I hope people are keen to humiliate themselves all over again. This time, I plan to pick something other than a Victorian novel, I think.

(Aha! I’ve just thought of the perfect book.)

But first, a recapitulation of the rules.

The aim of the game is to reveal a gap in your knowledge, by admitting that you haven’t read a book that everyone else has read.

All you have to do is pick a book that you haven’t read but that you can confidently assume that everyone else has read. Your success in the game depends on the number of other people who have read the book; obscure titles won’t get very far.

Scoring is straightforward on the individual points system: you receive one point for every player who has read the book that you nominate.

Last time we played the game, it involved a lot of flipping back and forth through the comments for everyone to keep up with the titles. So I’m going to run the game in two rounds this time.

First, add a comment below stating which book you haven’t read.

Don’t comment just yet on whether you have read other player’s books.

Because we have to cap the player list at some point—or the game gets to confusing—I’ll close the nominations tomorrow night at 6 p.m. This way people won’t have to keep checking whether any new books have been added to the game.

Then I’ll open a new thread, with a list of players and books. We can then comment on which books we have and haven’t read, and I’ll tabulate the final scores once all the participants have commented.

Many of you might have seen Nick’s public Pownce note to this effect, but if not, check out the lovely freebies at Tor Books.

They have .pdf and .html files (and other formats that I don’t recognise) for a wide number of books (I’ve just downloaded Jo Walton’s Farthing, and am super excited: I loved her Tooth and Claw) and a range of desktop wallpapers, some of which are so lovely that I’ve bumped the James Jean cover to the ninth Fables trade that I’ve had on my desktop for about a year.

But they’re only available until the 27th of July.

For those of you who haven’t read any of David Lodge’s novels, Humiliation is a game invented by his Brummidge professor Phillip Swallow when he was a postgraduate student, but debuted in the novel Changing Places, later in Swallow’s career.

It’s also a central example in Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, for reasons that should become apparent even if you haven’t read Bayard.

In Humiliation, players nominate a well-known book—usually one of those books that everyone is supposed to have read—that they themselves haven’t read, and receive a point for each participant who has read it.

(And, in fact, this post can’t fail: either we have a round of Humiliation, which will be good fun, or everyone ignores me, and then I’m humiliated, which means I don’t have to change the title of the post. Win-win situation!)

According to Pierre Bayard, “It is hard to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the way our displays of culture in social settings, before the mirror of others, awakens unreasonable feelings of shame” (122).

But I don’t think this game should shame us: even Bayard mentions that such shame is “unreasonable,” because, of course, he argues that actually reading a book is less important than being aware of its place in the collective library.

(More accurately, I suppose, with Humiliation we are dealing with the third of Bayard’s three categories of libraries, the virtual library, or “the realm in which books are discussed, in either written or oral form, with other people” (125n): this is, he says, a “a mobile sector of every culture’s collective library and is located at the point of intersection of the various inner libraries of each participant in the discussion” (125n), where the inner library is “a subjective part of the collective library and includes the books that have left a deep impression on each subject” (73n). So, in this case we bring our awareness of the book’s position in the collective library to the virtual library.)

But I do admit to a certain feeling of uncertainty about this game—or, more accurately, about playing it on the blog.

But then, why? We can’t read everything, not matter how bibliophilic our instincts.

For example, look at the table of contents to Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon—just the TOC, not any of the actual text. He names in the TOC twenty-six authors: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, and Samuel Beckett.

Of those twenty-six authors, I haven’t read any works by eleven of them, including two who, frankly, I hadn’t heard of before this point. (I’m not saying which authors I haven’t read, but feel free to guess.)

Another two authors I can’t remember reading works by, but can’t be sure that I haven’t.

And yet, I read a great deal and, it seems to me, rather widely. So am I humiliating myself by admitting to not having read certain books—or, at least, not having read them yet?

I’ve surely admitted to not having read books on the blog before. But the point of Humiliation is admitting to not reading books that, by certain rather nebulous standards, you should have read.

And as Bayard points out, the better-known the book, the less risk to the game. The key example in Changing Places is an American professor—who, the character narrating the game says, “has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured” (cited in Bayard 123)—who insists that he has never read Hamlet. But, as Bayard says, there is really no risk here: “For one thing, no one is likely to believe him. And for another, the play is so well known that it is not necessary to have read it to speak about it” (124).

So I’ll humiliate myself.

Good nineteenth-century scholar that I am, I’ve never read The Mill on the Floss.

(And now, the panic: I have read other Eliot.)

Anybody else want to play?

I was reading through L. M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle tonight—a book I mentioned on the second stage of my bookshelf tour—and came across the following passage:

Some nights the whole outer world seemed to be given over to the empery of silence; then came nights when there would be a majestic sweep of wind in the pines; nights of dear starlight when it whistled freakishly and joyously round the Blue Castle; brooding nights before storm when it crept along the floor of the lake with a low wailing cry of boding and mystery. (Angus and Robertson, 1980. 241)

Now, I’m not saying that’s the best prose in the world: in fact, I think “dear starlight,” at least, is a horrific phrase, hatefully twee.

