Books you tried to finish but just can't

[cjsmall]

Bradbury's more a metaphorical-oriented 'fantasy' writer than SF proper, but...many professionals and fans argue over the diffs re 'fantasy' and 'science' anyway. Worth reading, but, not to everyone's tastes.

John:

That's an interesting way to describe Bradbury. I was thinking about this myself after he came up on this list and you really cannot classify him as either science fiction or as fantasy or as straight literature (say like Hemingway). He has a truly unique voice. His writing is very poetic*, and stylistically, probably comes closer to Anthem than any other author that comes to mind.

Regards,

--

Jeff

* When Harlen Ellison was working on his Dangerous Visions short-stories series, Bradbury was the only person he was willing to accept a poem from for inclusion in the books. Note that I do not recommend Dangerous Visions as a starting point for anyone testing the SiFi waters! :-)

[John Dailey]

Jeff:

~ Well, Harlan Ellison is definitely a bit sui generis, even in his prefaces/story-prelude-intros. He, like Bradbury, is 'his own' writer, subject-wise and perspective-wise. Talk about hard-to-classify! NTL...he, as Bradbury, is fascinating.

~ Indeed, they both are very similar in their subject-matter and style of handling it, (though apparently not personality-wise). POETIC is a very good way of describing their fiction-writings (let's avoid Ellison's non-fiction here). Strange, I didn't think of that. Very well put.

~ However, I don't think that Ellison is one to add here for neophytes to the...er-r...'genre.' (He deserves a thread of his own!)

LLAP

J:D

[cjsmall]

John:

Can you explain the acronyms NTL and LLAP. I tried looking them up on the Internet Acronym Server but didn't find either. Thanks.

--

Jeff

[John Dailey]

Barbara:

Addendum:

~ 'The Golden Age' was in the '40-50's. Forget refs to sex, except 1 referring to a male star-ship captain re females brought to another star system, and all f's were pregnant when they arrived; the latter was the 'punch-line' of the story, and damn if I can remember the name or author of it beyond '...Mighty...' Couldn't find it in Google or Wiki, but, such stories then weren't noted for dealing with 'R' rated subjects. My adolescence might've been different if they had.

LLAP

J:D

[John Dailey]

Jeff:

~ Hmm...sorry 'bout that (or, sbt.) Surprised you didn't find 'ntl.' I have some typing holdovers from when I learned The Joy of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) where you pick a subject and some group of people are out there discussing it, from how to properly parse Klingonese to Zen and the art of TV watching. The chat 'rooms' were real-time reading/typing, and, when busy, REALLY busy. While typing a response to 1, 5 other responders where sending in and you're trying to read them while finishing yours to 'send.' Acronyms for common phrases abounded just for the time saving in the typing. I've dropped some, but, NeverTheLess still use a few I presumed others were familiar with. Guess there's a new cyber-gen now which haven't much IRC exp.

LiveLongAndProsper (not an IRC 'acronym')

J:D

[cjsmall]

John:

Thanks for the explanation. I should have figured out NTL, but I don't think I was going to get LLAP despite having watched all the Star Trek series! :-) Of course, your avatar might have been a small clue now that I think about it. I submitted both of these to the Internet Acronym Server. BTW, occasionally I use a few of these shorthands myself, but I always wonder who I'm confusing when I do so. More often when I use abbreviations, it usually due to plain old bad typing!

Regards,

--

Jeff

[Jehni125]

I love scifi and fantasy books. I've read all the LotR, Narnia, and Dune but I just can't finish David Baldacci. I have tried to finish "The Court" three times but I just can't get into it!

[BaalChatzaf]

I have tried six times but I cannot get past pp 118 in Kant's -Critique of Pure Reason-. And I have tried with different translations, too.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

Books you tried to finish but just can't

I got this idea from an email listing of articles I receive from LewRockwell.com. A link went to an article called Books readers could not finish. Here are the fiction and nonfiction lists for England given in the article:

I'll start with The Holy Bible. God knows I have tried to read the full thing, but alas! I am a failure at it.

You have to read it in Hebrew and Aramaic to get into to it sufficiently. Not all parts are equally interesting. The begots and the begats are boring in any language.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

Puhleez!

You left out Greek.

Your yarmulke is too big.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

I have tried six times but I cannot get past pp 118 in Kant's -Critique of Pure Reason-. And I have tried with different translations, too.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Start with the last chapter--or page.

