Asymmetrical Information

J. K Rowling.

It has been a lonely week.

You know whats interesting, they don't make you read Adam Smith or Ricardo as an undergrad in economics... probably too free market...

I took Anatole France's advice; 'Life is short and Proust is long.' Which is the opportunity cost argument. More Dostoevski means less Tolstoi. More Schiller; less Goethe.

Heinlein, Asimov, Niven?

Actually Ricardo and contemporaries are near the top of my (long and growing) list of candidate things to poke around in. Why the heck did it take so long for people to figure out comparative advantage? I don't understand why it should've been any harder to figure out than what Kepler or Galileo did long before.

By the time Ricardo came along, the physicists were doing stuff like perturbation theory, and partial differential equations for continuum mechanics. That seems as weird to me as if the order had been reversed, so that Galileo had worked in 1810 at about the same time that the political philosophers were working out the game theoretical and information theoretical implications of Ricardo's work from 1680. What was so hard about markets?

I have read a history of ideas about freedom of trade, and some of _Wealth of Nations_. It seems to me that it not being assigned to economists today for the same reason that Galileo and Newton aren't assigned to physicists today: we have better ways to present the material. On the other hand, modern pundits don't constantly get a free pass for ignoring the ideas of Galileo and Newton. One reason to assign Smith and Ricardo today might be to hammer home how long ago people made solid arguments for the net benefits of unilateral free trade, so that students can leave class with a deep appreciation of how stunningly economically illiterate it is when pundits ignore them.

I just started reading Machiavelli's The Prince because eventhough it was 'suggested reading' for more political science and economics courses than I can count, I just never got around to it.

In David Lodge's 1975 academic novel "Changing Places" there is a party game called "humiliation" in which you name a book that you have not read and get a show of hands of the people who have read it. The one with the most hands up wins the round. It may been fun for English majors in the '70's, but it is a boring game with mathematicians.

I think the only non-Anglophone fiction authors I've read are Homer, Voltaire, Lo-Kuan Chung, Dante and Umberto Eco- unless you count Plutarch and Heroditus as fiction.

I've been meaning to read Dumas' stuff, for about 15 years now. I just never get around to it.

Oh, I read Don Quixote in Spanish! Someday I hope to know what the hell it is about.

I will never read Proust. One of my strongest memories of my departed father is him telling an 11 year old me, "You havent read 'À la recherche du temps perdu', yet?" in genuine disbelief. I will not make that memory false.

Proust (though I started it once). Don Quixote. Tolstoy. There must be a thousand others, but those feel like the biggies.

I am waiting for some of my co-authors to fessing up to never having read some of the articles that they've written . . .

You can skip the rest of Eliot if you like, but you *must* read Middlemarch. Really.

Personally? I'd not read "War and Peace" until this year. I've never made all the way through "Moby Dick". Nor "Ulysses". At one point, a long time ago, I did read "Don Quixote" in Spanish, but in the two decades since I've forgotten most of both the novel and the language.

I haven't read Proust, Tolstoy, or (and I'm ashamed of this) Dickens (other than "A Christmas Carol"). The only copy that Borders and Barnes & Noble have of "Temps Perdu" in French is in three paperback volumes, at $12 each. I have to try online. The majority of people I talk to who have read Don Quixote had to do so in high school and didn't like it. Perhaps the translation they had was bad, I loved it.

I took eight semesters of French in college without reading Hugo (though I'm rectifying this now), and got an undergrad in economics without reading more than a few chapters of Smith. I did read a lot of Sartre and Camus, though.

Tolstoy comes to mind. (and yes, from now on I will say I've never read "War and Peace" in English)

More importantly though, why do we feel ashamed for not having read enough literary works? Do you think it's because we've all been brain-washed by our liberal teachers? No one feels ashamed for not knowing the laws of supply and demand, but I stand being accused of being ignorant if I can't discuss existentialism.

More importantly though, why do we feel ashamed for not having read enough literary works?

Good question. I haven't read more than excerpts of Adam Smith, Ricardo or "The Origin of Species" but I feel like I understand the main ideas and don't feel particularly bad about not having waded through the actual prose. Is that the wrong attitude?

