How to Feel Hopelessly Underread

If I can accuse myself of one accomplishment, it's that I'm much better-read than most people I meet. This was true in graduate school as well. I was not, alas, a Department Star, but I realized after a bit that I'd read quite a bit more than my classmates had. I don't think I was better-read than the professors, though the professor who covered genre for my orals hadn't heard of Henry Roth, so who knows. But I read omnivorously and quickly, and I have a particular fondness for the books that people know about but don't read, like Ulysses and Boswell's Life of Johnson. I am much stronger on fiction than drama, and I have a decent grounding in poetry, though I haven't kept up with what's been coming out over the last ten years, except as I discover it accidentally or through recommendation (hence Mark Doty, Sharon Olds).

At any rate. I'm over at the New York Review of Books website looking up a phantom article a friend of mine mentioned to me something like twenty years ago (something like "The Selling of Nancy Reagan"; I remember it being by Garry Wills, and my guess is that it was subsumed into Reagan's America), and I decide to check out their NYRB Classics, not one of which I'd heard of on the first page. I think I had to go to the second or third page before I found something I'd heard of (only because it was made into a Merchant Ivory movie a couple of years ago). I own only one or two of the books listed (Warlock, which I think I own only because I read an article about someone who once went drinking with Tom Pynchon and mentioned the book).