Ten things I've never done (and some book lists)

1 Watched an episode of Big Brother or similar
2 Watched a whole episode of a non-animated sit-com, or any cop show, on current first-run TV
3 Owned anything by Elvis Presley
4 Made it past page 120 of Ulysses
5 Watched a team sport involving balls
6 Believed in any god or gods after turning 8
7 Taken a needle drug for recreational purposes
8 Downloaded an image from my mobile phone to my computer
9 Lain carnally with twins, identical except that one is black and one is white
10 Flown, without machines or equipment

One day I'll probably achieve 4 and 8. I'm losing hope, over 9 and 10. 9 is a cliché, obviously, but some things become clichés for a good reason. Happy to leave the rest as is.

One of David Lodge’s novels describes a game called “Humiliation”, where you win by owning up to not having read books that you are supposed to have read. If you can truthfully say you haven't read a particular classic, and everyone else at the table has read it, you win. In the novel an English lecturer won by admitting he’d never read “Hamlet”. Then his Department heard about it and he got fired. (That seems an unlikely outcome, these days.)

In a game of "Humiliation" my best cards would be that I've:
1 Never finished a novel by Jane Austen
2 Never finished a novel by Charles Dickens
3 Never even attempted Proust
4 Never finished Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
5 Stared determinedly at every page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but in such a state of disengagement and boredom it hardly counts as reading
6 Never got past go, on Gogol’s Lost Souls
7 Never finished a book by Virginia Woolf
8 Nor any William Faulkner
9 Nor anything in the South American Magic Realism line
10 Still trying to get through Pope’s translation of the Iliad

I’m not proud of any of these. People who seem to have reliable taste in other ways like all of these books, and my non-response to them is my loss. Probably. Though I find that hard to believe about Virginia Woolf. I’m only genuinely embarrassed about the Gogol. And Pope’s Homer. And I will have another go at Proust.

Books I finished, but could have put the time to better use playing Freecell
1 Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
2 CS Lewis, The Narnia Chronicles
3 A fantasy novel by Sherri S Tepper (I forget which one)
4 Patrick O’Brien, the first two Aubrey-Maturin books, after which I jumped ship
5 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality
6 Mark Akenside, Pleasures of the Imagination
7 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology
8 I can’t be bothered with this list any more

Swank section: Books I did finish, that you probably didn't
1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (as a non-Catholic, too)
2 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen
3 Matteo Boiardo, Orlando Inamorata
4 The complete Bohm’s Classical Library edition of Plato’s Dialogues
5 Artur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
6 James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (actually enjoyed this, but not Ulysses; weird, I know)
7 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
8 The Mahabharata
9 Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
10 And the definitive unread book, Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time

Books I wouldn’t touch with a barge pool, except to push them to the bottom of the canal and hope they stick:
1 JK Rowling and all Harry Potter product
2 Sue Townsend and all Adrian Mole product
3 Biographies of sports players
4 Tolkein imitations
5 Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series
6 Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and his other books past or future, plus all spin-offs, cash-ins and imitations (except entertaining debunking)
7 Books about 20th century royalty, or socialites, or celebrities
8 Books about bloody Bloomsbury
9 Books by anyone who was in Bloomsbury except Lytton Strachey. And except Bertie Russell if you think that shagging Ottoline Morrell counts as being in Bloomsbury, which I don’t
10 Books that use split-up words or spelled out puns like mans/laughter, (dis)ease, write/right/rite, deference/difference/difference, the/rapist, and so/on.

Ripping
1 George MacDonald Frazer, the Flashman books, plus everything else he wrote or will write (though using the future tense is on the optimistic side)
2 Jan Potocki, The Saragossa Manuscript
3 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (the Penguin edition with Barbara Reynolds’ translation)
4 The Thousand Nights and a Night (according to legend you'll die if you read all of these stories; I skipped a short one about a sailor, not called Sinbad)
5 PG Wodehouse, anything concerning Jeeves, the Drones Club, Blandings Castle or Mr Mulliner; the romances are a little less rewarding
6 Nick Mason’s book about being the drummer for Pink Floyd, which I just finished.
7 That's enough lists.