--Brant

[Laure]

Baal, congratulations for getting to pg 118; I couldn't get past about pg 2. :cry:

[Barbara Branden]

Baal, congratulations for getting to pg 118; I couldn't get past about pg 2. :cry:

Laura, I've read great hunks of Kant with considerable interest and even with some pleasure.. But this is not a virtue. With all reading, one has to have a purpose -- and with some reading, the purpose has to be more than pleasure. I've been able to read Kant because it was very important to me to understand his ideas; but there's no reason why it should be important to everyone -- and short of that, I grant that he is unreadable.

I'm sure that everyone here can think of books they've read with great interest and profit that, because we have different purposes and interests, others might find impossible to read.

Barbara

[Laure]

Well, I wanted to read Kant, to learn about his ideas firsthand, but I just couldn't seem to focus on it. As someone who's never had a philosophy course, I may just not have the background to understand Critique of Pure Reason. However, I had no trouble at all focusing on Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; it all made sense and was logical to me. Maybe the intended audience was different. (Or maybe Objectivism just makes more sense! )

[BaalChatzaf]

Laura, I've read great hunks of Kant with considerable interest and even with some pleasure.. But this is not a virtue. With all reading, one has to have a purpose -- and with some reading, the purpose has to be more than pleasure. I've been able to read Kant because it was very important to me to understand his ideas; but there's no reason why it should be important to everyone -- and short of that, I grant that he is unreadable.

There are basically two reasons for reading anything:

For (laughs/giggles/pleasure) OR for information. Sometimes the two overlap. Sometimes they don't.

If what one is reading neither entertains nor informs, it is time to put the book down. Time flies and we only have so much time.

The philosopher I have had the most pleasure in reading is David Hume. He is right on the money and his writing is clear. The political writer I have had the most pleasure reading is Tom Paine. Again, for the same reasons; he is correct and his writing style is luminous. J.S.Mill is mostly correct, but he is a bore. If you have trouble sleeping, read his stuff.

I gagged on Kant because of the Synthetic A Priori. There is no such thing a necessarily true synthetic judgment. Synthetic statements are true if they happen assert a fact. Otherwise they are false. There are no necessarily true synthetic statements. Every fact in reality just happens to be a fact. The only necessarily true statements are tautologies and they do not state facts. If I tell you it is either raining where you live or it isn't (at a given time) then I have told you nothing about the weather where you live. If one wants to know what the weather is, he most go and observe it. It cannot be deduced from a necessarily true statement.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michelle]

I have an aversion to leaving books unfinished, but there are a few...

I have yet to finish The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, despite repeated attempts to do so. (I was finally able to finish the movie version on my fourth go through without falling asleep, and found the other films mildly enjoyable. Maybe the same will be true of the other books when I try again. But that first volume...)

Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett. All three of these "novels" are nigh unreadable.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce... but has any living human being read every word of this... thing?

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Pretty much the most terribly written "classic" I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Funny that I couldn't finish, considering how short it is (my copy was just shy of one hundred pages long). Engendered in me a life-long hatred of this writer. Reading similar reactions people have had to The Ambassadors only reinforces my opinion that he is the lowliest creature to ever put pen to paper.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Another remarkably short book. It is just SO boring. My eyes glaze over a sentence or two in, and stay that way.

As to books I haven't fully read...

Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre is overall a decent volume overviewing various existentialistic philosophers, but the translation of some of Karl Jasper's stuff in this volume is awful. I only got so far through his section before just skipping to the next bit on Heidegger.

Several people I have met have struggled to finish The Brothers Karamazov, but I never had a problem with it.

Edited October 22, 2009 by Michelle R

[Selene]

Michelle:

Damn, I wish I could have not had to finish it. God awful.

"The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Pretty much the most terribly written "classic" I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Funny that I couldn't finish, considering how short it is (my copy was just shy of one hundred pages long). Engendered in me a life-long hatred of this writer. Reading similar reactions people have had to The Ambassadors only reinforces my opinion that he is the lowliest creature to ever put pen to paper."

"Due to its ambiguous content and narrative skill, The Turn of the Screw became a favorite text of New Criticism. The account has lent itself to dozens of different interpretations, often mutually exclusive, including those of a Freudian nature. Many critics have tried to determine what exactly the nature of evil within the story is." Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw

I had a number of great grad teachers and this was forced on us by one, in order to understand the nature of the different "critiques" and their respective schools of "thought".

