What I'm Afraid to Read

Anyone want to give me a pep talk?

Then I decided I’d skip around a bit and read one of the Es—a very strange looking man called George Eliot, with ringlets and watery eyes. It was called Silas Marner and it was marvellous. And then I decided to read an H and chose Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy.

I hope I never read another book so utterly terrible as this. It is a marvellous book and I didn’t skip any of it, and I read on and on and on; but all the time I was thinking of Thomas Hardy, of the terrible sorrows and sadness of him. It seemed terrible to me that anyone who knew that he was a writer beyond all possible doubt should have not one glimmer, not one faintest trace of happiness in him. There was one thing that he said that beat in my head, over and over and over again. It was at the point where poor Jude just misses meeting someone who might have changed the whole terrible pattern of his life. If he had, who knows, says Hardy, then all might yet have been well. Then he adds, but this did not happen, this good fortune, BECAUSE IT NEVER DOES.

-from A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam

An engraving by Agnes Miller Parker for Jude the Obscure

I’m afraid to read Jude the Obscure. Heck, I’m afraid to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I know just how good Hardy’s writing is from Far from the Madding Crowd but every time I inch my way towards his bleakest books, I don’t know if my heart can handle it.

Thomas Hardy isn’t the only author whose books I’m afraid to touch. I have a whole list of them, and I imagine many of you do too. Whether it’s because of the bleakness or grittiness of their contents or because the sheer page number is daunting or because others have made them out to be dense, cryptic tomes, there are some books that you’re not exactly dying to pick up, though you might have a nagging feeling that they’d be worth it and more than worth it.

Yet I often find it just takes one person to sing a book’s praises or to share why that book meant so much to them personally to shoot the book right up to the top of my to-read list.

So I thought I’d copy my list down here and see if there are any great admirers of these novels or authors who’d like to clear away my hesitations? Or perhaps to say, “no, no you’re right. That one would keep you up at night.”

Here they are:

1. Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

2. And Then There Were None and Endless Night by Agatha Christie

3. Silence by Shusaku Endo

4. Henry James (I heard someone once describe James as ‘inscrutable’ and that dampened my enthusiasm about getting to his novels.)

5. Iris Murdoch (mostly I need to know which novel to begin with. I’m determined to read Murdoch even though I fear I don’t have the philosophical chops to really give her a worthwhile reading.)

6. Ivy Compton-Burnett (I’ve heard she’s quite the difficult and marmite-y author, but I do have A House and Its Head hurtling towards me at the moment via interlibrary loan, so I shan’t let my intimidation get the best of me.)

7. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (I did really enjoy All the Pretty Horses.)

9. We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsey

For context, there are lots of darker works I do like and even count among my favorites: Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Barbara Comyn’s The Juniper Tree, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, Charles Portis’ True Grit. What I hesitate over is the extremely eerie, hopeless, or graphically violent.

So, in the comments let me know if there are any among these that you absolutely love or think are must-reads. And please do share the books you find intimidating but want to read so we can give you the pep talk you need.

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