Entertainment For Lively Minds
I really must get round to finishing that book....
I'm really enjoying the literary randomiser. If there was a toss up between books and music it would be a tough call to make.
A couple of the posts mentioned books lying dormant and I was reminded yet again of one book in particular that I have started on at least 3 occasions but have never finished.I know there are the usual suspects as regards the great dust gatherers of our literary past: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Jeffrey Archer...
My Schubert's 8th is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. I have read and enjoyed The Remains of The Day, An Artist of The Floating World and When We Were Orphans but for some reason I cannot finish The Unconsoled.
The odd thing is that what I have read of that book has stayed in my mind much more than the ones by Ishiguro that I have finished. The dream-like sequences and the maddening extenuation of Ryder's impotence as more demands are made on his time are vividly recalled but I just don't seem to be able to get past the halfway mark or thereabouts. The writing has frustrated as much as it has delighted: sometimes I feel like pages are saying nothing to me and yet still do just enough to make me keep going (or as E. M. Forster said "If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we say “why?”") and on other occasions the surrealism dazzles like a modern variation of Alice in Wonderland.
But what is the book that you can't get round to removing from a state of limbo but that you feel compelled to try again?
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catch 22
Bought it summer of 1992, made it to page 142 and had laughed twice. Reckoned the guffaw to effort ratio wasn't high enough, and the writing style just wasn't for me.
I moved house a few years ago and was putting books into boxes and came across said book, with bookmark still in it; I kept it. It still sits on the front row of the bookshelf (two layers of books there) and I *do* reckon it's worth giving another rattle to, now that i'm definitely older and possibly wiser.
It won't be tonight though...
Curate's egg
Good, even great, in parts but it does go on. If ever a book needed a good editor that's the one.
And posssibly best read when younger in fact. From age of 18 or so, when I first read it and absolutely loved it, up to age 35 when I read it again it would have been my answer to the what's your favourite book question. Now it's not.
ah crap
Was 18 when i thought 'this is rubbish'.
I'm 35 now. This does not bode well!
if it helps
I was 45 when I read it last year - I thought it was great still. I love the skewed logic mixed with tension. I was not expecting to enjoy it - maybe that made a difference!
Lord Of The Rings
For years I couldn't get past chapter 7 of the first book. I forced myself to finish it finally and afterwards thought: well that was part of my life I'm never going to get back. Thoroughly underwhelmed. And me a reader of science fiction and fantasy...
Meanwhile there is a book called Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace that I've only made it to about the 400th page. It runs to about 1100 pages. I know there's something going on about drug addiction and tennis in there, but apart from that I couldn't tell you anything else about it!
For me, the opposite applies...
I anticipate, savour and delight every re-reading of the Lord Of The Rings - and I almost entirely DON'T care for sci-fi/fantasy (Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series is the only other fiction of that type that moves me - and I think it has similarly profound things to say about 'real life' and the nature of things).
However... much as I enjoy readsing Tolkien, reading his minor works, reading scholarly books about his works, concordances of minutiae, biographies, etc, I have never yet finished 'the Silmarillion'. I even had a go at the unabridged audio book version read by Martin Shaw (who is very impressive in the role), but still haven't finished it. It will, in the words of major Tolkien apologist/commentator Prof Tom Shippey, 'never be anything less than difficult to read'. And he's a SERIOUS fan...
Oh well...
I'd love to have been a fly on the wall
at the meeting between (in the blue corner) CS Lewis with Tolkien as second, and Arthur C Clarke (with iirc Val Cleaver) as his second.
Lewis had expressed a liking for "Childhood's end" and a country pub provided the venue.
Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy
I haven't even finished the first one; what I have read (off and on over more than a decade) is so compelling that I can't understand why I cannot persevere with it.
I gave up on this too
I pushed through the first story and found it so pretentious that the thought of a whole trilogy chilled me to the marrow.
A friend of mine explained why she loved it, and if I hadn't previously tried reading it I'd have rushed out and bought it on her recommendation alone. But when it's in front of you...it's just one of theose books you feel you're supposed to like, but in all honesty it's impossible to do.
Auster's 'Book of Illusions'...
