Author Mireille Juchau. Then there are the books some people pride themselves on not reading – your Twilights and Fifty Shades. But what about the books it seems everyone has read but us? The classic we missed during a sick week at school, or the buzzy new volume that's been gathering dust on the bedside table for months now? Melbourne Writers Festival director Lisa Dempster admits feeling some guilt that she hasn't read much Jane Austen. She also struggled with Christina Stead's acclaimed The Man Who Loved Children. "It was one that I just couldn't latch onto. I guess that stung because a lot of writers I admire have read it and loved it, so I wondered what was wrong with me that I just wasn't into it." Author Mark Dapin confesses that he's "read virtually nothing in the last 10 years." His list of not-reads ranges from the classics – Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment – to contemporary giants such as Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap and Don DeLillo's Underworld, which he threw away after two pages.

SJ Watson, author of Before I Go to Sleep. Credit:Graham Jepson "Moby-Dick, another one I haven't read," he says. "I've not read As I Lay Dying, not read anything by Whitman, not read Heart of Darkness. That one I've started four times and I cannot finish. But I haven't bought it, I only ever get it out of the library, and I'm allowed to not finish something I only get out of the library. Or indeed not open it." He has a solid excuse. "Since I've had kids and started writing a book a year I honestly believe I would have read for pleasure maybe half a dozen novels, as opposed to the dozen books I've reviewed. That would compare with a book or two a week in the days before children." Writer Maxine Beneba Clarke. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones When asked for the title he most regrets not reading, Andy Griffiths immediately turns to Proust.

British author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) also nominates Proust as the one great reading omission he rues. It's unclear why the French giant holds such a powerful attraction to children's authors. Melbourne Writers Festival director Lisa Dempster admits feeling some guilt that she hasn't read much Jane Austen. Credit:Wayne Taylor "Because it is so iconic and such an amazing achievement," Griffiths says. "Well, I say it's an amazing achievement but how do I know until I've read it?" But Proust's seven volume magnum opus can take a year or a decade to get through. Author Annie Barrows once heard that 349 A.D. was the last date a person could read all of the books written in their own lifetime - "We're totally off the hook!" - but says there are omissions in her own reading that she's still furtive about. "The Canterbury Tales, for example. It seems as though an educated person should have a grip on The Canterbury Tales. And every last word ever written by William Faulkner. A person who writes about what might be called the American South in the 1930s should be familiar with William Faulkner. I worry about that."

While we clearly can't read everything worth reading, it's not unusual to pretend otherwise. S.J. Watson gave up on Flaubert's Madame Bovary after a few pages. "A group of very good writer friends often cite it as a great book, with much to teach about writing and character, and the first time they mentioned it I was too embarrassed to admit I'd never read it. So now I just nod along sagely whenever it's mentioned and let them think I know it well." Daniel Handler says that "there is a whole category on my shelves of Books By People I Know And Love Which I Have Not Read And Have Pretended To Read. Obviously I will not identify these books. I feel pressure to secretly read them but I take them down from the shelf and sigh at them." Some books are so woven into the fabric of our culture that it's easy to fake familiarity. Indeed, actually reading them can almost feel redundant. "There are some books that, even if they're not fabulously written, carry such a weight of expectation due to their place in social consciousness that no reading can ever live up to their effect," says poet and author Maxine Beneba Clarke. "Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One spring immediately to mind as books I knew from prologue to postscript before I even began them."

Writers are the first to acknowledge that a should read isn't the same as a good read. "A few years ago I felt bad about not having read Pride and Prejudice, for example, and forced myself to read it," says Watson. "I hated every moment, it was like doing homework, and I gained nothing from the experience." Graeme Simsion forced himself to finish War and Peace in his 20s. "I had to because it's the greatest book ever written and all that. You know what? I remember nothing of it. I have no memory of that book at all." Once we're clear of high school, there should be few pressures to read any particular book. But Melbourne writer C.S. Pacat says that "there is some sense in which we think of books as having authority," and that our relationships with them can get tangled up with broader attitudes we feel towards other figures of power." As soon as we mentally categorise a book as something that we should read, we inevitably enter into some kind of psychological relationship with it, where we make assumptions that it's going to be time spent in obligation or duty. I think that means you can find yourself caught up in relationships to authority, where you have this duty that you're letting down, or some demand-resistance if you have that kind of relationship to authority."

Pacat says that "sometimes not reading a book can be a curatorial choice. It can be quite a powerful, even a liberating act." She points to the author K. Tempest Bradford, who several years ago challenged readers to stop reading white, straight, cis-gendered male authors for a year. Many writers are strategic in what they don't read. "I tend not to read much contemporary stuff even when I do have time, or many acknowledged classics for that matter, because they're the things that everyone's read and I'm looking for things to steal," laughs Dapin. "You can't steal off things that are in plain sight." "Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is a book I haven't read, have no desire to read, and will never pretend to have read," says Clarke. "The most exquisite writing in the world couldn't interest me in the Anglo-American penned romantic woes of a spoilt, Mammy-owning plantation owner's daughter." Simsion avoids what he calls "Asperger's fiction" due to the overlap with his own novels The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect. He may be one of the few people who hasn't read Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for instance. "I just didn't want my voice to be affected, but of course everybody asks have you read it?" Simsion was even on a panel with Haddon, once, and admitted that he'd not cracked the spine of the British writer's work. "He hadn't read mine either. I think there was a reasonable level of understanding. Occasionally, say at writer's festivals on panels, there's an expectation that you'll have read each other's books or at least had a look at them. To tell the truth, it's seldom very useful to do so. It's much more of a courtesy." Author Mireille Juchau says that reading the book everybody is talking about can have negative effects.

"I'm often slow to read the books that are capturing the popular imagination. I want to become immersed without the clamour." And not reading a book isn't the same as never reading a book. "I hold on to the belief that particular books will materialise when you're ready for them. I read Tess of the D'Urbervilles quite recently and it seemed almost preordained that my first encounter with Hardy would occur while writing about the connections between atmospheres and identity... How could it have assumed its evocative power if I'd duty-read it at another time?" Moby-Dick is the book Liane Moriarty has tried to conquer more than once. "I will keep trying at intervals, because I've found over the years that sometimes I've picked up a book at another time in my life and all of a sudden it's the right time and I love it. However, I suspect that I'll never find the right time for Moby-Dick. Apparently there are pages and pages about whaling practices. And I can't imagine a time where I will develop an interest in whaling practices." It may come as some consolation to anyone with a mountain of unread bedside books that most authors won't soldier on through a volume that isn't working for them. How long they'll give a title varies. Watson: 20 pages. Handler: 50. Clarke: four chapters. "Quite often I pick up a book and read the first couple of pages and think 'this is shit'," says Dapin. "You see sentences that have been written a thousand times that have been put in a slightly different order. You read dialogue that you only ever hear on television." "I'm pretty ruthless," says Griffiths. "The writer has the first chapter. I won't go much beyond that if I'm not getting pleasure. It's the writer's job to hook me in and either they're not doing their job or I'm not the right audience for that book. I don't feel guilt."

Pacat says that she used to be a completionist. "I used to force myself right to the last word. That was probably all through my teens and 20s. As I've gotten older I think that I trust my own taste more and I value my own time more. When you're young you think you're immortal and you have endless time." Perhaps the last word should go to Moriarty. In an email she writes words that might soothe anyone overly burdened with guilt about the Great Unread: "I know many empathetic, intelligent, interesting people who don't read fiction at all. Although I do admit to thinking: HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE READ TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD???" The Melbourne Writers Festival begins on Thursday week, August 20.