I'm so Humiliated

Prof. Novel Reading has been playing the Humiliation game, in which she confesses to the most glaring omissions in her lifetime reading. For Rohan, this game has some meaning. As a specialist in the Victorian novel, she admits that there is some professional sense in which she should have read Martin Chuzzlewit and Pendennis and any of 29 unread Trollope novels. To the Amateur Reader, none of those are famous enough to count as Humiliations (although Martin Chuzzlewit is pretty great).

Rohan humbly omits two things. First, that as part of her training, she has a pretty good idea of what's in those books, and if she doesn't she knows where to find out. For some scholarly purposes, a book that's been read is not much more valuable than one that hasn't been. Shockingly anti-literary of me, but there are interesting things in the world besides the purely literary, and some of those things are usefully studied by literature professors.

Second, as with all well-trained literature PhDs, there was a concentrated period of intense reading, broad and deep, covering the entire history of whichever literature they've picked. This is aside from the later specialization, the dissertation and whatnot. Those first couple of years of graduate school provide a base for the entire career. This is one reason (of many) that there is minimal prof-bashing at Wuthering Expectations. Lit profs know their business.

I've done a lot of the reading that the lit profs have done, but on a surface level. Few secondary sources, for example, and then mostly literary history that helps me see the field. No theory; no linguistics. Everything non-English in translation, of course. My breadth ain't bad; my depth could use some work.

Since I've set up shop as a bit of an amateur specialist, though, my position is a little bit closer to the profs, except that where they argue from authority, I argue from enthusiam. My rhetorical trick here, as in many aspects of life, is to write with confidence, whether or not I know what I'm talking about.

To help undercut any pretence to authority, here's my 19th century Humiliation list, the most famous books of the period that I have not read, by language or field:

English: Eliot, Middlemarch; Dickens, David Copperfield, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities; Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles and many more; Stoker, Dracula; Stevenson, Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Almost no Christina Rossetti.

American: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; James, I'll let The Portrait of a Lady stand in for a larger Henry James problem; Thoreau, Walden. Almost no Emily Dickinson.

French: Hugo, Les Miserables; Zola, Germinal and others; Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé.

Russian: Dostoevsky, The Devils, The Idiot; Goncharov: Oblomov; Herzen: From the Far Shore. I know, these won't win the Humiliation game. I guess I've read the conventional Russian Top 10.

Norwegian and Swedish: Ibsen and Strindberg

German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish: Ha ha ha, these don't count, not their 19th century literatures. Not in the United States at least. None of these literatures have the prestige necessary to count as Humiliations. This is where the game breaks down. Goethe's Faust, Fontane's Effi Briest, Verga's Little Novels of Sicily, Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman - they ought to be on everyone's "someday" list. But they're not. Still, for my own sake:

German: Keller, Green Henry.

Italian: Verga, The House by the Medlar Tree.

Spanish: Perez Galdos, Fortunata y Jacinta.

Portuguese: Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro.

Yiddish: This one will be checked off the list pretty soon, actually. Keep reading, steer clear of too much junk, and any fool can beat this game.