Books you can't finish

Dan Perry in BEING on receiving end of offensiveness shocker!

I seem to not be able to finish Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night, which is a bummer because it's realtively short.

and ulysses haha

For me: Infinite Jest. I've tried twice now but to no avail. I've enjoyed some things Wallace has written (esp. the essays), but the first 80 pages of IJ simply haven't compelled me enough. (The self-importance and cleverness are pretty annoying, too.)

On the other hand, I LOVE Underworld. One of my favorite books.

did manage to finish that on sunday in fact (though you shouldn't ask how much i understand). it took me a month and chapter 14 nearly 'broke' me but I enjoyed most of it (kind of like listening to 'difficult' music for the first time, there's a readjustment period there i think).

I haven't finished crime and punishment bcz i was pretty bored by it but i might try that again someday.

In fact, Kerouac's style is one that I find kinda pleasing-yet-uninspiring. Like watching a sitcom cuz it's "the only thing on" and there's that one guy that says something funny once in awhile.

Dan, have you ever read Ellison's Invisible Man? It made me a little uncomfortable to read it...

Offensive, though not necessarily Deeply.

The Trial - too depressing

The Crying of Lot 49 - the print was way too small

Dharma Bums is great, Kerouac's best book in my opinion.

well don't you think kafka is exaggerating things a bit for it to be depressing. The trial is really wonderful.

The only one I stopped reading purposefully was Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It was such a superficial load of greed-justification spit out by one-dimensional characters that I am pretty sure that I cursed and threw it across the room in disgust when I reached the end of the first part.

*In my mature phase at least.

Julio, chapter 14 of Ulysses is Cyclops right? The trick there is to read aloud the big honking catalogues, makes them considerably more bearable.

Not only did I read that, I loved it.

Either I have a filter on how I read books depicting the indignities of my "forefathers" when written by black people as opposed to white people or a lot of white authors can't write about the subject dehumanizing the people who suffered. (I strongly suspect some combination of the two is at work.)

I remember asking the teacher who assigned me to read Invisible Man (who is a black woman) if I could read something else, cuz it was making me feel a little irked (it was still an earlier part in the book), and she said "no, this is something you need to read". I think she was right. By the time it was done though, so much had occurred in the story that the earlier scenes that had made me feel uncomfortable seemed like long distant memories.

Honestly, I believe a little of my discomfort in reading that one was that I (obviously) was reading it from a white-person perspective; which I think is one reason she (the teacher) was so serious about me reading it, like she wanted to sorta cross-pollinate the students with things they might not have gotten around to appreciating through their usual social directives. In that same semester, she also had me read/write about Native Son and Othello. (fwiw, it was one of the only classes I ever got an A in)

I hear you Dan, although sometimes I like to read virulently offensive stuff out of a sense of keeping on my toes, or knowing my enemies, or some other bad rationalization on my part. I mean, I think there's a big difference between V. and, say, The Turner Diaries, but I can definitely see how you'd find the former offensive.

*shrinks away and tries to get Dan not to notice that the handle hstencil comes from V.*

**fails miserably**

I couldn't finish Nausea, V, or (yet, but there's still hope!) Gravity's Rainbow.

Still have never been able to finish Huckleberry Finn...and as I muttered in a chat earlier today, tried to read A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius and couldn't get past the first few pages.

well yeah, and that. kafka is fucking funny to me.

I don't know if we've gone over this stuff in another thread, but I think it's pretty fascinating right now, for some reason (that reason more than likely being my complete boredom at "work" right now).

Oxen of the sun.

Someone should try to read Ulysses on Bloomsday. When I read it back in 1997, that was the day I started on.

of these, i think proust is probably worth returning to and i hope to.......one day!

I mean back in 91, it was already a standard joke on Usenet that all copies of Gravity's Rainbow were blank past page 100 to save on printing costs.

Franny & Zooey-I tried to have a Salinger x-mas a couple of years ago by reading both this and "Catcher..." I got the through the latter alright but had to go back to school after 40 pages of this, and haven't picked it up since. A shame, cause I liked what I read so far.

It is a 'difficult' book on first read tho'.

I do actually want to get round to some pynchon but we'll see.

I think it's sort of slow going at the beginning. I read about 100 pages, then set it aside for six months before finishing it. But actually, even then, I enjoyed it while I was reading it but never felt eager to pick it up once I'd set it down.

The grandpa in me wants to say that it's a hipster coolathon where people try to out-obscure each other and these books which are essentially unreadable get this cache far beyond their actual worth. I consider myself a pretty sharp guy, but trying to get through a lot of the books mentioned on this thread (and I realize now I've already put down V, too, without remembering) is pretty tough. In general I have very little use for prose that is wilfully dense to the point of not being able to extract meaning out of it, but I certainly understand the perverse appeal of trying to do so, having been a pretentious fuck at one point in my career.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Jose Saramago's Blindness yet...it seemed to be all the rage around here for forever, but it was so fucking hard to decipher in places I almost gave up several times...I mean, what the fuck, is it REALLY that hard to find the quotation mark? Books where you have to struggle to figure out what's speech and what's text are my biggest peeve.

Books where you have to struggle to figure out what's speech and what's text are my biggest peeve.

So it sounds like Sean is out.

BTW, Bryan would like you all to know that I'm STILL pretentious.

granpaw crudders would hate MBV, sonic youth and all that 'pretentious' stuff too.

I like the idea of just rereading books to extract 'meaning' out of them. The thing abt returning to a book again and again bcz you'll find more there.

I find a very fundamental difference between music and books in that regard--with music I very much like sound for sound's sake even if it doesn't obviously "mean" something. Trying to read a 400-page book where I'm not taking anything away is much more frustrating, no matter how beautifully-written it is. I mean, why read it in order then? Wouldn't it make as much sense to just flip it open at random?

Also, I'm nuts about Blindness, though I can see how Saramago's punctuation might be a little off-putting. I however love it.

Again, let me make it v v clear that I'm not disparaging anyone else's right to read and enjoy them, nor am I saying that these books are worthless, bad, or a waste of time/paper/what have you in the GENERAL sense, even if I consider them a waste of MY time.

It was the first Eco book I read and couldn't get through it on the first try also. Really like it now.

I forget the number of times I tried to read Dhalgren - I did eventually get through it, but I feel like I missed something.

i do think there's a similarity, in that because we digest so much music, we don't consider listening to a difficult album to be any kind of a stretch or waste of time. if we were the kind of person who reads a couple hundred pages every day, though (and these people exist, i swear) would they be as hesitant to tackle something like V? do they ever put down books? i just think that it's a question of whether you are fundamentally about music more than literature, or vice versa.

never tried FW but yeah I was thinking of cecil taylor unit when reading stuff like 'ulysses' actually.

I've struggled with Faulkner's work of all writers - I don't think I've finished any of his stuff (though I've only tried two or three titles). And I never did finish On the Road, though my excuse is that my copy was mis-printed and the middle and end of the book was just assorted pages from the first third or so - I bought a new copy, but never did crack the spine.