Inspired by the Proust thread.
I used to work in a second hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road and it was one of our running gags that we should sell orange crates to students full of well-thumbed copies of books that students like to pretend to have read but haven't. These would be "pre-read for your convenience".
Proust was a must, as were Ulysses and Das Kapital.
What would you put in the crate?
Oh, I admitted that I never read Ulysses, although I had a copy for years, until I finally gave it away. I did see the movie though. Never even considered reading Das Kapital.
Perhaps some translated classics from German or Hungarian?
Anything by Jacques Lacan. Michel Foucault. Heidegger. Finnegans Wake. Anything by Peter Handke.
This OP vaguely reminds of the book handling service invented by Myles na gCopaleen, which would fulfil the same purpose, but for a better-off target group.
Or the game "humiliation" invented by David Lodge .
The book handling service is brilliant!
I tried very hard with Lacan until I reached an anecdote from his teens. He was working on a trawler and a tin of fish got caught in the trawler's net and he started drawing all sorts of conclusions from this. I drew the conclusion he was taking the proverbial.
Anything by Jacques Lacan. Michel Foucault. Heidegger. Finnegans Wake. Anything by Peter Handke.
I had forgotten these guys. Absolutely.
Not much to add to Riesling's great post.
The Divine Comedy might belong there. Maybe also The Man Without Qualities.
Books by Tolstoy. I think that relatively few people really have read "War and Peace" or "Anna Karenina" from beginning to end, although in their defense I have to say that the latter is mostly boring after the death of Anna. For good measure, though, throw in a copy of Tolstoy's "The Cossacks," which I actually read in Russian many years ago.
There was a cartoon in The New Yorker many years ago that showed the counter of a diner (a type of low-cost eatery in the United States) and a waitress calling into the kitchen "Have we got any strawberries crushed in cream cheese?" At the far end of the counter is Proust, in the well known pose with one hand under his chin.
I asked a friend who had read "Remembrance of Things Past" what the reference was, and he said he didn't know. He said that he had only read the first volume, "Swann's Way." That prompted me to read the entire work. I did find that reference to strawberries crushed in cream cheese, though, fairly early on in "Swann's Way," so my friend probably hadn't even read one volume. Send him one of those crates of books.
Funny -- I told my husband about this post at lunchtime and The Man without Qualities came up. I could just throw in pretty much anyone who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
NAmerican -- I studied Russian literature at university and read War and Peace as well as Anna Karenina. Fortunately, in English -- we only had a few excerpts in Russian. I certainly haven't read anything by Tolstoy since then.
