I know. So have you. But have you read it on the toilet?
Some years ago, I realised that I was spending a significant amount of time in the smallest room reading leftover bits of the weekend Guardian and Observer. Worthy though these were, I came to the conclusion that here was an opportunity to read those books that I always thought I should read and everyone else pretended they had.
I put Moby Dick on the cistern, a chunky tome but not too intimidating. It rattled along in a series of day-to-day episodes of Starbuck and Queequeg swirling around in an allegorical confrontation between a mutilated superego and an enigmatic cetacean.
Then followed:
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
AS Byatt: Possession
James Joyce: Ulysses
Zadie Smith: On Beauty
At this point, it seemed right to go for the big one:
LeoTolstoy: War and Peace
That took a long time.
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George Eliot: Middlemarch
Orhan Pamuk: The Museum of Innocence
Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda
Charles Dickens: Bleak House
Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy
Now… The Big One
Marcel Proust: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
That took more than a year of closeted perusal.
Back to normal…
John Updike: The Rabbit Angstrom novels – Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redox, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest
W.M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair
I have a similar programme in my workplace that has been running for a relatively short time. So far:
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’urbevilles
The most surprising aspect of this is that I have never had piles.
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