I drive around booming Silicon Valley in my little blue Honda Civic admiring shiny license-plate-less Porsches, Ferraris, convertible Mercedes, BMWs, Jags, and yet-another Lexus. Middlefield and Embarcadero, Alma and 101, El Camino Real and California Avenue present a showcase of peripatetic status symbols. (I read there is a six-months' waiting list for Porsches; the impatient IPO-ed order theirs from Southern California.) But I'm not jealous, however invisible I feel to the nouveaux Internet-riches in their cozy leather bucket seats. No, I putter past Netscape and Yahoo thinking of my wealth of books.

I've been rich my entire life with long hours to spend reading. I drank down oeuvres of cool literary cats like Shakespeare (including the lovely, little-known "The Phoenix and the Turtle"), Chaucer (well, no Latin works), Milton (except the unpalatable political tracts), Spenser (including every magical ninth Alexandrine line of The Faerie Queene), Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Dryden, Tennyson, Pope, Emerson, Austen, Thoreau, Whitman, Bradstreet, Dickinson, Poe. But I grow tedious.

And come to my point: book snobbery. Perhaps more insidious than any materialistic arrogance, this sort of elitism robs me and many really quite intelligent, pleasant people of a great deal of fun. How wonderfully odd if someone asked me at one of those polite parties, "What books have you never read?" As that has yet to happen, this column becomes a kind of confessional. I shall not be ashamed to admit I haven't read Something Important. I will not only read Classics-And-Widely-Acclaimed-Works. I will pray The Prayer of The Good Student - Let me approach any written work (and all art) with joyful anticipation and as few artificial preconceptions as possible. Make me be like my child, who has no food snobbery, only taste buds and appetite. She loves blaring orange packaged macaroni and cheese as well as paella, Reese's cups as well as biscotti, blissfully unaware one or the other might be "better." She just enjoys what she likes.

To begin. I have never read anything by Iris Murdoch. My only acquaintance with this recently deceased British novelist is a marvelous New Yorker Personal History piece by her husband John Bayley-"Elegy for Iris" (July 27, 1998). The beauty of his writing matches the depth of its passion. The descriptions of their river "bathing" are a compelling tribute to the romance and loyalty of love. But, I say again-I have never read, or, as academics are fond of saying, "recently reread" any of Dame Iris.

There are many Famous (and Infamous) Books I haven't reread recently. War and Peace I started extracurricularly in college, but after I'd made a bookmark list of all the names and couldn't keep them straight, I gave up. The Odyssey; and only sibling rivalry moved me to read, surprised, a riveting, funny translation of The Iliad (long after graduating), when my younger brother read it for the heck of it. No Hemingway save one, but I forget which. No major Faulkner novel. Believe me, I tried too.

Admitting to some of the exemplary stars of my ignorance leads me to contemplate that among life's most exciting possibilities are The Books I Haven't Read…Yet. There are the ones I don't know much about but think I might like (maybe I will; maybe I won't-what lovely suspense). There are those I think I wouldn't like and others I have in fact begun and don't like-but you never know about tomorrow. And there are the ones I've not even heard of yet that some friend or stranger will hand me and I will fall in love, thinking, "Yesterday I hadn't even heard of this author!" Maybe they will be on the New York Times bestseller list; maybe not.

Books as a way of the soul means the ones I haven't read are as telling as the ones I have. Think of the mysterious negative significance of the unknown Old English texts (burnt, Viking-stomped, chopping-block-lost) against the wonders of Beowulf, "The Dream of the Rood," "The Seafarer," and Aelfric's homilies. The Haven't-Yet-Reads give my life's invisible sculpture its negative space, and in that space, my soul does grow.