But what struck me was “empery.” I’ve never consciously seen the word “empery” before—and I’ve read this book before.

(My spellchecker hasn’t seen it, either—but then my spellchecker also isn’t familiar with the word “twee,” which just proves that it’s never watched Eurovision.)

So I looked it up.

It wasn’t in my Concise OED, and I don’t think that’s because at home I have to settle for The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, my copy of the Concise OED itself now living permanently in my office at work.

So I looked it up in the online OED, which tells me that it is both a verb and a noun.

As a verb, it has, apparently, only one definition and only one citation: listed as “obscure, rare” intransitive verb, it means “to exercise supreme power; to lord it.” For support, the OED cites a quotation from Arnolde, 1502: “Alsoo emp’ryng vpon ful many cristen lordis.”

But I’m not sure we’re talking about a verb here.

And the noun has a much longer entry.

The noun, the OED tells me, is now only poetical or rhetorical; that makes me feel a little better about never hearing the word before.

First and foremost, it means “the status, dignity, or dominion of an emperor,” an obsolete usage. Here, the OED offers me citations ranging from one dated 1297 (which includes archaic characters that I’m fairly sure my computer won’t reproduce without effort) to, of course, Shakespeare, from Titus Andronicus (1588, I. i. 201): “Thou shalt obtaine and aske the Emperie.”

But as a subset of this definition, the OED offers “In wider sense: Absolute dominion.” And here the citations run from Udall in 1548—“Ryches, honoure and emperye”—to my old favourite George Macdonald in 1882—“A wider love of empery.”

And as a second subset of the same definition, we have “In the sense of L. imperium: The authority with which an officer or magistrate has been lawfully invested; legitimate government,” also an obsolete usage. Here, the citations range from Chaucer in c.1374 to Bridge in 1642: “If a Prince should [. . .] change the form of the Common-weale from Empery to Tyranny.”

But it wouldn’t be the OED if there weren’t a set of secondary definitions:

2. a. The territory ruled by an emperor. b. In wider sense: The territory of an absolute or powerful ruler.

2a is listed as “also figurative”: does that mean the first is purely literal?

For these secondary definitions, there are citations ranging from Coke in 1550—“Constantyne [. . .] conquered the whole empery”—to Keats’s “Lamia” (1820)—“A want Of something more, more than her empery Of joys (ii.36)—to Hartley Coleridge’s Poems (1833)—”‘Tis all thy own, ‘tis all thy empery.”

Which of these relates to Montgomery’s use?

No idea: I distracted myself.

But isn’t it interesting?

(Not as geeky as Nick, mind, who’s just headed out to collect a Chinese take-away with the enigmatic comment “Give my love to Broadway.” Since Nick would rather self-immolate than watch live theatre—especially musical theatre—I find this a remarkably odd comment.)

But that’s not important right now.

The important thing is that I’ve been re-reading Dorothy L. Sayers, moving on from Agatha Christie to another of the so-called Queens of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. (Which reminds me, I should track down some Margery Allingham: she’s the only one of the Queens with whom I’m unfamiliar, but the only short story of hers I’ve ever read I found a little dull.)

I’m currently re-reading Gaudy Night, which I enjoy immensely, although I understand that J. R. R. Tolkien did not care for it, much as he liked the early novels. It certainly has a confronting approach to academic life, especially the cloistering of academic women that still persisted in the 1930s: Sayers’s partly elegiac but partly anxious rendering of academia is attractive and unfamiliar to those of us whose experience of the ivory tower seems to settle on shouting “Stop jamming my papers!” at the photocopier half an hour before every tutorial.

Or perhaps that’s just me.

But it’s not the content with which I have a problem. Sometimes, much as I love Sayers, I do struggle with the plots: rarely will I re-read Have His Carcase, because I find the strain of muttering “He’s a haemophiliac” through gritted teeth for four-hundred pages too much for me.

But with Gaudy Night, it’s the presentation.

Gaudy Night is one of two volumes—the other being Murder Must Advertise, a perennial favourite—that I have in this particular edition: the rest of the collection has been cobbled together from secondhand books sales, so that there’s a plethora of typefaces and covers across the dozen volumes.

The Gaudy Night publication is a recent NEL reprint: they have lovely black-and-white photographic covers—although the plastic coating over the cardboard rubs away very easily, leaving them a little ragged looking—but two points count against them.

The first might be solely my problem, but the introductions by Elizabeth George add nothing to the text. Partly, it’s that I was never able to read the only Elizabeth George novel I ever started, which was For the Sake of Elena. To make it worse, I’d already seen the television adaptation, and I still couldn’t be bothered finishing the book.

(I actually quite liked the actor who played Tommy Linley, largely because I thought he was an excellent Rawdon Crawley in the BBC’s production of Vanity Fair—even though he was nothing like the big, blonde, mustachioed Rawdon that the book had led me to expect.)