In another thread on Atlas part of the discussion related to the "narrator" which is the one aspect that the Screw that was of interest to me.

Adam

[Michelle]

Michelle:

Damn, I wish I could have not had to finish it. God awful.

"The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Pretty much the most terribly written "classic" I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Funny that I couldn't finish, considering how short it is (my copy was just shy of one hundred pages long). Engendered in me a life-long hatred of this writer. Reading similar reactions people have had to The Ambassadors only reinforces my opinion that he is the lowliest creature to ever put pen to paper."

"Due to its ambiguous content and narrative skill, The Turn of the Screw became a favorite text of New Criticism. The account has lent itself to dozens of different interpretations, often mutually exclusive, including those of a Freudian nature. Many critics have tried to determine what exactly the nature of evil within the story is." Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw

I had a number of great grad teachers and this was forced on us by one, in order to understand the nature of the different "critiques" and their respective schools of "thought".

In another thread on Atlas part of the discussion related to the "narrator" which is the one aspect that the Screw that was of interest to me.

Adam

"Narrative skill" indeed.

Read this review of The Ambassadors.

An excerpt:

The Ambassadors offended me. I love the English Language as much or more than I love anything else. To see it desecrated, violated, humiliated in this way was painful. Painful.

Halfway through (literally - I wrote a table with percentages in increments of 10% so at any moment I could tell how far I had to go) the book got a little interesting, just for a page or two. An interesting little plot twist occurred. So the book is flawed even in its imperfection. Because of those two pages, it is not as bad a novel as possibly could exist.

I'm afraid you don't believe me. I will give you two more pieces of evidence. First of all, in 1903 two chapters were reversed. It was a blatant error. The chapter that took place in the evening was followed by the one that took place in the morning. In the former chapter, a character referred to a conversation that hadn't happened yet.

A horrible error you think, right? Henry James fans would be complaining and yelling, right? Well, it remained unnoticed for FIFTY YEARS. You heard me; for half a century people were talking about and analyzing this book, forcing students to read it, and never noticed that two of the chapters were in the wrong order. The error was finally noticed by a Stanford Undergraduate, Robert Young, in 1950. Literary James scholars were anxious to get a quotation from this brilliant young man who had made such a significant discovery. What words of praise for James would their new hero give them for posterity? Let's quote Robert Young: "There must be something radically wrong with a writing style that has managed to obscure an error of this magnitude for so many years from the probing eyes of innumerable readers, publishers, editors, critics, and even the author himself."

Finally, my ... wife, Laurel, was hearing me say that this was the worst novel I had ever read. She was sympathetic, but it started to annoy me that she didn't really understand, because she only thought she knew what bad writing was. So do you all, as I said above, until you've read The Ambassadors. So I asked her to read a paragraph (which was about three quarters of a page). She read two pages, disbelieving, only putting it down out of fears of harming our unborn child.

I took notes as she spoke. "That's... horrible. ... The whole book is like that? Nothing but phrases and commas? Each sentence should have been 18 words shorter... Wow, I really don't like him... I could have finished The Scarlet Letter if this was its competition."

This characterizes The Turn of the Screw pretty well too. There is no narrative skill, it's just poorly written, like a bad parody of the worst aspects of Victorian writing.

Edited October 22, 2009 by Michelle R

[Alfonso Jones]

Michelle -

Those comments on The Ambassadors are hilarious!!! Make me almost want to briefly read a few pages to see just how bad it might be...

This all reminds me of the sort of imaginary referee's reports we used to imagine writing. (I have been an Associate Editor for multiple academic journals, and referee for many more.)

(All the above are imaginary, brief letters to the author of a submitted paper):

Dear sir:

You have obviously confused our journal with your trashcan. Please resubmit your paper to the appropriate one.

=====

Dear sir:

Your paper has been reviews by an Associate Editor and two referees. All three agree that paper should be burnt and you should be shot.

=====

Regards,

Bill P

[Michelle]

Michelle -

Those comments on The Ambassadors are hilarious!!! Make me almost want to briefly read a few pages to see just how bad it might be...

This all reminds me of the sort of imaginary referee's reports we used to imagine writing. (I have been an Associate Editor for multiple academic journals, and referee for many more.)

(All the above are imaginary, brief letters to the author of a submitted paper):

Dear sir:

You have obviously confused our journal with your trashcan. Please resubmit your paper to the appropriate one.

