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Ask HN: What works of literature have you completed and which haven’t finished?
I am a physician in my mid-sixties. During a recent discussion with a friend, we compared which great works of literature we had read. We were surprised not only at some of the ones we had managed to complete, but also the ones we had missed, both tried and failed. In my case, I’ve read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brother Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, Before the Storm (Fontane), The Autumn of the Patriarch, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Vanity Fair, and Middlemarch, among others. I have failed at In Search of Lost Time (only finished first volume), The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Ulysses (Joyce), Bleak House, The Death of Virgil (Broch), The Sleepwalkers (Broch), Evening Edged in Gold (Lucky to have beautiful original 1980 translation) and 2666. These are a few in a much longer list of notable incompletes. What works of literature have you completed and which haven’t finished?