But what really annoyed me about For the Sake of Elena was when Linley expressed the disappointment he had felt on learning that Jane Austen didn’t live in a thatched cottage. Why on earth would the eighth Earl of whatever he was the eighth Earl of think that Austen lived in a thatched cottage? Anglophiles who live in California might think that, but I would imagine Austen would have died of shame had she come down in the world to a thatched cottage.

But even that—should you have made it this far through this rambling post—is not what really annoys me about these editions.

No, that would be the typesetting.

I don’t know if it was done on character-recognition software from an earlier edition or what the reason is, but it’s ripe with doubled and tripled letters and punctuation marks: two commas at the end of a sub-clause, for example, or three ts in a word that should only have two.

And it drives me insane, even while I’m enjoying the plot.

So I’m tempted to do something very geeky, and read the novel with a pencil in my hand, so I can cross out the extra letter and punctuation marks, and make neat marginal corrections.

But I’m restraining myself, because I fear the next step would be inevitable.

I want to be at least seventy before I start writing complaining letters to the newspapers insisting that Coles and Woolworths change their signs to read “12 Items or Fewer.”

(Technically, this qualifies as reading, since this is about the lyrics. Plus, I haven’t posted anything about reading in ages, and this is, after all, called Circulating Library.)

I’m constantly amazed by the frequency with which people play “Every Breath You Take” at weddings despite the fact that it is, frankly, an insanely creepy song.

Apparently—and I’m quoting from the Wikipedia page here, so take that as you will—the song was written during the collapse of Sting’s first marriage, and in his words “It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realise at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control. These were the Reagan, Star Wars years.”

If even Sting thinks it sounds sinister, who am I (Leavisite or not) to argue with that?

(Also, it’s clearly creepy.)

But I was listening to my Bon Jovi album tonight (yes, it’s a best-of compilation. Shush.) and I came across a song.

I don’t know the title, because the album cover was lost many years ago in an evening of drunken CD playing, and I can’t remember most of the song titles any more. I suspect it’s called “I’ll Be There For You,” but I can’t be bothered looking it up.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that it included the line “When you breathe, I want to be the air for you.”

Is it just me, or is that also ridiculously creepy?

My general response to that would be something along the lines of “Wow. That’s . . . wow. No, no, honey—I mean that in a good way. I . . . wow. No—stay over there. I find that remaining on opposite sides of the room at all times is actually good for a relationship.”

Perhaps I’m over-sensitive, but these don’t strike me as love songs.

Maybe my standards are skewed.

The moon is a crescent tonight, and it reminds me of The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes’s poem from 1906.

For some reason, it’s always the crescent moon that makes me think of “the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.” I’ve never seen a crescent moon ride horizontally rather than vertically, and I fear for the crew of a vertical galleon. But I don’t like to think too much about it, because I love this poem.

I don’t even know why. And, oddly enough for me, I can’t even remember when I first read or heard the poem. It seems as though I’ve always known it.

In a way, it reminds me of hearing Old English spoken—or, I suppose, more properly, read. I don’t understand the words, I have no vocabulary to draw on, and it may as well be gibberish—but it isn’t. It draws on some deep centre of my brain as though the language that I love, and speak every day, and work with, and revere as one of the most flexible modes of writing on earth gives me some degree of understanding of its alien root.

Fanciful? Yes. But it’s the best way I can think to describe it.

And “The Highwayman” draws a similar response from me—not as deep or primal, but similar. It’s not the only text that does so—Poe’s The Raven is another example—but it only happens when it’s a work that I seem to have known for as long as I’ve been alive.

Is “The Highwayman” good poetry?

I don’t know.

I’m not capable of judging.

It gives me goosebumps every time I read it, and I must have read it a hundred times by now.

Perhaps there’s a shadowing here of the nostalgia created by the fact that I, like so many young girls, favoured fatal love fantasies when I was younger; once upon a time, it seemed romantic to die of leprosy—or some such—in, if I can use this cliche, the pursuit of love. (And I’m not alone; look at Anne of Green Gables and Agatha’s Christie’s autobiography, to name just two.)

I grew out of it, but perhaps a shadow remains to lend some sympathy to the black-eyed landlord’s daughter, Bess the landlord’s daughter, resolving on gripping the trigger if she couldn’t free herself from her bonds.

But I think the real secret is the rhythm.

Take these verses as an example:

Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight, Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.

He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord’s daughter, The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

As I say, I don’t know if it’s good poetry. I do know that Noyes is profligate with his exclamation marks, which normally bothers me.

Is it doggerel? Not is we accept Wikipedia’s definition, because the metre here, the rhythm, the movement of the poem is where its evocative power lies.

Anyone who’s read my Ode to Pirates and the consequent silly but immensely fun comment thread knows that I’m no poet.

Perhaps, then, I’m easily moved by poetry that speaks on a shallow level.

Certainly, I’m no fan of Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome but I appreciated, and even thrilled to, the verses from “Horatius” when they were recited in an episode of the new series of Doctor Who:

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.

Shallow? Or just a poor judge of poetry?

I hope neither is true of my love for “The Highwayman,” or I won’t know how to celebrate the next crescent moon.