In the comments to my post asking readers to list the last three books they have read, IB Bill suggests an interesting correlative: What are the last three books you didn't read, and why?

My answer:

1) Coral Lansbury's Felicity. Lansbury is a scholar of Victorian literature and culture who wrote this little academic novel on the side. Since I suffer from a mild addiction problem when it comes to academic fiction, I ordered this used from Amazon, and settled in for the sort of deftly caustic tale of campus politics to which David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Richard Russo and others have allowed me to become accustomed. Couldn't get past page fifty. As a self-indulgent exercise for a critic who is not really a fictionwriter, it's fine. As fiction, it is most definitely not fine. Reading it was the literary equivalent of eating cardboard.

2) Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. For a while there this spring, I thought I might be moving to Texas. So I picked up the nearest unread Texas novel in the house (having happily, blissfully, joyously devoured Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole too recently to bear re-reading), and settled in for some book-enabled re-imagining of my life. Then I found out I would not be moving to Texas after all and, in the manner of narcissistically projecting readers everywhere, I lost interest. McCarthy does deserve a better class of attention, and I am planning to return to the novel this summer.

3) Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform. This one is my fault entirely. Ravitch is an excellent ed-historian, and Left Back is an excellent book. I read several hundred pages of it last summer in the remote hills of Donegal. But my continuity with the book was shot when I had to move back to the States and commence the school year. I kept meaning, when I had a moment, to take it up again. Now it sits accusingly on the shelf, gathering dust and reminding me that there's no picking up where I left off with this one. I've been away from the book for so long that I'll need to start over entirely when I do return to it.

By the way, Steve Almond's Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America is a marvelous--and highly salivary--read.

The Ravitch book is excellent. I actually picked it up at your recommendation. Scared the heck out of me and disgusted me at the same time. I believe she is speaking at the Free Library sometime in May or June.

McCarthy is likewise excellent. The Borderlands trilogy, of which _All the Pretty Horses_ is the first, is well worth reading, although the second book isn't nearly as good as the other two. Still, his best has to be _Blood Meridian_. Even though it's almost stomach-turningly graphic at times it's still a great novel.

I couldn't quite tell if your mild addiction is to academic novels. If so, I'm the anti-Erin: I suffer a mild, even moderate, allergy to them. Smiley, Amis, Lodge -- _especially_ Lodge -- they all give me St. Vitus' dance. Thanks for warning me off of *Felicity*.

Books set aside, a coupla hundred pages in, meant to get back to, but something better always comes along, include Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy ... but for sheer daunting phobic avoidance, on the assumption that once I start I'll have to read them all straight through, I steer clear of Robertson Davies, Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Powell, and, yes, Proust as well ...

Henry James' The Golden Bowl. I've started it a couple of times, but it is opaque to me. People have all these meaningful conversations and I don't know what in the heck they're talking about. How the same man produced Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller is beyond me.