The Federalist, not the compleat series and not in order anyway.

Democracy in America, only got partially through that one.

God and Man at Harvard, on the shelf, not started yet.

Jane: "...like Goethe, about whom I could tell you nothing except that he seems sorta sad."

That's a strange comment. Goethe was famous for his philosophical perspective on life and his tranquility. To me he has always seemed a man who lived a life of cheerful reflection.

Tolbert: "God and Man at Harvard, on the shelf, not started yet."

Do you mean God and Man at Yale, by William F. Buckley?

I've read Atlas Shrugged, and yet no other Rand. Never read Marx, Machiavelli, Adam Smith. Never read Orwell(!). Or Huxley. No Hawthorne, hardly any Emerson or Thoreau. Practically no Sandburg, Plath, Angelou, Frederick, or Whitman. Started Chaucer once, then gave up. No Zola, no Dumas, no Solzhenitsyn, no Dosteovsky, no Nabokov. Read a little McCaffrey, but no Farmer, no Butler, no Koontz, no Ludlum.

More importantly though, why do we feel ashamed for not having read enough literary works?

Apparenlty we're rediscovering Snow's "Two Cultures" around here.

I haven't read Camus mostly because I object to $12 for about 120 pages. Kinda stupid with quality being important, but the classics always seem overpriced comparatively. There always seems to be something more interesting cheaper.

Isocrates,

Yes, I meant God and Man at Yale.

I had just returned from my internist, which by the way was just a two week wait, He's a Harvard man, I could tell, but I couldn't tell him much. (old joke) Heh.

Grand stuff. My recollection, however, is subtly different:

Megan: I've never read Camus in English.
Alex: That's brilliant! I'm going to use that.
Megan: "I've never read Camus in English?"
Alex: No, like this: saying "I've never read Camus in English" carries the implication that you HAVE read Camus in French.

This is, you'll understand, classic One-upmanship. It can be adjusted, naturally, to other languages - eg, "in my experience Lampedusa/Rilke/Turgenev loses too much in translation to be worth reading outside the original language." Due care and attention should of course be taken not to risk such a gambit in conversation with native speakers of said languages, who might be in a position to call your otherwise impeccable bluff.

Nikos Kazantzakis- The Compleate Workes

Some of the ancient Greek philosophers and poets.

Ayn Rand

More Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov

A Russian friend has gotten me interested in reading Nicolai Gogol, Aleksandr Blok and Anna Ahkmatova.

A Brazilian wife turned me on to several that are...interesting. Others I still would like to read include Fernando Sabino, Joao Ribeiro, Cora Coralina and Ana Maria Machado.

More of Gabriel Marquez.

and I really should read something from the Konig of Lists, Friedrich. A trip to northern Germany made me get interested in him and his life...makes it more 'real' to have someone you know a little something about.

An author who is not known by me, makes it just a text. If I know the author, it makes it a relationship.

My translation of War and Peace kept the French passages from original, and despite being idiomatic in both I found it exceptionally distracting to be flipping back and forth.

Camus was a chore in high school French. La Peste was badly taught, mainly thanks to teachers that preferred huge pop-trash novels that got made into Quebecois mini-series.

William Newman: Comparative Advantage came late because our applied math understanding came very late. Statistics is a VERY new discipline - with critical work coming from one of Darwin's cousins Francis Galton (now discredited thanks to his work in eugenics). "Against The Gods" is a very interesting history of the understanding or risk and probability that shows how what seems obvious is a very recent understanding. Material science had a very difficult time extricating itself from the realm of religion, and social sciences are much more tightly entwined with religion and the crown than physical properties, and it is much harder to conceive of the problems outside of an industrial economy while far more people puzzle over how and why things fall in agrarian circumstances.

The whole exercise is rather pointless, since by definition no one has read the canon. It is just as impossible as reading the entire US Tax Code, and nowhere near as important. Getting to any serious percentage of the canon would mean a total ignorance of maths, science, and other critical aspects of life. Liberal Arts grads are horrendously ill-educated, innumerate, and ignorant as it is. No need to accede to their pretensions of knowing the most important bits of civilisation.

