Two weeks ago I proposed a You Didn't Read the Book club: Membership limited to English majors, who are not permitted to confess to not having read a book in the canon. It will be an evening of bluffing, exaggerated by drink. Response was so enthusiastic that I have drawn up details for anyone wishing to form a chapter.
Participants: Limited to English majors. Non-English majors may attend, but only as mute observers. No actual books may be consulted.
Drinks: Sufficient quantities of wine, beer, and spirits are to be provided.
The first round: Participants enjoy their first drink and engage in general conversation. When they are ready to begin, a member draws a card at random from the stack provided (list below) and must lead the discussion of the book on the card. Every member must comment.
The second round: The second drink is provided. Now each remaining participant, in turn, takes a card from the stack and leads the discussion, in which all members must comment. The process continues until every participant has done a book. In this round, no one may dismiss an author as derivative. The club has the option to adjourn after the second round is completed.
The third round (optional): A third drink is provided. In this round the only work under discussion is Finnegans Wake, and all must comment on it. The club adjourns as soon as any member proposes a fourth drink.
The list of works
Beowulf
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Boswell, Life of Johnson
Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Austen, Mansfield Park
Dickens, Bleak House
Eliot, Middlemarch
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
James, The Golden Bowl
Eliot, Four Quartets
Wright, Native Son
Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
Ford, The Good Soldier
Nabokov, Pale Fire
Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (in translation)
Tolstoy, War and Peace (in translation)
Flaubert, Mandame Bovary (in translation)
Nabokov, Pale Fire
