Not only do I love to read, but my tastes in reading material run pretty wide. I’m a sci-fi fan (Asimov in particular), I appreciate a good postmodern novel every now and then (Slaughterhouse-Five, Pale Fire), I like the classics (The Count of Monte Cristo, Huckleberry Finn), the work of the postwar boys’ club (Updike, Roth), not to mention all kinds of nonfiction, and so on.
To someone who loves books, though, nothing is more embarrassing than admitting he or she couldn’t finish one—especially if the book in question has a reputation for being good or an important work in the canon. And yet there are some novels I’ve tried to read but simply can’t finish. Not from a lack of trying, mind you, but I can get only so many pages in before the thought of reading one more paragraph seems too daunting, too—well, not fun. And since I’m no longer a student I don’t feel the need to grit my teeth and drag myself through a book I’m not enjoying (*cough* The Scarlet Letter *cough*). Anyway, below are the books I just couldn’t finish, in order from my most recent failures to those distant, early memories of having given up. Don’t judge me!!
Middlemarch by George Eliot – stopped after 140 (of 838) pages (17% complete)
In February of this year, New Yorker columnist Rebecca Mead wrote a captivating article about her long-standing love affair with Eliot’s Middlemarch. A few weeks later I was in Barnes & Noble, browsing through a book that discusses the greatest novels of all time, and Middlemarch was at the top of the list. A few weeks after that a colleague mentioned that Middlemarch is her favorite book and she rereads it every couple of years. The last straw was discovering (on another trip to Barnes & Noble) that Penguin’s hardcover classics imprint had just released a version of the novel. By this point I was pretty excited about the prospect of reading the book, so I bought a copy of the new hardcover and began reading it that night.
And it’s a great book, clearly (you don’t need me to tell you that). Eliot’s prose is rich and precise without being verbose, I appreciate her gentle sense of humor, the village of Middlemarch is as fully realized as a reader could hope for, and some of the characters are very entertaining. But the book’s principle themes revolve primarily around marriage, money, and the clergy—three of the least interesting subject matters for novels, in my opinion. Reading Middlemarch, I had the odd dual reaction of enjoying the words but not enjoying the journey they created, so to speak. Even as I read sentence after beautifully crafted sentence, I found myself thinking, “This story keeps going in all the directions I wish it wouldn’t.” As with other classic nineteenth-century English novels that focus on marriage/money/clergymen (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Barchester Towers), it took more and more time for me to get through each subsequent chapter. So I put the sewn-in cloth bookmark in the place where I’d stopped and put the book back on the shelf, there to collect dust indefinitely.
Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth – stopped after 120 (of 710) pages (17% complete)
Last summer I was strolling through the stacks of the vast university library in the town where I work, and I came across John Barth’s novels. Being a former English major I’d heard his name and his work mentioned dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. Moreover, the concept behind Giles Goat-Boy (university as universe) had always sounded intriguing to me—and now that I was back in a university environment it seemed like the right time to try it out. Unfortunately, a mere 120 pages later I had to give up. The metaphors in this book seem to be the point of the book, rather than being just the structure of the book. The characters aren’t characters so much as ciphers for Barth’s philosophical construct, which was interesting for perhaps the first 50 pages but not so interesting when I realized the narrative wasn’t evolving but simply restating the same basic idea over ad infinitum. Perhaps if I'd read Giles Goat-Boy when it was originally published, in 1966, I would've appreciated it more, as an illustration of the times. But, circa 2010, the characters are not compelling, the story plods along at too slow a pace, and I have several bookcases full of books I'd rather be reading.
Vathek by William Beckford – stopped after 50ish (of 120) pages (40ish% complete)
I can’t even remember how far I tunneled into this one. I say 50 pages but maybe it just felt like 50 pages. It could’ve been 20. With a book this slim, it’s even more embarrassing than normal to say I couldn’t slog through it. So what was the problem? The synopsis makes it sound awesome: “Perverse and grotesque comedy alternates with scenes of 'oriental' magnificence and evocative beauty in the story of the ruthless Caliph Vathek's journey to superb damnation among the subterranean treasures of Eblis. Underlying the elegant prose is a strong element of self-indulgent personal fantasy on the part of Beckford, youthful millionaire, dreamer, and eventually social outcast. Byron, Poe, Mallarmé, and Swinburne are some of the literary figures who have admired Vathek's imaginative power” (this from the back cover of the Oxford World’s Classics edition). As a fan of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, H. P. Lovecraft, and Lord Dunsany, this book seems tailor-made for me.
