Roads Not Taken; Books Not Read

If we start with the notion that a bozo is a--well, a person of whom it may be said he or she has a diminished capacity for intelligent behavior, then we could argue that a bozon is one unit of dumbness.

Wait. This does have pretensions of going somewhere.

If we start everyone off with one hundred points on a scale of being literate and remove one unit, a classico, for major classics not read, we would have an index of literacy. Having lately been tested for just about everything else in the physical sense, I subject myself to the literacy test, mindful of my two bozon handicap. Think of this as playing literature Monopoly.

I lose one classico per title for not having read:

Middlemarch,
The Mill on the Floss,
Silas Marner
The Aeneid
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Rise of Silas Lapham
My Antonia (although I did read Death Comes to the Archbishop)
Typee
Omoo
I almost didn't read Moby-Dick
almost any novel by Henry James except The Ambassadors
Mrs. Dalloway

If you were to subtract hours spent in pool halls and additional hours reading pulp magazines, even though you weighed against these felonies my having read the entire works of Tobias Smollett and Anthony Trollope (didn't you just love The Way We Live Now?) you would not rank me very high on the index and might well drum me out of blogger dot com.