Bookshame

An article in the Telegraph on a literary game - the books that you haven't read.

Not an entirely new idea, as there was a rash of articles on the topic when Pierre Bayard's somewhat ironical book How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read was published, but the idea was clearly reignited at the Ways With Words festival in Dartington.

The Telegraph calls it Humiliation. I prefer Bookshame, and know the game well.

Despite having an English degree from a reasonably respectable university, I have what Sylvia Plath termed, on her arrival in Cambridge, 'whistling gaps' in my knowledge. No Proust, no more than a few pages of Stendhal; no Vanity Fair, no Pride and Prejudice. I once read somewhere that women didn't read Walden. So, powered by the nuclear fission of Dead Poets Society and sophomoric feminism, I bought a second-hand copy. Which, eleven years later, I'm still to read.

But then, I was encouraged to question the canon, to be suspicious of the fact that the books that lie shamefully unread are largely by dead white guys or spinsters in poke bonnets. So I may or may not read Our Mutual Friend (even if I told my tutor I had, and managed a convincing dissection of its central theme. English degrees are good for learning how to do this), but it doesn't matter either way. Sometimes, they're only books.