thanks juice...
now i'm contemplating my reading habits (or lack thereof)...
looking at the list of 101 Great Books that Juice linked in, I see that I've read 26 on the list, mostly because I was forced to by someone. While I will agree that everyone should read the "classics", I will also admit that most make for a BORING read.
And, most of them I read before high school. Some as young as 7 or 8, simply because they were in my parents' bookcase. I've only read a couple since leaving my sleepy little hometown.
-- Beowulf
Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust
Golding, William Lord of the Flies
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph Catch 22
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World
Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird
London, Jack The Call of the Wild
Orwell, George Animal Farm
Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen Selected Tales
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William Hamlet
Shakespeare, William Macbeth
Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion
Sophocles Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie
There's a ton of reading I'd like to do, but most of it is contemporary. However, I would like to finish Kafka's Trial. And unlike Juice, I'm not putting anything on my "wish i'd never read" list... except one recent original Doctor Who novel that SUCKED THE WHOLE STORY DOWN THE TOILET in the last 5 pages. (Wolfsbane.)
I'm not sure I can put anything on my "glad to say I've never read" list. I mean, how can you be glad you haven't read something? The closest I can come to that is "Glad I haven't read Michael Moore's writings because I know how deeply angry and violent I would get if I did, and it wouldn't be healthy"... but to say that I'm really glad I've never read something? Really? No. I can't think of anything I'm glad I've never read.
I'm ashamed I've never read more on the teachings of religions other than Christianity. Very ashamed. Well, aside from Mormonism or Scientology, but I guess I'd even be glad to read up on them from a documentarian perspective.
Books I never finished? Too long to list.
Back to wishing I'd never read things... I wish sometimes that I'd never read the witchcraft and wiccan books I read in high school, at least at the time. I mean... really. They caused more problems than good at the time, but have given me a better world-view. I'm sure if I had been reading the Koran I would've been thrown out of school just the same.