One of Slate‘s features for its fall fiction week is a reprise of a “gravest literary omissions” survey it conducted a few years ago – critics’ confessions of the most important books they had never read. This year, however, contemporary writers, including Margaret Atwood, were surveyed. Entertaining reading that should make you feel better about your own list of missed books…

From Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!:

I haven’t read the Bible, Ulysses, Moby-Dick, A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu, or any of the Greek tragedies, though I was a palace guard in a college production of Oedipus, and my father used to call me Oedipus when I was a small boy and he witnessed me kissing my mother. He also would cry out “Oedipus!” when he beckoned me to the dinner table. At the time, I didn’t know who Oedipus was and assumed that my father’s nickname for me was Yiddish for “good boy,” since the occasional Yiddish word, such as tsures (misfortune), was often heard in my household.

From Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway:

Of course, I never got through Finnegans Wake—that’s the one everyone feels ready to confess to—but what’s my excuse when it comes to Paradise Lost? Parade’s End? The Waves? Tristram Shandy? Beloved? Then there are whole stretches of work by writers whom I claim to hugely admire—Henry James, Jane Austen, Hart Crane—whose work I keep peering over at and intending to read. And what about those writers of whose work I’ve read almost nothing? Jean Rhys? John Donne? Gertrude Stein? Orhan Pamuk? And then there are all of the books that haven’t even come to mind yet. This is depressing. I’m going back to bed.