True bromance.
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed / Thinkstock
There are 21 Game of Thrones characters who have appeared in 25 or more episodes. You’ve got three minutes to name them! Good luck…
HBO / Robin Edds / BuzzFeed
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
I haven't read War and Peace. I haven't read Pride and Prejudice. I haven't read Middlemarch. I haven't read The Adventures of Augie March.
I used to date a guy who was writing a dissertation about Augie March. He never finished that dissertation, nor his Ph.D., but his dissertation proposal was good — what I read of it anyway. Anyway, I never read the book but I hear it's great.
Updike died. On Twitter and Facebook, everyone, it seemed, pretended they had read Updike. I haven't read Updike. I'd like to. Salter died; everyone pretended they had read Salter. I haven't read Salter. I'd like to. E.L. Doctorow died. All I've read of E.L. Doctorow is The Book of Daniel. Not Ragtime. I had to Wikipedia which of his other books were famous. I haven't read them.
I haven't read Fahrenheit 451. I haven't read Animal Farm. I haven't read Lord of the Flies. Should I bother at this point?
Maybe.
I haven't read the New Testament. That's a good one.
I was reading a list of the 100 greatest books in order to determine which of them I haven't read. Almost all of them were written by straight white men. I have read a lot of books by straight white men. I know a critique of the canon is nothing new. I went to the kind of college where that's what you learn. You read a lot of books written by people of color, by women, by queer people. Which isn't to say I've read enough of these books; I haven't.
This is as good a time as any to say I haven't read Toni Morrison.
I recently admitted this to a friend and he texted back that most white people haven't. I said at least I said it and I'm not sure that my saying that made it any better.
Maybe I'm saying all this to say: I'm working on it.
I haven't read Wuthering Heights. I haven't read Jane Eyre. I'm pretty sure the only Bronte book I've read to completion was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though I struggle to remember a single thing about it. I have two degrees in English — undergraduate and graduate. During those seven years, I read so many books, especially books that took place seemingly in that same fictional drippy, diseased English countryside, and yet if I try to conjure specifics from any of them, all I picture is Maggie Smith as Mrs. Medlock in the 1993 movie version of The Secret Garden.
I don't know if I've read The Secret Garden.
I think I have. I probably did, as a kid.
As a kid, I ate books like you eat pretzels with ginger ale. I ate books like you eat Triscuits with cheese. I blew through children's books, Matilda in my mind. Then I blew through classics, books I felt were hard, checked them off of a nonexistent list, as if I wanted to finish them all and be done with it.
The summer after my freshman year of college, the only job I could get was at a Borders in a strip mall aside a freeway, back in California where I'm from. It'd be hot in the parking lot even before dawn. During our multi-day orientation we mostly learned about shoplifting. During our workdays we mostly waited until we could go smoke a cigarette in the sun. My job was to take literature off the shelves to send it back to warehouses and stock things like The Da Vinci Code. I quit after four days.
This is as good a time as any to say I have read The Da Vinci Code.
I haven't read Water for Elephants. I haven't read Eat Pray Love. I haven't read The Help. I haven't read The Kite Runner or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or the Secret Life of Bees. I haven't read Game of Thrones.
I know that to a lot of people, these books aren't books.
I know that to a lot of people, these books are books.
I am unsure whether I need to read them. I took a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey off a shelf once and started it; then my flight boarded.
The other day it occurred to me that we should have a week a year where everyone is forced to read or watch or listen to art they've decided they hate but know nothing about.
I'd probably hate that.
Another summer, I taught at an academic camp for overachieving preteens on the campus of a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania Dutch country. I had to sleep in a dormitory and eat in a cafeteria with hundreds of dorky kids and their drama and their noise. I had 14 students between ages 12 and 14, and for eight hours a day, five days a week, for three weeks, I was to teach them how to write. I ran out of things to say on the first afternoon.
Evenings, after they'd been handed off to their counselors, I would run around a bucolic suburban neighborhood, panicked, brainstorming what else I could give the kids to read that they might actually like.
The three weeks finally, mercifully, ended, and their parents came to pick them up. I sat at a table in a gymnasium and my students' parents could come find me and ask how their children did. They did great, I said. (They did.)
One mother asked what her son should do to do better on the SAT essays section, when he took it in a few years. Her son hadn't been very interested in writing, as far as I could tell. He liked math. He liked video games.
"Read," I said.
"Read what?" she asked.
"Read anything." I said. "Tell him to read whatever he likes. If he doesn't like books, tell him to read comic books." Every little bit helps, I was trying to say. She didn't appear to like this suggestion.
When I was in grad school, at a Big Ten university in the Midwest, I taught a required literature class for non-English majors, mostly freshmen. My classes would usually be too full. My students would usually have no interest in being there. What they wanted from me was a B+ or A- and to move on with their lives.
