>Inspired by Bibliographing’s “Bizarre Ranks of the Most-Read,” I’ve been turning over in my own mind which authors I have most read. Excluded are writers I read in my teens and poets, with a cut-off below 5 books.

There are no major surprises, though I wish, of course, it was more erudite, more literary. It reflects the volume of science fiction I read in my twenties; also an inexplicable passion for writers I can no longer abide (Amis, Irving, Theroux). Many other writers on the list I have ceased to read.

• Iain (M.) Banks – 18
• Robert A. Heinlein – 14
• Paul Theroux – 14
• Julian Barnes – 13
• John Irving – 10
• J. P. Donleavy – 10
• Martin Amis – 10
• Alberto Manguel – 8
• William Gibson – 7
• Ian McEwan – 7
• Vladimir Nabokov – 7
• Douglas Adams – 6
• Haruki Murakami – 6
• J. G. Ballard – 6
• Glen Duncan – 6
• A. M. Homes – 6
• Jose Saramago – 6
• Michael Marshall (Smith) – 6
• Nicholson Baker – 6
• J. M. Coetzee – 5
• Geoff Dyer – 5
• Graham Greene – 5
• Friedrich Nietzsche – 5
• Arturo Perez-Reverte – 5
• Jean-Paul Sartre – 5
• Elmore Leonard – 5
• Ed McBain – 5
• Franz Kafka – 5
• Kingsley Amis – 5
• Joseph Heller – 5

>Is it me or am I seeing a lot about difficult books? Life is too short and abandoning Finnegans Wake being recurrent themes. I’ve yet to even attempt the Wake and may come to sympathise with those who leap overboard. I do however disagree with those that give up difficult books and then encourage others that these books are not worth trying to understand.

I share the view that I’d rather tackle a dense, chewy book that has entranced or confused or challenged readers for many decades or centuries, than tackle some fashionable jujube that will be forgotten within a decade. You have probably come across the fantastic series of articles running at The Millions, encouraging readers to tackle a series of “difficult” books.

What I’ve come to think of (somewhat unfairly) as the grad-school response to such allusiveness – treating each sentence like a puzzle to be solved – isn’t always the best way to approach to a tough text. With Finnegans Wake, for example, a willingness to let things wash over you can be the difference between sublimity and seasickness.

In addition to those in the article, the series continues in the sidebar, including two of my favourites: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and To the Lighthouse.

>Reading St Augustine impiously.

>

Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper turning its pages over on his bared knees.

From episode 4 of Ulysses: Blooms visits his outhouse with a paper (“he liked to read at stool”), the word cuckstool  found me reaching curiously for my Gifford notes.

cuckstool – Obsolete: a chair used to punish dishonest tradesmen and other offenders. The victim was fastened in the chair in front of his own door to be hooted at and pelted by the community.

 Why this is an obsolete word or practise is beyond me. Let’s start a campaign. Restore the cuckstool! I have a builder that I can nominate immediately.

>An arbitrary, personal list of “The 40 Books That Changed Susan Orlean’s World.” Somehow more meaningful than a list of favourites; I also agree with several of the choices.

>A happy discovery. I searched for a text of Balzac’s Treatise on Elegant Living several years ago after reading a partial translation on the old London Lounge site. So I am delighted to find a new translation of this “keystone text of dandyism.”

>The Telegraph leaps into the fray with a list: Adam Foulds, Sarah Hall, Steven Hall, China Miéville, Adam Thirlwell and Zadie Smith are all credible candidates; the others I don’t know particularly well or at all.

The Millions presents an “informal, unscientific, alternate-universe “20 Under 40″ list”: apart from Kiran Desai and Julie Orringer I know none of these writers.

Undoubtedly one or two interesting discoveries to be made from these lists.