Snap judging a book and deciding not to continue after a few pages - C/D

Just did this with two new books.

First I tried Gommorah by Roberto Saviano. The opening chapter had so many awful metaphors and bad sentence fragments that I just couldn't make myself read it.

Then I picked up ZZ Packer's collection, and the first story was just so full of cliches - white kids seem foreign, are associated with disney characters, have complexion like certain ice cream flavors, teacher with jewish name has weird luxury object that seems strange to black kids, gee I wonder if some kind of encounter is coming that will add to the complexity of the characters' understanding?

Do books necessarily deserve more of a chance than this?

I've read more than 100 pages of The Golden Bowl THREE TIMES and have given up every time.

Oh man, that happens to me with every Henry James novel I try to read.

are associated with disney characters, have complexion like certain ice cream flavors, teacher with jewish name has weird luxury object that seems strange to black kids

these are cliches?!

seriously... the ice cream thing??

it is really difficult for me to actually give up on a book though my dad when I was very young told me to never hesitate to put a book down and get a better one if the one I'm reading isn't working for me

the information stuck with me but I think I am more Catholic than my dad and feel obligated once I've started to read until it's either done or I absolutely can't stand it any more

these are cliches?!

seriously... the ice cream thing??

― max, Monday, July 5, 2010 11:23 PM Bookmark

The disney thing for sure. The ice cream thing maybe not specifically but the broader schtick of subversively showing white people as the other through black people's eyes, at least as an end in itself, struck me as tired.

henry james is a bit rough going until you get used to the strange rhythm of his prose (thinking esp. his last 3 novels)takes 50-200 pages depending...

what james is the easiest to get into?

I read about 400 of Wings of the Dove and gave up in frustration too (this is coming from someone who loves "difficult" prose). OTOH I read Washington Square rather quickly and really enjoyed it.

I hear Turn of the Screw is pretty accessible too.

i get more like this the older i get i think. in spite of friends' raves i put down 'the savage detectives' about a third of the way through once i was like 'man, i just cannot make myself care about a single person in this book'

do people who do this also tend to walk out of movies more? (i almost never do)

yeah pretty rare for me to walk out of a movie, but I guess the obvious difference is time commitment.

If 2666 was any indication, you weren't missing much by not finishing Savage Detectives. The former was a stylistic mess that attempted to be brutal but instead just desensitizes the reader. The only decent parts were when he references older, far superior authors like Canetti and Grass.

I don't walk out of movies (cause I hardly ever go) but I'll stop watching a dvd for sure

i turn off movies and put down books all the time. i usually keep in mind, though, that later i may be in the mood for a book that i've previously put down; i don't really think of it as a damning judgement.

Yeah I see my not being able to finish James as more my failing than his.

i officially don't think there's anything wrong with doing this, but i am mad at you for snap judging zz packer, so maybe i'm kind of lying.

I do this w/ library books all the time. It feels so decadent w/o actually being decadent.

With Henry James, go with 'Washington Square', 'The Europeans' or 'The Spoils of Poynton'. If you can't finish one of them, then he is not going to ever be your thing.

does 100 pages of a book count as a snap judgement? cuz that's usually how long i give a book

I say classic. The opening sentence/image/page/chapter is so obviously an important thing to get right, and an opportunity to intrigue the reader, that failure here is a pretty big hint that it's not going to be worth plodding on.

What's the latest you've done this? I abandoned The Great Railway Bazaar about a decade ago well over three-quarters of the way through - though I did always mean to go back to it, in fairness.

I read about 400 of Wings of the Dove and gave up in frustration too (this is coming from someone who loves "difficult" prose). OTOH I read Washington Square rather quickly and really enjoyed it.

― Ciudad Warez (corey), Monday, July 5, 2010 11:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

James's last three novels are notoriously difficult to get through, so I wouldn't necessarily call it a failure - just maybe you need to work your way up to it through the James oeuvre

I did this with Clockers and The Corner, btw

Think I was over halfway through Vineland when I suddenly realised I didn't have a fucking notion what was going on. I mean as well as being generally clueless about characters, motivations, plot, there had been a flashback or hallucination episode about 60 pages back and I didn't even know if it had ended or not.

haha i had the exact same thing happen w/ gravity's rainbow

yeah I think that happened w/ gravity's rainbow w/ me too. all I remember is something about stunt glass being made of candy or something. then again I was like 15 when I tried, I would be better off trying to read it now I think.

i love james but i wouldn't recommend you go anywhere near 'The Europeans', which is really quite poor. "washington square' is a good starting point.

anyway i do this quite a lot and i think it's quite easy to tell the difference between a style that takes a while for you to settle into or click with and writing that is not for you or just plain bad. i recently stopped andre aciman's "call me by your name" and colm toibin's "brooklyn" after 40 or so pages. the aciman was horribly precious and toibin's writing was hideous to me.

generally if I get properly into a book (a hundred pages in or so) I'll finish just out of sheer stubbornness. I refuse to let it beat me. I remember, though, reading Naked Lunch when I was about 18 and stopping 3/4 of the way through because I didn't have the slightest grasp of it.

