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The Great Novel I Never ReadThe Sound and the Fury, Swann's Way, and other books that novelists skipped.

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2007, at 11:36 AM ET

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Maybe I was a bit startled by the speed of developments, or maybe my parents' warning still echoed in my ears—something made me hold back, and Jez realized that my education was incomplete. He reached under his pillow and produced a tattered copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

"Read this!" he commanded.

Back in my room, I grappled with the dense, mysterious prose, for I was eager to please. But somehow my eyes just glazed over.

A week or so later, I met Nick. He had long golden curls and a cute beard. My parents wouldn't have liked him, either. Encountering the same obstacles, he handed me a copy of John Donne.

"Here, read this!"

And I did.

Jim Shepard
James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. What's the most important book I've never read? Well, where to begin? My experience of the canon is mostly a history made of gaps, like one of those "There Be Monsters" medieval maps of what lay out beyond the Pillars of Hercules, with vast stretches of blank space filled in every so often with an archipelago or two of what I have encountered. Of course, I never got through Finnegans Wake—that's the one everyone feels ready to confess to—but what's my excuse when it comes to Paradise Lost? Parade's End? The Waves? Tristram Shandy? Beloved? Then there are whole stretches of work by writers whom I claim to hugely admire—Henry James, Jane Austen, Hart Crane—whose work I keep peering over at and intending to read. And what about those writers of whose work I've read almost nothing? Jean Rhys? John Donne? Gertrude Stein? Orhan Pamuk? And then there are all of the books that haven't even come to mind yet. This is depressing. I'm going back to bed.