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Sometimes Penguin Classics inspire contrite looks and whispered confessions: "You know, I've never read xxx." The unspoken truth is that with the classics comes guilt over the great books we have not finished or not even started. But we are in good company. This fall Slate asked several authors to name their neglected classics:

J. D. McClatchy: The Tale of Genji
Margaret Atwood: Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata
Nell Freudenberger: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

In a similar spirit, we've asked some Penguin colleagues to name a classic they have never read and would promise to read in 2008 as one of their new year's resolutions, which are always easier to keep if done with others:

Bibi Baksh, Senior Marketing Manager: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Sonya Cheuse, Publicist: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Molly Barton, Publishing Coordinator: Robertson Davies' Fifth Business
Matt Giarratano, Managing Editor: Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter (The Wreath) and Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel
Stephen Morrison, Editor-in-Chief and Associate Publisher: Kerouac's On the Road
Dennis Swaim, Director of Advertising and Promotion: George Eliot's Middlemarch
Jeremy Tescher, Assistant Sales Manager: Tolstoy's War and Peace
Alan Walker, Senior Director of Academic Marketing & Sales: Plans to read one Penguin Classic per letter of the alphabet, from Alain-Fournier to Zola, and begin again if he finishes before the year's end!