1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville - Admit it, you read exactly up to "Call me Ishmael".
2. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking - It was said to be the first "readable" popular science book, but it's roosted undisturbed in bookshelves since 1988.
3. Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri - An exhaustingly prolix, breathtakingly pompous, encyclopaedically rambling memoir. Those who stopped at its fawning epigraph lauding the British empire were wise.
4. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie - Those who wanted it banned only claimed to have read it, and everyone else never got past page 31. Or was it page 13?
5. Two Lives, Vikram Seth - It'd take more than two lives to crack this one open.
6. Ulysses, James Joyce - Sure, it's a Modernist classic. But its breathless stream-of-consciousness style, very erratic punctuation and prodigious vocabulary including words like "adiaphane" and "hyperborean" and even "awokwokawok" and "Frseeeeeeeeeeeefrong" makes most people close the book with a "khrrrrklak" by page 2.
7. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust - At 3,000 pages, that damn madeleine was tough to swallow. Where's the water?
8. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky - Maybe if you were exiled to Siberia, you would get around to reading it too.
9. Kanthapura, Raja Rao - Take an R.K. Narayan novel, set in a village. Remove its verve and wit, and swamp it in turgid metaphysical and patriotic digressions, and you've got the reason why most Indian subjects choose not to subject themselves to what is purportedly independent India's first novel.
10. My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi - Most readers' experiments failed at the prologue.
11. The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen - You've had your fill of them with the city's autorickshaw drivers. And then you want to read about it?
12. Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault - Because even the title left you scarred.
13. A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Magic realism proved magically soporific.
