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Also posted here: https://benjaminstubbing.substack.com/p/the-best-books-i-didnt-read-in-2024
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*To grasp more closely this non-All, let us turn to a wonderful dialectical joke in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: “Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?”
In both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this One-coffee is each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-no-cream, then coffee-with-no-milk. (In a similar way, Eastern Europeans in 1990 did not only want democracy-without-communism, but also democracy-without-capitalism.)
What we encounter here is the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature—the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin (people from Montenegro were stigmatized as lazy in the former Yugoslavia): why does a Montenegro guy, when going to sleep, put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty during the night. The point of this joke is that the absence itself has to be positively registered: it is not enough to have one full glass of water, since, if the Montenegrin will not be thirsty, he will simply ignore it—this negative fact itself has to be taken note of by the empty glass, that is, no-need-for water has to be materialized in the void of the empty glass.
There is a political equivalent of these lines: in a joke from Socialist Poland, a customer enters a store and asks: “You probably don’t have butter, or do you?” The answer: “Sorry, but we are the store that doesn’t have toilet paper; the one across the street is the one that doesn’t have butter!”*
—Slavoj Zizek, Zizek’s Jokes
“You consider that to be important?” he asked. “Exceedingly so.” “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Silver Blaze in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist. As a result, unless he abstains definitively from all conversation and all writing, he will find himself forever obliged to express his thoughts on books he hasn’t read.
Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.
—Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
In lieu of me finishing my annual review post, I hope you’ll enjoy this homage to Kieran Healy’s list of books he did not read in 2003. Here are my ten favourite books I didn’t read this year, arranged in the precise order in which I didn’t read them.
There was a time when I merely happened to not read Dickens, in the same way one happens to not visit Paraguay. But in 2024 I elevated my not-reading-of-Dickens to the first degree. Though he haunts my bookshelf, seeping through the canon of the English novel, I steadfastly refuse to attend to him. Truth be told, the thing that most compels me to read Dickens is the Herald Quiz.
The book I have quoted the most this year having read the least. I bought a beautiful volume that has transformed by Zoom background magnificently. In fact, its contribution to my digital persona has been so significant that actually reading it would feel like a betrayal of its true purpose.
The title alone suggests it was meant to remain unread. From the moment I found a copy in the annals of Pegasus I decided I would not read it until I had first read The Bible. What I didn’t know then was how long I’d spend not reading The Bible.