I'd poll them on the first day, and ask: What was the last book you read that you liked? The Giving Tree. Harry Potter. Mockingjay.
I don't like it when people like me, book people, complain about people these days, about how nobody reads anymore. Life is garbage; people should be able to fill their heads and time with whatever they want.
A lot of my friends read more than I do. The ones who work in book publishing. The ones who remained in academia. The ones who don't live in cities but instead in small towns in big houses with whole walls of books. Such walls freak me out. So many books I've never heard of. So many books I will never read. My smartest friend told me to read Buddenbrooks, said it was incredible and I couldn't miss it, and it sat aside my bed for years, at at least three addresses. I haven't read Buddenbrooks. I'd like to.
A friend plans all her trips around which bookstores she wants to visit. Bookstores tend to devastate me. I am a failure, I think to myself. I've read nothing.
The upside of prison, a mentor once said, would be time to read.
The books I do have mostly collect cat fur. I love them desperately.
I love books because they contain contradictions. I love books because they exist across time. I love books because they are wrong, and because they are right.
Somebody recently polled a group of us who were hanging out, asked, "You could save one human life, or save all of Shakespeare," something like that. A bunch of them saved the human life. I was like, of course Shakespeare.
The other night I got a beer with a friend whose first book is publishing soon. He said when it's out, he's going to D.C., to the Library of Congress, to see it. "It'll be there forever," he said.
"Or at least until the country ends," I said.
We’re wizards, Harry.
I mean, it does. It definitely does.
“I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending that I don’t exist.”
Warner Bros.
“I feel like a fraud all the time.”
John Green / Via reactiongifs.com
"I mean I haven't published a novel for three and a half years, so...yeah. I feel this way all the time. People often use the phrase 'literally the worst' colloquially, but I have on countless occasions felt that I am literally the worst writer on Earth, and that I am a complete fraud. I feel like a fraud all the time, and I still don't feel like I know how to write a novel, and at this point I doubt I ever will."
Via reddit.com
More like Reader of the Free World.
U.S. President Barack Obama and daughters Sasha (left) and Malia shop for books in the Kramerbooks book store on November 26, 2011 in Washington, DC.
Pool / Getty Images
To learn more, click here.
Scribner
Crime and Punishment just took on a whole new meaning.
1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
2. The Giver
3. Moby-Dick
4. Eat, Pray, Love
5. Hop on Pop
6. Crime and Punishment
7. The Harder They Come
8. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
9. Holes
10. The Very Hungry Caterpillar
11. The Sound and the Fury
12. Curious George
13. Everyone Poops
14. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
15. The Lord of the Rings
16. Cooking with Pooh
17. Strong Motion
18. The Human Stain
19. The Fountainhead
20. James and the Giant Peach
21. Lost in the Funhouse
22. Are You My Mother?
23. Fathers and Sons
24. Freakonomics
25. Oh, the Places You'll Go!
26. Of Human Bondage
27. V.
28. How to Win Friends and Influence People
29. A Storm of Swords
30. The Narrow Road to the Deep North
31. Dark Places
32. Old Yeller
33. Yes Please
34. White Noise
35. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
36. Man's Search for Meaning
37. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
38. The Great Divorce
39. The Naked and the Dead
40. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
41. Make Way for Ducklings
42. Go Down, Moses
43. The Five People You Meet in Heaven
44. Twelve Angry Men
45. A Confederacy of Dunces
46. My Struggle
47. One Hundred Years of Solitude
48. A Room of One's Own
49. Misery
50. Naked Lunch
51. The Old Man and the Sea
52. The Anatomy Lesson
53. The Secret Garden
54. The Grapes of Wrath
55. The BFG
56. Hard Times
57. The Poky Little Puppy
58. The Giving Tree
59. Open All Night
60. Where the Wild Things Are
61. An Untamed State
62. She Stoops to Conquer
63. Fox in Socks
64. Journey to the End of the Night
65. The Story of an Hour
66. Men Without Women
67. The Ocean at the End of the Lane
68. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
69. Go Set a Watchman
A new book takes a spectacular an inside look at the making of this iconic film.
A new book by Taschen titled, The Making of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey', takes readers on a visual journey through the production of this iconic film. In four bounded volumes, the book brings together an archive of interviews, film stills, behind-the-scenes photos, screenplays, and production notes.
Actor Keir Dullea in the one-man space repair pod with glaring headlights.
Stanley Kubrick Archives / TASCHEN
A specially commissioned artwork demonstrates how the various interior sets for the Discovery would fit in to the habitation sphere if the ship were constructed at full scale.
Oliver Rennert / TASCHEN
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