A stack of books (Ian Wilson (cc:by))
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Toni Morrison's book is _Beloved_, not _The Beloved_.
I love to read long books, but I once attempted to read Gone With the Wind for a book report in high school...honestly - the most boring book I ever read! So, half way into it, I discovered that if I just read one page, skipped one hundred pages (and repeat until done) that I basically understood what was going on. It was like a soap opera on television - you can turn it back on a year later and still be able to follow the story!
Interesting. Honestly the books that I have read always horrified people enough that I don't remember ever having to lie about having read a book. I haven't read War and Peace, but I have read Anna Karenina twice. After reading the Inferno, I made it half-way through the Purgatorio. Read the first book of Proust, and again about half-way through the second book. Never saw a reason to lie about books to other people. Accumulating a library as a result of an ability to lie to myself about my capacity for reading seems odd enough.
I was assigned Wuthering Heights in two different literature classes in college. I never got past page thirty. Either time. Ugh.
In college I took a 3 month course on The Canterbury Tales and I still keep the huge book on my bookshelf for bragging rights. In truth, I think I read about 10 pages of it. Thank god for Cliff Notes!
I would like to suggest that people consider the Bible for this list. I have read it cover to cover and it has become obvious to me that very few people have read it themselves even though most people would say that they have.
I DID read several books in their original French in college - Le Rouge et Le Noir, Mme. Bovary, La Cousine Bette - but really didn't understand them, so while I can brag about my accomplishment I couldn't tell you anything about those books. (Was The Red and The Black about clergy?)
I lied about having read a memoir in which my colleague (who outranks me) is a main "character": a stupid lie and pointless, but the memoir was written by someone I know and the memoir is, I hear, mean to my colleague, so I just clucked my tongue and said "I know, it's unbelievable that she wrote that about her."
Now I'm curious!