But the problem is that the prose drones on and on, with hardly any structure and almost no insight into the characters. The entire story skates along the surface of the plot, focusing on the action without exploring it. The book is one long, uninterrupted, monotonous set piece; that’s all. I’ve read that Beckford, only 21 at the time, wrote this book in just three days and, to be frank, I can believe it. Oddly enough, it’s not unlike Kerouac’s On the Road in that it has that agitated, written-on-a-single-roll-of-paper quality about it that works so well for a novel about Beat-era drifters but doesn’t seem to work as well for a book about a ninth-century Middle Eastern caliph seeking supernatural powers. After reading several pages carefully, I started skipping ahead to see if it got any better; this is the only book for which I’ve ever done that. Not surprisingly I just found more of the same, so back on the shelf it went.
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow – stopped after 100ish (of 336) pages (30ish% complete)
Oh how I wish this book were written in prose instead of verse! What a shame that Sharp Teeth’s most distinguishing feature is the thing that eventually forced me to stop reading it. Here is where I fail as a former English major: I cannot enjoy poetry. There’s something about a deliberately broken line that causes my eyes to hiccup. Why the artificial break of a line in a regular novel doesn’t cause this same stutter in my reading, I don’t know. But for as long as I can remember I’ve had this problem reading poetry. You know how teachers instruct their students not to get into that sing-songy rhythm when reading a poem? (As in “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock, duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh,” etc.) I can’t stop reading poems this way—even in my head, and even if they don’t rhyme (which Sharp Teeth doesn’t). The first lines of Barlow’s novel should read like this: “Let’s sing about the man there at the breakfast table: brown skin, thin features, white T, his olive hand making endless circles in the classifieds, ‘wanted’ ‘wanted’ ‘wanted,’ small jobs, little money, but you have to start somewhere.” Nice, right? Lyrical, evocative, brilliant. But because the book uses a verse format I read it as “Let’s sing about the man there [pause] at the breakfast table [pause] brown skin, thin features, white T, [pause] his olive hand making endless circles [pause] in the classifieds, [pause] ‘wanted’ ‘wanted’ ‘wanted’ [pause] small jobs little money [pause] but you have to start somewhere.” So you can see how this would make the book seem much more ponderous that it should be—the exact opposite effect the author’s going for, in fact. Because I found the prose (well, the “prose”) and the characters so compelling I stuck with it for as long as I could. But nearly a third of the way through it started giving me a headache. So I quit. But having given up on this one pains me still. [My boss lent me her copy of this book and I’ve already, full of regret, returned it to her, which is why it’s not in the lineup of shame at the top of this post.]
Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison – stopped after 72 (of 432) pages (17% complete)
I have a hard time with fantasy novels, generally speaking. There are exceptions, of course. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a favorite of mine, and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, if you can even call it fantasy, is probably the best series of books I’ve ever read. But often I find that the basic tropes of fantasy don’t appeal to me, no matter how the author may tweak them.
Moreover, I have never liked the mystery/detective story. I’ve read some Sherlock Holmes, some Agatha Christie, and I didn’t like any of it. Unfortunately, Dead Witch Walking is both these things (i.e., a mystery and an urban fantasy novel). It stars a witch detective living in Cincinnati who works with a mischievous little pixy and a vampire. Much of the action revolves around them running afoul of various other witches and vampires, as well as ghosts, demons, etc., with a little bit of sex thrown in. I dunno. I love a TV show like True Blood (not to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer), which is arguably the same kind of thing, but in book form it just makes me roll my eyes. I realize this is a totally unfair double standard; I cannot explain it. [Incidentally, this was another book lent to me by my boss, thus it doesn’t appear in the photo above either. At some point she’s going to stop lending books to me.]
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem – stopped after 71 (of 271) pages (26% complete)
If Philip K. Dick were alive today, he might’ve written something very much like Gun, with Occasional Music. I’ve never read a non-PKD book more like PKD’s books than this one, and I’m a big PKD fan. So why didn’t I finish it? Honestly, I’m not sure. I bought it off a remainder table in a Washington DC bookstore during the first weekend trip my future wife and I took together. I read the first 71 pages during whatever downtime I found in those few days, but when I got home the book didn’t make it onto my nightstand for some reason. I must have started reading a few other things because by the time I remembered it too much time had passed and I felt that, if I wanted to read the rest of it, I should really start over from the beginning. And who wants to reread part of a book you haven’t even read all the way through? Not me, apparently....
Ooh, this one hurts my heart. And it is the blackest of black marks on my reading life. I’m so ashamed of this that I can’t even believe I’m admitting it. But it’s true. Despite considering DFW one of my favorite writers of all time, I have not finished reading his magnum opus. That’s like claiming David Lynch is my favorite director (he is) but saying I haven’t seen Eraserhead (I have).
