WRITERS I HAVE NOT READ

Students have asked me several times to draw up a list for them of Authors I deem relevant and worth reading.  I never completed any such list because I thought it would be biased and probably misleading. Plenty of reading lists mention essential, must-read writers and titles where the whims of the composers show their predilections which are often misguided and misleading in my opinion. In my slumbers last night I thought it would be a better idea to mention the authors I have not read. For example, Chesterton, S.C. Lewis, Follet, Saramago, Coelho, Vargas Llosa, Dante, Günther Grass, Boris Pasternak, Mao-Tse Tung, Agatha Christie, García Márquez, Karl Marx, Tagore, Nostradamus, Pérez Reverte... come to mind, off the cuff. There is a spate of more writers I have not read or even heard of. There are 5 Nobel Prize winners in this short roll... Why haven´t I read them? Why didn´t I read Dr. Zhivago when the whole world and his mother were reading the novel in the States in my youth? More than half of Europe read Mao´s Red Book. I didn´t. My mother had all of Christie´s books and read them eagerly. Why didn't I read one? Search me.