A NON-READING LIST 

 

Terry Pratchett | Henrietta Scott, London

Dostoyevsky| Gerard Pecht, Houston
I want to read him but he sends me to sleep

Misery lit | Lily McMyn, Singapore
I’ll have no more of it

Harry Potter | Richard Calnan, London

Howard’s End E M Forster | Scott Atkins, Sydney
a tedious tale

Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon | Howard Seife, New York
boring and overblown

Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Reading of Biblical Narrative Phyllis Trible | Natasha Moore, London
required reading at uni, #traumatize

The Science of Logic Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Kevin Hogarth, London
excruciatingly painful

Moby Dick Herman Melville | Jarret Stephens, New York

Cleopatra: A Life Stacy Schiff | Jarret Stephens, New York

The Canterbury Tales Chaucer | Georgina Hey, Sydney
long, turgid, written in verse

Ulysses James Joyce | Lisa Salazar, Houston
required reading for Honors class, never again

Northanger Abbey Jane Austen | Martin Scott, London
had to read it at school, hated it

Mao: The Unknown Story Jung Chang and Jon Halliday | Martin Scott, London
turgid

Dangling Man Saul Bellow | Andrew Robinson, Durban/Cape Town
desperate existentialistic narcissism

August 1914 Aleksandr Solzhenytsin | Andrew Robinson, Durban/Cape Town
500 pages where nothing actually happened

Moby Dick Herman Melville | Nick Grandage, New York/London
Started. Stopped. Started. Stopped. Started and finished. Because it was there.

The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell | Nick Grandage, New York/London
decided 20 pages in that I couldn’t bear it

Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand | Chaim Wachsberger, New York

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens | James Bateson, London 

Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky | James Bateson, London
never was there a more appropriately titled novel

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ludwig Wittgenstein | Lex Melzer, Sydney

Rebecca Daphne du Maurier | Lex Melzer, Sydney
saccharine

The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy | Laura Shumiloff, London
pure torture