...is very impressive - gripping and haunting - if I'm recalling the title correctly: the one about the mysterious silent cinema star. Wouldn't want to give the plot away so I shall say no more...
D'oh!
I recently bought this - heard a gushing recommendation, then saw it cheap in HMV. The above don't sound like descriptions of books I like to read!
Unconsoled
Yes Bisto..it was one of my three in the recent Literary Randomiser post. All those bloody long speeches. It has been thrown across the room a couple of times. My reading was to think of it as an artist retrospectively considering various stages of his persona throughout his life. Maddening nonetheless.
My personal bete noir is Gravity's Rainbow by the world's most overrated author, Thomas Pynchon. Have tried it three times in last twenty years and still not past page 100.
Thomas Pynchon
I love "Gravity's Rainbow", but it's admittedly very hard going - I genuinely felt I'd "achieved" something when I'd finished it, and though I'm far from clear what it was all about, huge chunks of it still pop into my head from time to time... "The Crying Of Lot 49" is a lot easier to get to grips with, and though "Vineland" wasn't really worth the effort, I still rate him as an author ploughing his own furrow.
That said, I have both "Mason & Dixon" and "Against The Day" in the "to read" pile, and they're both so intimidatingly large I've found it hard to work up the cojones to get started on them so far.
V
by Pynchon. I've been unable to get beyond the first 20 pages.
I managed to finish the thing
..and well, life is too short to put up with "V". Much preferred the TV series
Also Gravity's Rainbow for me...
I managed V (don't ask me to summarize it, I only vaguely remember it), Crying Of Lot 49 ended just at the point where I was getting confused but Gravity's Rainbow? Several attempts have seen me get no further than page 100 or so.
Don Quixote has been on my shelf for 15 years and started twice without ever being finished. The problem for me is he attacks the windmill so early on that it seems not worth reading the next thousand or so pages. Perhaps that's what most people think when they read it "ah, here's the tilting at windmills bit, no need to read any more."
Never managed to finish On The Road after about four attempts. I just despised it with a passion, middle class tossers finding themselves. I just wanted to strangle every character.
I have failed to complete more books by Dickens than any other writer. I really feel in this case that the problem lies with me and not the books.
Have you tried ripping Dickens into installments ;-)
Might read better that way ??? Just wonder how many books of that era might be better on a Kindle ...
As they were originally intended to be read of course...
... as they were sold in monthly instalments, as I'm sure you knew. I love the stories about the riots in American docks when the ships containing the final chapters of "Little Dorrit" pulled into harbour, people scrambling all over each other to get the first copies...
And in a similar vein, the reason "Vanity Fair" suddenly shifts gear partway through is because the early instalments sold so badly that the publisher told Thackeray to liven things up or it would be cancelled!
Just as well he didn't have Zombies available as a plot device
c.f. the new Austen mashup
Nicholas Nickleby
..been reading it for 10 years now, still nowhere near the end, and I do like Dickens but NN is just beyond me
Actually Forster had a killer line about
" ... the familiarity with the outside of books…" which I resonate with too well ...
I know this much is true
No, it's not Gary Kemp's autobiography. It's a book by Wally Lamb about the relationship between 2 brothers, one of whom is somewhat mentally unstable.
My wife read it. Loved it. Has passed it on to many friends and given it as presents to others. I think they all loved it. I've ploughed manfully through a couple of hundred pages. I try and try, but damnit, I can't finish it. It lies beside the bed, a reminder of something....
Middlemarch and the Master and Margarita
I know that might sound like another mash-up, and maybe one day it will be, but those are the two books I have enjoyed immensely up to a third of the way in, then lost momentum and had to start again at least once, maybe twice; even now, Middlemarch is in my pile of books to read, within easy reach, yet the latest Young Bond book and Jose Saramago's Seeing are currently on top.
Oh, and there's the Confessions of a Justified Sinner too.
I find classic works of literature can appear dense, in a good way, but overwhelming, like trying to eat wholemeal bread after a diet of Smart Price thin-sliced.
Does anybody reading this have a view of Jose Saramago's work, by the way?
Despite buying them months/years ago
I'm still yet to read:
Crime and Punishment
Lucky Jim
Song And Dance Man III
The Fall Of The House Of Usher (and other writings)
Tender Is The Night
and a few more.