It has been well-established that I like to read - and read a lot. However, part of the nature of being a voracious reader is, of course, trying to get through books you don't like. Well, my philosophy has always been... DON'T. If I'm not liking it, to the point where I can't finish it, I don't. That's not to say that I don't read and finish books that aren't good, that I really don't like (Robert Parker, I'm talking to you...). But we - and I, especially - have dealt with those books that for whatever reason we just can't push ourselves to complete. Most of the time for me it's because I'm reading other things or I have too many other books that are available to read. Sometimes, too, I just can't get into a book - the characters, the writing style... whatever it is, it's bothersome. Most of the time, it's a modernist work that I just finf annoying, too dense or overwritten. Just as often, it's a work by an author I like - or who has works that I've read and enjoyed!
Well, after much ado, here is a list of the books over the course of the last... oh, say, three years or so... that I wasn't able to finish. Some of them I got about halfway through, most of them far less than that. Who knows? Maybe you fight this list as interesting, as amusing or telling, as the list of books I have read over the same period of time:
- A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
- The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (twice!)
- The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
- The Women, T.C. Boyle
- Sanctuary, William Faulkner
- Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
- So Much For That, Lionel Shriver
- We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
- Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
- I, Claudius, Robert Graves
- An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
- Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
- Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
- Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst
- In One Person, John Irving
- Memories of the Ford Administration, John Updike
- Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
- The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
- A Great Deliverance, Elizabeth George
- The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin
- Nostromo, Joseph Conrad (twice!)
- The Bronze Horseman, Paulina Simons
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
- On the Road, Jack Kerouac
- Ten Days in the Hills, Jane Smiley
- La Brava, Elmore Leonard
- Quentins, Maeve Binchy
- The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
- Field Gray, Phillip Kerr
- I'd Know You Anywhere, Laura Lippman
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
- Hollywood Station, Joseph Wambaugh
- Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
- The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
- Beloved, Toni Morrison
- Falconer, John Cheever
- Loving, Henry Green
- A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
- The Terrorist, John Updike
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carre
- Case Histories, Kate Atkinson
I could probably summon up a few more, and I might occasionally update or, if I'm in a forgiving mood, cross some titles off this list if I feel like giving them a second chance.
Do you think I should have stuck with any of these?
0 comments:
Post a Comment