I'm v. happy to give up on something in the first couple of pages though, usually because it feels like it's jarring with my current headspace and as such will just take me ages to get through - because it's the-thing-I'm-reading if I ever think "now I'm going to read something" I'll remember that that book I don't want to read is the-thing-I'm-reading and watch TV or something instead. More of a problem with my reading mentality than anything, but whatyagonnado.

(this is all WRT fiction, with non-fiction I'm generally happy to give up whenever.)

Read 7/8 of both Mao II and White Noise. Liked WN fine, meant to come back to it, but had absolutely no urge to pick it up.

If I had my time over I wouldn't struggle to the end of A Confederacy of Dunces.

^^^^ truth bomb

i think i read about 8 tenths of the Illuminatus! Trilogy a few years ago and stopped dead short of the end.

when i was in high school my dad gave me Atlas Shrugged and said "tbh i never finished this, everyone always gets to the long speech at the end and stops." i was like "i'll show you" and read the fuck out of that book for weeks and weeks, until i got to the speech and was very smug and self-congratulatory about it. then i got bored and never finished it.

also as a shy bookish type i rarely attracted male attention, but the month i spent reading Atlas Shrugged at school brought out ALL the junior libertarians.

People say the same about the musings at the end of War And Peace, but I thought they were great.

8 tenths??

I've said this before, but quitting any Ian McEwan book ten pages from the end would be the best way to read him.

OTM!

although i thought Chesel Beach was the first one since the very early gays with an ending that was good.

Boswell's Life Of Johnson is one of those books I started with enthusiasm, never totally lost interest, but put down about halfway through because there were so many other books demanding my attention. it seemed a waste of my brainspace to slog through more minutiae about Dr. Johnson's kind affection for Dr. Gurney who lately lost his wife & Mr. Garrick who got a scathing review.

I have an obsessive tendency to read every single passage I come across, no matter how mundane, even when the book is nonfiction and I'd be better off just reading the bits that interest/edify me. it's easier for me to stop a book halfway through and never pick it up again than it is for me to skip a chapter here or there but loosely read it from start to finish. in principle I know the latter is a much better use of time, but obsessive habits are hard to break.

Dr. Johnson, fwiw, wasn't very fond of reading tiresome books from cover to cover:

In the morning of Tuesday, June 15, while we sat at Dr. Adams's, we talked of a printed letter from the Reverend Herbert Croft, to a young gentleman who had been his pupil, in which he advised him to read to the end of whatever books he should begin to read. JOHNSON. 'This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?

<3 Johnson so much

nice

life of johnson worth reading, or are my big quotation dictionaries covering most of what i need to know of the good dr's greatest hits?

Dr J so otm.

My latest bad habit is skimming non-fiction once I realise there probably isn't much in it for me - just scanning each page to find out if there's something worth slowing down for.

Johnson OTM indeed. Although I can't think of many books I've done this with - I did look through a friend's copy of The Da Vinci Code and decide it was not worth my time, but that wasn't something I had actually tried to start.

i love james but i wouldn't recommend you go anywhere near 'The Europeans', which is really quite poor. "washington square' is a good starting point.

You're OTM re Washington Square: I usually recommend to James newbies. But The Europeans is a delight. Most of his short novels are.

life of johnson worth reading, or are my big quotation dictionaries covering most of what i need to know of the good dr's greatest hits?

eh, it's very, very exhaustive. Boswell obviously wasn't around to document 100% of Johnson's life, so he tried to fill in the gaps by enclosing letters to and from Johnson, recollections from acquaintances, references to unattributed writings believed to be Johnson's, etc. ...so it gets fairly dry and encyclopedic at times, and the best, most lively bits are the transcriptions of Johnson's conversations as Boswell witnessed them. I'd recommend getting an unabridged copy and just reading the passages that catch your interest.

Hester Thrale's biography of Johnson is heavier on bon mots and lighter on detailed biographical info, so I'd definitely recommend it as a much shorter read.

