Let's have a bit of a shameful confession thread. Post writers whom you have NOT read, but that are considered integral to Western literature. Post writers you really should have read by now, but haven't.

I haven't read any of the Russians. Not a word of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, let alone somebody like Pushkin. I also have barely touched Dickens; just Great Expectations when I was in high school, and that's it.

>>24571688 (OP)
Homer, except for a few excerpts from the Odyssey in high school. I got everything I need to know from reading Percy Jackson in middle school desu.

>>24571688 (OP)
Gay male here. I only read fiction with male protagonists. Out of the last 100 books I’ve read only 1 was written by a woman. Nothing personal, I just don’t relate.

>>24571760
will you read my book?

>>24571760
Women are the worst bro

Unironically Harry Potter, never read the books or seen the movies

>>24571760
holy based

I am ashamed of having read dostoevsky's every book.

>>24571688 (OP)
I haven't read any contemporary writing and I can't find any enthusiasm to

>>24571688 (OP)
I haven't read any Russians. As for Dickens, I've only read an abridged version of Great Expectations in 9th grade. I dropped out of high school so I missed the modernists. I've only read one Hemingway and no Faulkner, Fitzgerald, etc. I basically completely missed out on literature as a youth because my school didn't think it was worth reading until junior year.

>>24571824
Sure - what’s the name?

>>24571760
>Gay male here.
You came to the right place.

>>24571688 (OP)
I have read very little Dostoyevski and no Tolstoy, and I intend to keep it that way. Cant fucking stand the turgid melodrama of the Great Russian Soul. I do not care what Alyoha thinks about god, his overblown woes of impressing Lyudmilka Skibidilovna, nor how cold his fucking garret is.

What i actually do need to catch up on is Shakespeare. I've only read Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that just isnt enough for such a foundational body of work. I've also noticed that the older I get the more brilliant the various quotes and bits get that I hear or read in other media.

I also feel like I probably should have read Les Miserables or The Retard of Notre Dame by now, but eh. I'll get there.

>>24572195
Tried to get into contemporary literature recently and it's all vulgar trash, just stick with the classics, at least that's what I'll be doing.

I've read The Name of the Rose 7 times

I am having trouble separating between the good in itself and a sort of vanity of intellectual aggrandizement. For instance the thing that has given me the most meaning and freedom is the sophistication of my literacy, though I am skeptical of prioritising it as such - maybe it is just an egotistical compulsion? My question ultimately is, is it worth it, sincerely, to pursue the arts, or is it just a convoluted way of assuaging the ego. Has anyone confronted this?