If there’s a public library in heaven (one of the few the government hasn’t yet managed to close) its shelves will be brimful of novels that good people like us always meant to read in our lifetimes but somehow never quite got round to. Vita brevis and all that.
Among those tomes waiting in the great hereafter for those of us who have lived lives too busy to read them are (be honest) Ulysses (all of it, not just the easy Penelope section), Proust (not just Swann’s Way) and all those foreign writers such as Perec and Pessoa whose names we’d dearly love to drop in conversation if we only were certain how to pronounce them.
And, of course, the Everest of unread fiction,