(xposts - unreg otm)

idk about the life, Darragh - it's a curious (stalkerish?) and important book, and it isn't all about the standard one-liners - conversational Johnson is forever throwing out neatly formed opinions, apercus, arguments, challops, etc. But it's a long haul, and it can drag a bit if you aren't interested in the man or the period. I like reading Johnson himself more, tbh.

http://thecia.com.au/reviews/g/images/good-advice-poster-0.jpg

thankig u guys, i will not dive into boswell it sounds too heavy for me.

Washington Square was also the first James novel I read, and remains one of my favourites - have never understood why James didn't include it in the New York Edition (Jed will be pleased to hear HJ didn't rate The Europeans, either - it's def one of his slightest works - some of the 'comedy' reminds me of Wodehouse! - but prefer it Daisy Miller, one of the few James short stories that have dated rather badly.) In general, James is best read in order, and I often think the opening chapters of his books are the weakest/toughest part - this is especially true of Portrait of a Lady, tho that is def. one novel that is worth sticking w/ (I'm remember reading abt someone finding the following handwritten annotation on their copy of Portrait - "This is where I gave up"!)

The Portrait of a Lady is my favorite novel of all time, but the opening chapter is some twee bullshit.

This was the exact passage that made me stop Gommorah:

"You have to reconfigure your imagination to understand the port of Naples as the bottom rung of the ladder of Chinese production. The biblical image seems appropriate; the eye of the needle is the port, and the camel that has to pass through it our the ships. Enormous vessels line up single file out in the gulf and await their turn amid the confusion of pitching sterns and colliding bows; rumbling with heavy iron, the sheet metal and screws slowly penetrate the tiny Neapolitan opening. It is as if the anus of the sea were opening out, causing great pain to the sphincter muscles."

prefer chicken of the sea tbh

If I had my time over I wouldn't struggle to the end of A Confederacy of Dunces.

― postcards from the (ledge), Tuesday, July 6, 2010 11:16 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
^^^^ truth bomb

― like a ◴ ◷ ◶ (dyao), Tuesday, July 6, 2010 11:21 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

OMG, yes.

My mother (a librarian) always told me I couldn't get another book unless I'd read at least three chapters of the current one. If I then decided against it, she'd let me pick up another.

Now, I pre-plan my reading so obsessively that it's unlikely I'll start a book without having at least read a decent review of it and usually the first page or so on Amazon if possible. So: DUD.

ha i like that passage hurting! its a pulpy true-crime novel right?

"the chinese are fuckin us in the ass am i right fellas"

"by which i mean the anus of the sea is opening out, causing great pain to the sphincter muscles"

It's actually a journalistic expose of Neapolitan organized crime. I mean I just don't understand what he means by any of those sentences. An Italian port is the bottom rung of a ladder of Chinese production? Fitting ships through a port is as hard as a camel passing through the eye of a needle?

Could be translation, I guess.

eh i dunno its kind of weird and florid and fun. its not "great writing" and i can see being turned off if youre expecting something more journalistic.

Yeah, I just felt like the first few pages were a great big fail of a scene-setting. The writing seemed ineffective at conveying both the physical presence/atmosphere of the port and the importance of it.

It's actually a journalistic expose of Neapolitan organized crime. I mean I just don't understand what he means by any of those sentences. An Italian port is the bottom rung of a ladder of Chinese production? Fitting ships through a port is as hard as a camel passing through the eye of a needle?

― surfer blood for oil (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 6 July 2010 15:48 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think he says in that passage or nearby that something like 2/3rds of the goods imported to europe (i'm making the figure up, but it's the sort of number that makes you think, "really, that much?") come through naples so i think he's trying to capture how overloaded the port is - same point with the link to chinese production, this is where it all ends up. it leads on to a great discussion about how intertwined organised crime and regular commerce are, and i think it's worth perservering. the style is a bit overwrought but saviano takes the mafia kind of personally and i kind of like that he has his own eccentric voice.

I was enjoying that Gomorrah passage well enough until the last sentence, at which point oyyyyyyy. I would be tempted to leave it at that too.

what the hell is wrong with A Confederacy of Dunces you guys? I've now heard from about ten people who've given up on it. While I can't remember a great deal from it I do remember that it was a breezy read all the way through.

I've whinged about it here before so at the risk of repeating myself... perhaps I just don't like comedy of the grotesque but the characters and situations were all utterly unpleasant and implausible.

I mean if you like reading about horrible people being horrible to each other perhaps you might find it 'breezy', to me it was just uncomfortable and hence difficult from start to finish.

