Literary Everests!!!

One book I really had to force myself through was "Daniel Deronda", and since then I've decided that life's too short to force myself through books I'm not enjoying. So I declared at about one and a half pages with Finnegans Wake, and not much more of Paradise Lost, Humphrey Clinker, Tristram Shandy, and The Waves.

That's about 2000 pages of Proust so far. And nothing of note has happened yet.

Every now and then I take stabs at parts of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I used to want to read the whole thing, but that would mainly be to say that I did it, I think (I do genuinely like it, but the whole thing would be a bit masochistic).

I don't climb mountains, I climb books.

But I have read both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, as well as some of the Aopcrypha! Now that's kind of an achievement, considering some of the deadly boring stuff in Numbers and the Letters of Paul.

Exeunt

(Gesundheit)

MikeyG: Be careful with those Proust books - they start to hurt after a while.

Heh heh. Yeah, the nemesis of that ball-breaking essay I have to write for work before I can get back to the play, the novel... oh yeah, and that story about the apocalypse I'm supposed to be doing this week too... damn, I just want to lock myself in my room with my spook pop n' never come out. I guess I'm currently, like, at base camp one on a mountain that's much shorter than Everest but it's isolated, dark, and battered by icy 60-mile-an-hour winds all day. They go down to 40 by night, so I have to decide between climbing in higher winds or groping for handholds that I can barely see at all.

But I did read all of Zola's Nana in the original French. There's that -- do we get spotted a couple hundred paginas for foreign-language hills? I've read Jane Eyre twice! I deserve to live!

-- Ann Sterzinger (asterzinge...), January 13th, 2004.

I liked The Island of the Day Before, and I'm digging Baudolino, but of course not as much as Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Baudolino is all about Baudrillard, really, and I'm really interested in time, which is why I liked Island. Certainly not his best work, though.

But the ultimate "I can't believe I made it through it" book was Updike's The Witches of Eastwick, which was far more boring than anything even Samuel Richardson could imagine.

gravity's rainbow was on my own, and it actually took me a few years. i kept making it halfway through and losing the mood. then i took a trip through israel, and something about actually being in a "zone", with barbed wire fences and soldiers and tanks on the streets made it click ... of course when i got home i picked up a couple of books on gravity's rainbow ... lots of the pynchon scholarship is by US scholars from the 60s so it's not terribly cutting edge anymore (and therefore understandable to a layman like myself)

Definitley worth the effort. The third book is a little bit off, though, but then Peake was going through some serious health issues when we wrote it.

I read the first two books and stopped because it just seemed so perfect I couldn't imagine going on from there. Should I read the third?

I was 13!

It depends; you find out a great deal more about Titus as a character, but the prose in no way resembles the first two books (Peake had a degenerative neurological condition), and the third book is actually a first draft made readable by Peake's wife and a long time friend/editor.

I've read A Suitable Boy, which isn't difficult, just long, and mostly not worth it.

I dunno, I've read a lot of books like Alphabetical Africa that many people wouldn't have the patience for.

I gave J.R. to a significant other, and was told it's one of the best books he'd ever read. I've not read it, though.

I raced through The Crimson Petal and the White over a weekend, if that counts for anything.

The White Nile and The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead.

And I've read every (and memorized many) Calvin and Hobbes collection that I've managed to track down.

Hey now, Ulysses makes plenty of sense.