=====

Dear sir:

Your paper has been reviews by an Associate Editor and two referees. All three agree that paper should be burnt and you should be shot.

=====

Regards,

Bill P

I'll never read The Ambassadors. That's more than twice the length of something he wrote previously that I was unwilling to finish. He's just a really, really horrible writer.

Funny fantasies about those reports. I've often wondered what kind of agony it must be to sift through thousands of plain bad submitted manuscripts for a publishing house.

[jeffrey smith]

Michelle:

Damn, I wish I could have not had to finish it. God awful.

"The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Pretty much the most terribly written "classic" I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Funny that I couldn't finish, considering how short it is (my copy was just shy of one hundred pages long). Engendered in me a life-long hatred of this writer. Reading similar reactions people have had to The Ambassadors only reinforces my opinion that he is the lowliest creature to ever put pen to paper."

"Due to its ambiguous content and narrative skill, The Turn of the Screw became a favorite text of New Criticism. The account has lent itself to dozens of different interpretations, often mutually exclusive, including those of a Freudian nature. Many critics have tried to determine what exactly the nature of evil within the story is." Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw

I had a number of great grad teachers and this was forced on us by one, in order to understand the nature of the different "critiques" and their respective schools of "thought".

In another thread on Atlas part of the discussion related to the "narrator" which is the one aspect that the Screw that was of interest to me.

Adam

Turn of the Screw is a great horror story precisely because it leaves so much open to the reader's imagination--it suggests a great many things but never actually says them.

However, James is the kind of writer whose style takes getting used to, so I can understand your wish to avoid him.

As to books I've not finished--plenty of commercial best sellers, but the highlight of the books I haven't finished must be At Swim Two Birds, by Flann O'Brian. This was foisted on us by a visiting prof for a 20th century Brit lit course, as the very last book of the term. Not a single member of the class could finish it; and it wasn't because of spring fever or anything else. It was quite simply an absurd book.

Jeff S.

[Philip Coates]

> Turn of the Screw is a great horror story precisely because it leaves so much open to the reader's imagination--it suggests a great many things but never actually says them.

Jeffrey, are you saying i) he shows rather than telling, ii) he leaves some things implicit or affects your subconscious, iii) he's ambiguous - he leaves things totally up to whatever interpretation a reader wants to make.

i) and ii) can be literary virtues, but I find it hard to see how iii) can be so, despite all the professors I've had who claim it to be good writing. If you think iii) is good, could you say why and perhaps give an example from Henry James or anyone else?

[jeffrey smith]

> Turn of the Screw is a great horror story precisely because it leaves so much open to the reader's imagination--it suggests a great many things but never actually says them.

Jeffrey, are you saying i) he shows rather than telling, ii) he leaves some things implicit or affects your subconscious, iii) he's ambiguous - he leaves things totally up to whatever interpretation a reader wants to make.

i) and ii) can be literary virtues, but I find it hard to see how iii) can be so, despite all the professors I've had who claim it to be good writing. If you think iii) is good, could you say why and perhaps give an example from Henry James or anyone else?

I'm saying i and ii. iii can sometimes be an inevitable result of i and ii.

I'm not going to defend James very heavily--besides TotS and Washington Square, the only book of his I remember reading was the Bostonians, and that was many years ago, and that was mainly because my interest was piqued by the fact the title referred to my home town. However, TotS is a good example: the reader's view of what is actually happening ends up being directly based on what the reader thinks of the governess, and what is going on in her head: were there real ghosts, or was she a hysteric seeing a past case of child abuse where there was none?

And however bad James is, he's far better than, say, Dan Brown or Flann O'Brian.

Edited October 22, 2009 by jeffrey smith

[Xray]

Moby Dick, which I didn't even read close to getting it finished. The reason not being Melville's writing style but my total lack of interest in the story, even when I told myself Ahab's fight had to be interpreted "symbolically" of course. Didn't help me one bit here.

Edited October 23, 2009 by Xray

[9thdoctor]

A couple I found to be utter snoozers:

Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha

Robert Pirsig: Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

One I can’t seem to get back to:

Thomas Pynchon: Against the Day

I got through Gravity’s Rainbow, with difficulty, and like to dip back into it on occasion, but Against the Day is just too damn big and goes off on so many tangents, and I’m only about a third through. I haven’t touched it in months.

Edited October 23, 2009 by Ninth Doctor