What excuse can I possibly provide here that absolves me of this sin? No good one exists, that’s for sure. So allow me to simply explain what happened: In the year 2000 I took a trip to Japan. At that point my only experience with DFW’s work was his flawless A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which remains the greatest nonfiction book I’ve ever read. Knowing ahead of time that it would take hours of uninterrupted concentration to really delve into it, I brought Infinite Jest along with me as my only book for the two 17-hour flights from New York to Tokyo and back. It certainly served its purpose for those flights (taking my mind off the agony of sitting in one constricted seat for nearly an entire day, twice), but it was a disorienting book to read on the most disorienting vacation I’ve ever taken. It will come as no surprise to someone who’s never been to Japan that Japan is nothing like the U.S. Or anywhere in the West, really. Without a doubt one of the most eye-opening trips of my life, but one during which I probably should’ve read Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery or Yamamoto’s Bushido: The Way of the Samurai. But I’d already read those books, and I really wanted to read this DFW novel I’d heard so much about.
When I returned home, Infinite Jest did make it to my nightstand but didn’t get picked back up immediately. Instead, I spent several weeks thinking and reading about what I’d learned in Japan, and by the time I was ready to return to Infinite Jest, I read a few pages but it didn’t feel right. As would happen with Lethem’s Gun, I didn’t want to go backwards but I didn’t feel equipped to go forwards, either. So it sat. And sat. And sat. Finally, I moved it back to the bookshelf. A year later I bought a used copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and read it instead of going back to Infinite Jest. Then I bought and read Oblivion, and The Broom of the System, and Girl with Curious Hair. Then DFW died and I didn’t want to read Infinite Jest. But then I read David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, followed by The Pale King. Now here I am, with nothing to look forward to from Wallace, but something to look back on. I have one last book of his to read. The gargantuan one. The one that, when I’ve finished reading it, will mark not only the pinnacle of my DFW-reading experiences, but will also be the end of my new experiences with DFW’s work. I suppose there may be a few more short stories to surface over the next few years, but they will be things that, I can only assume, he hadn’t planned on publishing, otherwise he would’ve published them already. So Infinite Jest sits, waiting.
Some excuse, huh?
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon– stopped after 113ish (of 760) pages (15ish% complete)
What a slog those 100-some pages were. As with Ulysses (see below), my attempt at reading Gravity’s Rainbow occurred shortly after I’d graduated from college and wanted to maintain my engagement with the “big books” I hadn’t had a chance to read/study as an undergrad.
It turns out I was lucky not to have taken that upper-level class on Pynchon, because Gravity’s Rainbow is a classic example of a book that defies my understanding of it. I would start reading it and, one or two pages later, realize I’d started daydreaming about something else and therefore had not absorbed the material my eyes had just passed over. So I’d go back and try rereading the passage, only to find myself daydreaming again.
Recently, I told a friend (who has read it and whose literary tastes I consider to be trustworthy) about my failure and he said to me, “You know what? It isn’t worth it.”
Well, that made me feel better.
Ulysses by James Joyce – stopped after 51ish (of 783) pages (6% complete)
(Let me preface this section by stating that Joyce’s Dubliners is one of my favorite short-story collections, and “Araby” is in my top 10 favorite stories ever. So I’m not a total heathen.)
A few months after graduating college I landed a job halfway across the country in a place where I didn’t know a single soul. I stuffed my old 1990 Ford Taurus with as many of my belongings as I could, drove to Morgenstern Booksellers where I bought a copy of Ulysses and the June 1995 issue of Rolling Stone, then headed out of town. That 740-mile, two-day trip still lives vividly in my memory, and beginning to read Ulysses sticks out. About a week after I’d arrived and settled in, I remember sitting in a Laundromat with only one other patron, my head stuck in this book. That was the last time I opened those covers. Not long afterwards my reading tastes lashed out by leading me to the nearest Barnes & Noble and forcing me to buy a copy of Peter David’s Q-Squared, which is just about as antithetical to James Joyce as you can get.
The Children of Men by P. D. James – stopped after 143 (of 351) pages (41% complete)
At forty-one-percent complete, this is the runner-up to being the book I read the most of before stopping. In the summer between my junior and senior years of college I worked in the mailroom of my hometown’s newspaper. I packaged and shipped newspapers to readers all over the world who, I presume, had a good reason for reading a paper that reported on news of a region in which they no longer lived. I also delivered these bundles to the post office, sorted the incoming mail, and delivered it upstairs. It was a full-time job, but a job with lots of downtime. My girlfriend at the time lent me several of her books. I read Camus’s The Stranger on my lunchbreaks, as well as a few other short novels. The Children of Men is another one that I started reading whenever I had a few spare moments. I don’t remember why I stopped, to be honest. I’d say because it’s such a bleak novel but surely it’s no more depressing than The Stranger, right? And besides, I like bleak books. Nineteen Eighty-Four is still one of my favorites. So it’s hard to say why I never finished The Children of Men.
