Reading for dummies (like me)

I am procrastinating; avoiding the work that I really ought to do.  I can't be bothered because (five weeks into my new job) I'd sooner leave it than get stuck in.  I have formed an escape committee with Mrs Spiers.

Anyway, I took to thinking about how ill-read I feel.  I'm not illiterate.  I know that much.  But I was struck, not so very long ago, with how few books I had read from The Guardian list of the top 100 books of all time.  (It turns out, apparently, that the list was merely re-printed by The Guardian, from the original constructed by The Norwegian Book Clubs, of all the improbable points of origin one might think of.)  Over 50 of the texts can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, here.

Last year, again while procrastinating, I was likewise struck by how few novels on a list compiled by Time Magazine I had read.  It was described as the ALL-TIME list of the world's best 100 novels.  To be deemed eligible for consideration a novel had to have been written between Time's first publication in 1923 and 2010.

I combined the two lists, which contain 187 texts.  There are 9 texts on both lists.  I've read 32 of the texts (including 4 of the 9).  That's a paltry 17 per cent.  Time to get reading.

I've started with Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac, written in 1835.  In the first chapter I came upon the term "car of Juggernaut".  That struck me as a modern term for an early 19th Century author, which shows you how much I know.  Jagganatha, the Hindu deity translated as Lord of the World, is worshiped in temples that date from as far back as the 12th Century (in Puri, Orissa; North East India).  The picture is one of the Madrass car of Jagganatha.