People should be MUCH more ashamed of not having tackled Newton's Principia, or at least its concepts, or of being ignorant of the controversy over who came up with Calculus. Missing out on some authors is a problem, but you can get a gloss of most of the canon through the cultural references of the authors that succeed them. If you can't grasp the concepts of Newton's calculus, you can't even begin to grasp anything in our society or to have a reasonable political discussion. Statistical arguments are useless if oen doesn't understand a limit or an integer, and that's the really shallow end of critical math that many people don't grasp.

falkoyn: I heartily recommend several Asimov stories (my favorite being The Last Question), as well as practically all of his nonfiction, which can largely be regarded as The Intro of Everything to Nerds.

Meanwhile, Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series became fun reading for me in high school - dunno if it still holds up. Xanth is younger fare, I'd say. That's about all I've read of him.

Actually, this kind of thing is called "implicature", and was studied by philosopher Paul Grice:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/

The proposition that your friend has read Camus in French isn't *semantically* implied by the statement, but this is the pragmatic implicature brought about by his statement.

Never read Gravity's Rainbow, Lolita, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, War and Peace. The list seems endless.

Camus is a great read and well worth the $12. The Plague is the least easy to read of his novels. Both The Fall and The Stranger are fantastic reads, each one quick and profound. It's actually extraordinary how tight and beautiful the prose is -- not a word is wasted.

Once at High Table at Oxford this came up, and I essayed that no one could consider himself educated unless he'd read "The Feynmann Lectures on Physics." Arts (but not science) dons looked at me as though I were crazy (fair enough), but I stand by that assessment. No one literary figure's works are remotely as worth reading as the Feynmann lectures.

Feynmann is pretty good, no denying. Authors I should read but won't: Joyce, Proust, Camus, Emerson, Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and many others.

My list is endless and I can block out whole groups, ethnicities, and time periods chock full of canon worthy writers.

I've read no Russians (aside from Bulgakov), despite growing up in a house filled with Russian novels, the remainder of a parent's aborted attempt at a masters in Russian studies back in the 1960/70's.

No 20th century female authors at all, aside from Anne Sexton poetry, and that was only by way of a Peter Gabriel song called Mercy Street that caught my ear and had me wondering what in the world he was talking about.

No Irish authors. Few black authors. No Proust, no Dickens. Indeed Dickens would be redundant given all the movies made of his work: plots revealed, interest destroyed.

And now I am getting too old to read anything deep or ponderous or worthy, having not yet resolved things like comfy home, beautiful wife, nice car, right job, stocked fridge, summer home, independent wealth, fluffy 401K, svelte physique.

Reading great books of fiction would keep me from accomplishing the goals I am not accomplishing.

Just going by what's on my shelf, since anything I think I should read I buy and then proceed not to read: Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Adams, God, Hawking, Luo, Schey.

I actually have read Hugo, but only the apocryphal yet amusing account of Waterloo.

I have no idea who Sterne and Baudelaire are, and I don't care. More than that, I can't understand why anyone would care. In general, reading about fake real people doesn't interest me. Okay, I liked everything from Dickens I read, but that won't earn me my tweed jacket. I find real real people much more interesting, and if I want a diversion, I'll go for fake fake people.

I feel guilty that I haven't read Feynman. At best I can only feel shame that I haven't read anyone one Jane's list.

Goethe may well seem sorta sad if the one book you've read is The Sorrows of Young Werther. (A must to avoid, read the highly entertaining, far, far shorter Thackeray verse parody instead.) If it's Faust, then maybe not.

In future games of Humiliation my trump card will be The Old Man and the Sea. It's short, it's simple, and it was often assigned in high school. I like my chances.

"In future games of Humiliation my trump card will be The Old Man and the Sea. "

I intend to trick you into reading it by slipping the complete text into a medium length comment.

I haven't read a Bible, but I'm working on it. I haven't read a Bible in the Greek and Hebrew.

I've tried to read "the Prince" several times, but haven't finished it yet. I see no need to read "The Wealth of Nations" (is that heresy on this blog?).