I did see the movie, though—so I finally got to find out how it ends. What a gut-punch!
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice – stopped after who knows how many (of 352) pages
My older sister, like my boss, loves these trashy supernatural thriller/romances. When I was a senior in high school she kept hounding me to try these stupid Anne Rice books. I do remember I got pretty far into this first one (probably close to 100 pages or so), but just could not find anything worthwhile in it. When I returned it to her with the news that I couldn’t finish it, she told me she probably should’ve had me read The Vampire Lestat first instead. To which I replied, “Yeah, well, too late now!”
Fortunately, years later, she and I bonded, book-wise, over our mutual adoration of Raymond Carver and John Updike, so our familial tie wasn’t torn irrevocably asunder.
On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony – 220 (of 303) pages (73% complete)
The book that taught me I don’t like urban fantasy novels (a lesson I apparently forgot when my boss offered to lend Dead Witch Walking to me). This one also takes the prize for book I read the most of before quitting. I got 73 percent of the way and then just stopped? Really? Honestly I’m kind of dumbfounded. I couldn’t bother to rip through those final 80 pages? What, exactly, was I doing in high school that was so important that it kept me from finishing a book I was so close to finishing? I can’t recall. But it probably involved a girl.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – 527 (of 1359) pages (39% complete)
The Hobbit? Awesome. The Fellowship of the Ring? Umm, not as fun. To my 13-year-old self, anyway. Too much wandering around, too much talking about things, and, most of all, too much in the way of food description. I understand that many Tolkien scholars consider The Hobbit to be an inferior, indeed juvenile tale within Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga, but I disagree. It may not be imbued with the gravitas of Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom or the pathos of Sméagol’s tragic fall from grace, but it is a well-told story with eminently entertaining characters and nail-biting episodes.
Anyway, that’s pretty much what I’d been expecting when I began The Lord of the Rings, not grim talk of an evil power to the southeast, political maneuverings among various pissed-off humans, and lots of sumptuous feasts. So although I did finish reading The Fellowship of the Ring, I never did start reading The Two Towers. This is one of those books I’m sure I’d love now, but with Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth firmly entrenched in my brain I don’t see the point, really.
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy – 69 (of 267) pages (26% complete)
Have you seen the 1982 BBC production of The Scarlet Pimpernel starring Anthony Andrews, Ian McKellen, and Jane Seymour? It’s fantastic. My dad, my brother, and I watched it when it aired on PBS all those years ago and my dad taped it on our first (top-loading, 30-pound) VCR so that we could watch it again and again (which we did). My dad also had an old hardback copy of the novel, so after having seen the movie, oh I don’t know, a half-dozen times or more, I decided to read it.
As you might expect, the story in the book is not entirely like the story in the movie. Sir Percy Blakeney’s relationship with his wife, Marguerite, is far more strained in the book. And there’s something about Anthony Andrews’s performance (not to mention Ian McKellen’s!) that cannot be matched by the Baroness’s writing. Perhaps that’s a blasphemous thing for an avid reader to say, but I don’t think the Baroness’s prose is particularly good. It’s just an adventure story, really—nothing more (though historically important, of course, as a precursor to Zorro, Batman, etc.).
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott – 91 (of 497) pages (18% complete)
Have you seen the 1982 BBC production of Ivanhoe starring Anthony Andrews, James Mason, Sam Neill, and Olivia Hussey? It’s fantastic. My dad, my brother, and I watched it when it aired on PBS all those years ago and my dad taped it on our first (top-loading, 30-pound) VCR so that we could watch it again and again (which we did). My dad also had an old paperback copy of the novel, so after having seen the movie, oh I don’t know, a half-dozen times or more, I decided to read it.
Did you notice that the above paragraph reads pretty much identical to my first paragraph about The Scarlet Pimpernel? It does, but that’s because it’s basically the same setup. The movie made such an impression on me (and turned me into a lifelong, devoted fan of Anthony Andrews, James Mason, and Sam Neill) that I had to read the book. Or so I thought. Sir Walter Scott was the most popular novelist of his day (and the world’s first living celebrity author), but that day has gone. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that his prose hasn’t quite stood the test of time.
So, what books have you failed to finish?
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