The Curse of the Bibliophile

I think one of the drawbacks of trying to read through "the canon" is that it expands dramatically the minute one decides to add works in translation (to say nothing of adding in poetry or short stories).  One could probably reasonably get through all the "important" books written by British (and Irish) authors or American authors (and I track my progress here), but then if one wants to read some key texts by the Russians, French, Germans, Italians, etc. then this really is a life-sentence.  Some days I accept that I won't ever get through all my reading lists (particularly as I often include interesting "mid-list" authors and keep adding just published books), and some days (particularly when there has been a really long stretch of disappointing books) this depresses me and makes me ask myself why I am bothering.  Many of the books that one "ought" to read don't live up to the hype.  Personally, I find Faulkner kind of hit or miss, and I certainly don't understand the hype around von Rezzori's The Death of My Brother Abel (I did see a contemporary review that hinted it was self-indulgent and extremely sexist).  For that matter, I don't really get why so many (including Calvino) thought that Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana was so central to the modern Italian canon.  I didn't dislike it, but I just didn't think it lived up to the hype.

But I probably cannot escape being a reader.  It is foundational for me -- part of my habitus (as Bourdieu would put it).  I picked this up from my parents (who had books and book and more books in the basement), and I'll pass it on to my children, who both seem to be big readers (a true achievement in this internet age).  If anything, I probably should do a better job balancing the fiction and the non-fiction (I'm probably 95% fiction these days).

I think I have rearranged my lists so that I will hit most of the key "missing" books over the next 2-3 years, including:
X Homer The Odyssey and The Iliad (sticking with Lattimore and Fitzgerald for now)
X Virgil The Aeneid (a book that I really ought to have read in undergrad)
Fante The Bandini Quartet
X Updike The Rabbit Novels (coming up quite soon)
Sinclair Lewis Main Street
Tolstoy War and Peace (I knocked off Anna Karenina a couple of years ago)
X Conrad The Secret Agent
X Musil The Man Without Qualities (some trepidation with this one)
Perec Life: A User's Manual
Faulkner The Snopes Trilogy
Dickens Oliver Twist (to get to David Copperfield in 3 years, I'd need to go out of sequence)
Hardy Return of the Native (to get to Jude the Obscure sooner, I'd also go out of sequence)
Austen Emma

On balance, I probably have read enough literature to feel I have done about 50% of the canon.  It is a significant accomplishment, but there is a such a long, long way to go.