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Great Unread Books: Which classic are you ashamed to admit you have never read? The Telegraph (UK) asked the question with a camera running.

Respectable authors made shameful confessions at England's Ways With Words festival; watch them below. Now it's your turn: which book are you most embarrassed to admit you have never read?

Humiliation, the game is called. And that's what it inflicts. You have to confess to a famous book you haven't read - and there's no opportunity for sly self-congratulation.

Readers chime in with their own confessions.

Okay, I'm a more or less "respectable author." Here's mine:

I have never read Chaucer.'s Canterbury Tales. As an English major, back when Wellesley had "requirements," I was one of a handful who took a course in John Milton (Paradise Lost) rather than galumph through medieval English, no matter how bawdy. I can't stand dialect. (That's also limited my Faulkner consumption.)

Here's the first sentence of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales at Librarius:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

What ever. What he said. Makes me crazy.

Veering off topic a bit, I did read Moby Dick but hated it.

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