There was dismay round the kitchen table last night during a conversation about Great Expectations when I mentioned that I hadn't read any Dickens at all. Slack-jawed with amazement, my family looked as though I'd just revealed a shameful past or a predilection for something not quite proper, and I suppose I now risk being blackballed by The Serious Readers' Club, but there we are.
This admission of omission ties in with Dark Puss' comment on yesterday's post, specifically the following: "I have grown out of any feelings of needing to read any particular author or any particular book - a feeling I held most strongly when I was a teenager. Is that maturity or have I lost completely my sense of adventure?"
What do we all think? Are we drawn to the vast territory of unread books in the way that we might look at maps of an unexplored land and eagerly plan a journey (even if only in our imagination), or in the absence of any particular yearnings to travel there, can we close the atlas, content just to go where our reading happens to take us, and to say when confronted with an author we haven't read, "what the dickens does it matter"?
