100 Books I've Never Read

So, I have this idea: to publish a book a book about the best 100 books I've never read.

The idea's kind of a reverse rip-off: people love lists, they love making them and love reading them, but the lists always have titles like, The Hundred Great Poems You Must Read, or Fifty Secret Vacation Spots You Never Dreamed Existed, or Ten Quick Fixes to Cure Your Slice...

This idea's legit. I haven't read Dante. I bought The Inferno that Pinsky translated but never read it, not liking Pinsky. I think I sold it to Green Apple. I read The Iliad but not The Odyssey. I've read enough Plato to know it's Socrates speaking. I did read Ovid's Metamorphoses, but only because it was the only book in the little cottage I was stayed in in rural Sweden. I started but never finished reading bothTristram Shandy and Don Quixote, though I venerate both books and keep both close to me for inspiration. The only Shakesperare I've read is Hamlet, and a couple of the sonnets. Haven't read Goethe or Schiller, nor Finnegans Wake or The Making of the Americans, though I tried. I read in and out of The Cantos (Pound) enough to almost memorize "With Usura" and the one that starts, The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders...

...I became interested enough in Pound to read The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner where, I learned that Pound said of The Cantos near the end of his life, "I could not make it all cohere." 

I even wrote a little poem--There is no Pound/around--that's in my book, Days by Themselves (Blue Earth Press, 2006) which almost nobody has read.