s unique, insane, heartbreaking, beautiful. Just an unforgettable novel.

I’ve heard great things about Housekeeping.

I’m in a gay book club and this next month is my choice. I’ve narrowed my top three picks down to The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt, At Danceteria and Other Stories by Philip Dean Walker, and Like People in History by Felipe Picano. Can anyone help me out? Anyone have a recommendation from those?

Lost Language is excellent, as is the film adaptation.

I liked them all, r47. Maybe the Felice Picano best. But the David Leavitt book is good, too.

The Corrections. I've bought it more than once and yet I can't get past page 20. Sorry.

My dad gave me The Old Man And The Sea when I was 11 and One Hundred Years Of Solitude when I was 13. Both remain unread.

I still have the same Signet Classics edition of An American Tragedy. From the age of 18 I always took it on family holidays, I always got halfway through.

"Not Without My Pizza" by Dom Deluise

Hi, R47. I also loved The Lost Language of Cranes. I was never a fan of Felice Picano; his writing always seemed sloppy, too full of generalizations. Don’t know much about At Danceteria but from what I can see it sees worth reading. Thanks for the comments on Murakami.

And thanks to you, too, R43.

R47 - I read Like People in History when it came out, and it left no impression on me. In fact I don't even remember what it was about.

In contrast, I found Lost Language of Cranes to be really moving, and it was a real page-turner. I'm actually considering re-reading it soon.

I finally read the Picano a year ago—I think he was the least talented of the Violet Quill. He thought he was Edmund White, but was closer to Gordon Merrill (and Ethan Modden, who at least occasionally got off a mildly witty riposte). I liked The Lost Language of Jeanne Crain when it came out, but haven’t read it since—of his more recent books, I like Lesvitt’s The Two Hotels Francforys, a bisexual revision of Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. At Danceteris is clever, if somewhat slight in dimensions, but it could make for an interesting discussion of the AIDS era. The Picano felt like a slog.

[italic]The Emigrants[/italic] tetralogy by Vilhelm Moberg. I read the first two books ten years ago. I want to read the last two, but now it’s been so long I’d really have to start all over again.

[quote] but was closer to Gordon Merrill

You mean Gordon Merrick.

Felice Picano wrote a pretty good gay thriller except the ending didn’t make any sense. There was some good sex in it and the protagonist was a sexy lunkhead. Highly recommended.

The Picano thriller was titled The Lure.

I’ve got far too many books which I haven’t read, and I’m slowly trying to cull my collection and keep only thosE which I have read and loved or which I really really want to read.

I used to read voraciously, but I now read all day at work, and my concentration levels in the evenings are poor. I only really read at weekends now.

I’ve got quite a big collection of German modern and classic fiction which I enjoy, but I doubt I will ever get through Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). It’s too much for me somehow, in German or English. I’m also fairly certain that will never read any Dickens beyond Great Expectations. There’s something implausible and maudlin about Dickens which frustrates and bores me.

[QUOTE] The Corrections. I've bought it more than once and yet I can't get past page 20. Sorry.

Honestly, it’s worth reading just to get to the last line which I still remember almost twenty years later.

^^YES! The Corrections was on my bookshelf for about 5 years, and one day for whatever reason, I forced myself to start it. My personal rule for long novels is to commit to the first 100 pages, and I think it was about page 97 when it started getting interesting for me. By the end, I totally loved it, and I think at the halfway mark, I started back at the beginning and everything then made sense to me.

Of course, I've always intended to read it again.....haven't gotten back to it yet.

For those who have read it... she's too old now, but for years I thought Laura Linney would have been perfect as the sister.

When I read a book I don't start at page one. I open it up in the middle and read. Then I go back 50 pages and read, then forward...then eventually page one. I admitted this in a group of other people and several of them said they do the same thing.

....

Various Pynchon The Little Friend A Confederacy of Dunces

Ever since Midnight's Children received the Best of the Booker, I no longer take that prize seriously.

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

I have both volumes of that Larry Kramer thing, but haven’t started actually reading.

I have reached the point where, after reading a book, I put it in a box, to actually sell or donate. (Not much interest anywhere in any gay books.)

[quote]I have reached the point where, after reading a book, I put it in a box, to actually sell or donate. (Not much interest anywhere in any gay books.)

In Pennsylvania, a group that mails books to prisoners told me their most asked-for categories were popular mystery series, gay books, and cookbooks. They preferred paperbacks because of mailing costs, but were happy to take a bunch of hardcovers I wanted to donate.

I have copies of Pascal’s “Pensees” and Montaigne’s essays on my bedside table. I think reading these books will change my life and resolved to read a selection from each book every day but I have not done so.