I mean if you like reading about horrible people being horrible to each other

Lady Gaga thread

Canetti's Auto-da-Fé fits that description and it's a masterpiece. I own but haven't read the Toole.

ha, I think I was a more unpleasantly antisocial person back when I read it, so perhaps it wouldn't be quite so breezy now.

I did this with Clockers and The Corner, btw

― like a ◴ ◷ ◶ (dyao), Tuesday, July 6, 2010 4:04 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

finish the corner, it's amazing!

Re: Confederacy of Dunces, ledge's first point about unpleasantness and implausability is nearer to how I feel about it. I've read plenty of excellent books about horrible people being horrible to each other, but they were, you know, well written and interesting. As much as I disagree with the notion that you need to 'identify with' central characters in order to enjoy a book, I just didn't find anything redeeming or even interesting in any of them - just cartoonish and boring.

I think I was a more unpleasantly antisocial person back when

the illusion of progress, a lethal drug imo

fack orf ya wank.

^ pleasantly social

this is obv completely reasonable and kinda necessary but some of the book that ppl are giving up on are making me super sad & angry

I am reading Bernhard's Old Masters and its one guy being horrible about everyone and (nearly) everything but hey its funny!

I wish I did more of this but I'm of a persevering type, and then most of the books I read are fairly short.

Haven't even started on a Henry James novel because I am afraid of not being able to finish.

I usually tend to slog through books rather than stop midway through them. The main exceptions being Kafka's Trial and The Castle which I've started about three times each before finishing them. But lately I've felt that there was no reason I should slog through boring books, honestly most of those I struggled to finish never turned out to be better after the 150- 200- 250- whatever- page mark. Which is why I'm probably gonna drop Last Exit to Brooklyn soon I guess.

xpost Wash. Sq. is less than 200 pages long IIRC.

If you're struggling to finish something it's not worth it, but I have stopped a book out of frustration and come back to it a year later to find I really enjoy it (Ulysses).

i remember reading a part abt this in doris lessing's preface to the golden notebook & her opinion felt quite liberating bc i always felt an obligation to read anything i started to its end.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

it didn't change anything, really—i can't think of a book i've thrown aside—but at least it seems like a valid thing to do now. most of the stuff i read are classics or got good reviews or are word of mouth recommendations so i think that's where the sense of obligation comes from. perhaps i should be more freewheeling with my choices like she advocates above.

can't wait till i finish college and can stop reading shit books by illiterate academics

Ok I restarted Gommorah for lack of anything better to read on the subway commute right now. It gets a little better once the author puts himself into it. He seems to have a fascination with bodily functions, but I'm beginning to think maybe that works well for the subject.

The book I most regret not finishing is J.R. by William Gaddis. I really was enjoying it but it was a fairly hard read and it was rare that I had enough concentration to give it the focus it needed (whole thing is written in unattributed dialogue and the scene will change in mid-paragraph without warning).

^^^one of my favorite books ever

Any tips? Did you just read it really slowly? Is it useful to maybe keep track of characters on paper?

read it fast, and don't worry about "understanding" everything. it's meant to be read in a mad dash. at times, when people are talking past one another, all you're supposed to gather from a scene is the confusion and humor that comes from 2-7 people talking with each other at once, none of them listening to the other.

here's a nice scene outline, too: http://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/index.shtml

yeah maybe that's what I need to do. It just seemed like there were subtle jokes in almost every line and I didn't want to miss anything.

That book is exhausting. It took me forever to get through because of the emotional and intellectual drain - I kept having to put it down. But yeah, one of my all-time faves, and so so worth reading to the end.

I've only read The Recognitions but oh man those party scenes are hilarious (going for the same satire as Proust, but funnier just because it feels more contemporary).

And slooow and dense but the quicker you read it the quicker you'll be able to pick it up again for a reread.

Agree that the best way to manage JR is at a fair crack - I think the voices become clearer when you're immersed, and the flow of it takes you a bit. It's near-impossible to catch everything, and wld end up feeling dutiful labour to me - a shame with such a funny and alive novel. I'd like to re-read - there's a world in there.

I did this with Clockers and The Corner, btw

― like a ◴ ◷ ◶ (dyao), Tuesday, July 6, 2010 4:04 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

The first 30 or so pages of Clockers are by far the best. The stuff with Rocco pining for the movie actor later on is pretty good, but that first fucking thirty pages.

Just dropped a novel by a writer who came highly recommended after maybe 50 pages of poorly-kerned noir-isms. More pissed off about the piss-poor page layour than the tired writing.