So Many Books, So Little Time
Inspired by the post below, Daniel Drezner posts on "an old parlor game among academics -- confessing the most important book in your field that you have never read." It's not clear what "my field" is. Since my formal training is in English literature, I might say Frankenstein (I intentionally avoided Ulysses, which means I'm not embarrassed). Given my current work, however, it's some combination of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I've read parts of each but all of neither. Dan's reader comments suggest that Smith is vastly underread.
Responding to the original post, readers have been hard on Mark Edmundson, but I've got to give him credit for admitting that he'd never heard of The Road to Serfdom. It would have been easy to fake it with something like, "It's certainly been an influential book, but I have to admit that I haven't read it." As Dan's post implies, much of education is knowing what books you should have read, even if there are too many to master.
Reader John Brennan writes, "What I thought was particularly delicious was that it was THE VERY LAST question on the VERY LAST SHOW of Booknotes."