I read about 50 books a year. Based on that, I've read about 2500 books in my life, including a number of "Bobsey Twins" and "Hardy Boys" in my youth. Since the Library of Congress has about 34 million books, I need another 680,000 years to finish it off...

Matt's mention of implicature reminds me of a conversation I once had with a coworker. We'd just passed a poster with the well-worn Edmund Burke quote:

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing."

We were debating the semantics of this (we're both logicians, sorta). I remarked that if this were true, then all you have to do to prevent this path to successful evil, is to destroy all the good men...

In my 10th grade (gifted and talented) English class we didn't read Don Quixote, we read Man of La Mancha, the Broadway musical adaptation. And I grew up in the most affluent county in the country (Fairfax Co., VA). How sad is that?

So I can say that I might not have read Don Quixote in Spanish, but I can sing a few of the songs from the musical.

"More importantly though, why do we feel ashamed for not having read enough literary works?"

I don't think anyone should feel ashamed, but they might be missing some good books. I'm always looking for something new to read, and the "greatest hits" from past years seem like a good choice.

I never finished War and Peace - just couldn't get into it, even though I prefer very long, involved novels. I've read relatively obscure Dickens novels such as Dombey and Sons because I enjoyed the length and intricacy, but after more than a hundred pages I still couldn't get into War and Peace on either of my two attempts. It might be the only book I ever chose not to finish.

What's so great about the Old Man and the Sea? I've always wondered that, ever since I read it in 7th grade.

If you read Ulysses, go page-for-page with the New Bloomsday Book, by Harry Blamires (it's kind of a Sparknotes on steroids, which explains what the hell is going on/some of the key references). If you really have time, read a chapter of Ulysses, then read the Blamires, then reread the chapter. To simply attempt to read Ulysses by itself would be masochistic and pointless.

I think I've read all the literature mentioned in this thread except for Proust. I couldn't get past the second page.

I liked Camus' "The Plague" much better than "The Stranger."

I once had a conversation with my classics tutor at Oxford in which I mentioned having read Proust in French when I was 19. He said something along the lines of: Oh, you have time to read French novels in French. (The reason I had had time to do this was that I had dropped out of Smith and was working as a chambermaid.) I thought it was wonderful, and later I was glad I had read it in French because I could read anything I wanted in French, without worrying about whether it had been translated -- i.e. about whether the powers that be had decided English-speakers needed to see it. A reader who never discovers books that are invisible to the collective wisdom, who spends all reading time working through the books "they say" you are supposed to read, is missing out on much more than the reader who has read 100 out of the 100 Books Every American Should Read. (I was given a copy of this list at the age of 13; I have no idea where it is now, but I am reasonably sure Pearl Buck's The Good Earth was on it. Hm.)

Restricting myself to books on the bookcase next to me that I actually intend to read someday:

Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, The Sun Also Rises, Ulysses, The Red and the Black.

(Like many here, I also haven't read Goethe or Proust, but neither have I formed a serious enough intention to read them as to warrant buying them-- though I'm close to that point with Goethe.)

By a deliberate effort I've made a lot of progress on my list over the past few years-- rotating unread classic works in with contemporary literary fiction and the genre stuff, or at least reading a whole section of something classic between two genre books. It helps that Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, and Neal Stephenson have all gone a year and a half without dropping any new 800-page hardcovers onto the world.

Not really in the same category here, but I'm beginning to think that I'm the only person in the world who hasn't read any Harry Potter books.

Boy, I pity the fools who think that Newton and Feynman are the only ones we should feel ashamed about missing. Faulkner, Jane Austen, the Bible, Homer, and many others are quite important--the classics, if read seriously, force one to consider one's assumptions.

Of course, many scientists have not even considered the philosophical presuppositions of the work they do for one second. The real scandal is not that we don't read enough good literature; it's that reading philosophy isn't even expected. Educated people, in America anyway, are often "ashamed" not to have read any Virgil; however, they probably haven't even heard of Hegel.

I agree strongly with Helen DeWitt: I still haven't read much Joyce, but I found Hermann Broch by myself and that mitigates my guilt a great deal.

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