Heresy and Humiliation

John Scalzi makes a startling admission:

I’ve never read a Harry Potter book.

In the same post, he also links to an old piece expressing the heretical opinion that the Lord of the Rings movies are better than the books.

He’s got reasons for both of those, and you can go read them, but what this brings to mind is the parlour game “Humiliation” invented by David Lodge, in which “Players name classics of literature that they have not read, the winner being the one who exhibits the most woeful literary lacuna.” Of course, why should the lit geeks get all the fun? This sounds like a topic for a Dorky Poll, namely:

What important work that you probably should’ve read have you never actually read?

This is open to any genre, and any field. It could be a novel, or a textbook, or a seminal monograph. Or, for that matter, you can just express a heretical opinion about some important work or person (e.g., “Feynman wasn’t all that.”). My opening contributions:

I’ll throw out two things that I’ve never read, one fictional, one physics-related. In fiction, despite being a fan of SF and “space opera” in particular, I’ve never read anything by E.E. “Doc” Smith. When they started doing Lensman reissues in the mid-90’s, I leafed through a few in the bookstore, and I just couldn’t see paying money to read one. I’ve been around SF fandom long enough to recognize when people are throwing Smith references around, but I mostly just keep my mouth shut during those conversations, and hope they’ll stop.

In physics, I’ve never read Feyman’s QED. People talk about it as a really good piece of work, but I’ve just never gotten around to it. I do have a copy of it, now, and will probably read it in the near future (at which point the most glaring omission in my pop-physics reading will be The Elegant Universe), but at the moment, I haven’t read it.

(If you want textbooks/ classes, I didn’t take classical mechanics in grad school, so I’ve never read or used Goldstein’s book.)

So, there are my humiliating admissions. Let’s hear yours.