what are you reading?

[Roscoe]

Melville's PIERRE OR THE AMBIGUITIES -- hoo boy.

[brian d]

Melville's PIERRE OR THE AMBIGUITIES -- hoo boy.

[kanafani]

[wba]

Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto and a book on the making of Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day by Petros Markaris

[nrh]

shoji shimada's murder in the crooked house. of course a book by the writer of the famously byzantine locked room mystery tokyo zodiac murders wouldn't disappoint. are there already multiple diagrams in the first 30 pages? of course there are!

[arkheia]

shoji shimada's murder in the crooked house. of course a book by the writer of the famously byzantine locked room mystery tokyo zodiac murders wouldn't disappoint. are there already multiple diagrams in the first 30 pages? of course there are!

oohh, this looks promising. I hadn't heard of Shimada before but I've been looking for a good mystery lately so I'll try to track this one down.

[kanafani]

[karl]

[wba]

another try with L'homme facile (1969) by Catherine Breillat, the book she wrote when she was 17.
This time it's a little bit easier for me to read and understand, though still an extremely esoteric text I can't really wrap my head around.

[arkheia]

Just got my copy in the mail, very eager to dive into it.

[sally]

i'm reading the golden notebook. i've not read lessing before. on the evidence so far i won't be going back. but she's coming after the blistering enjoyment i had with aragon's paris peasant. (1920's french, oh i have been devouring that cinema, so maybe i synchronised some echoes into joy...)

i think i read somewhere the other day that someone had compiled a list of all the films kafka said he'd seen, and now i have a conceit that if it so suits me, i'll watch if poss what was in the air of the period during which the book i happen to be reading was written. except not now because i'm reading 62 and watching silents.

[wba]

Red Room (1879) by August Strindberg

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

i think i read somewhere the other day that someone had compiled a list of all the films kafka said he'd seen

indeed, there's even a DVD release on the theme! https://www.edition-filmmuseum.com/prod ... ovies.html It wouldn't work in my Region 1 DVD player though, grrr...

[brian d]

i'm reading the golden notebook. i've not read lessing before. on the evidence so far i won't be going back. but she's coming after the blistering enjoyment i had with aragon's paris peasant. (1920's french, oh i have been devouring that cinema, so maybe i synchronised some echoes into joy....

i gave up on the golden notebook very shortly after starting the golden notebook. maybe it gets better? I wouldn’t know. but paris peasant is spectacular one of the very best surrealist novels.

[nrh]

paris peasant is by a pretty wide margin the best surrealist novel i've read.

on the second of ricardo piglia's emilio renzi diaries, the happy years. lots of fascinating things going on here but i also just find this period of argentine literature fascinating.

[sally]

i'm not sure why i'd never gotten around to paris peasant, probably because of the surrealist tag (can get a bit much) but if anything it was anti-surrealist. i am, at least, also delighted to be an inkwell at times.

but mainly i've come here to share my shame, i've given up on the golden notebook. i've only ever before given up on the glass bead game and some interminable zinoviez so it's rather a significant failure.

on the plus, i took down the next book along the shelf from the now accusatory mouth of the lessing gap, and discovered that herbert read's the green child was published in 1935! it's fate! so i'm reading that in the hope that my bookshelves stop shouting at me.

[kanafani]

1857152875.jpg (41.42 KiB) Viewed 4467 times

My original plan was to read the whole thing, but it's a dense 1,500+ pages, so there is no way that is happening. Just reading the first novel (The Tales of Jacob) for now.

[Roscoe]

THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. Le Guin. Enjoyable overall.

[brian d]

but mainly i've come here to share my shame, i've given up on the golden notebook. i've only ever before given up on the glass bead game and some interminable zinoviez so it's rather a significant failure.

there’s no shame in that. i give up on books quite a bit. i’ve even started giving up on movies more often, but i feel less bad about that. i was thinking about reading the glass bead game at some point, might need to check more information about it.

[mesnalty]

I love both The Glass Bead Game and The Golden Notebook, but then I haven't read the former since high school and the latter since soon afterwards.

[sally]

yeah, i gave up on the glass bead game when i was fairly young so maybe i'd think differently now - don't let me put you off!

[Roscoe]

Interesting topic -- Which books have you just given up on, and which books have you given multiple tries before a) finally giving up or b) finally finishing it, or c) putting it down again knowing that you'll get to it eventually but just not now?

For me -- I gave up on Franzen's PURITY, and Richard Powers' GOLDBUG VARIATIONS, and Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, Tevis' MOCKINGBIRD, among others.

Multiple Tries Before Giving Up: GLASS BEAD GAME, Theroux's LAURA WARHOLIC, Steinbeck's EAST OF EDEN (made it halfway twice and just suddenly stopped caring at the same point both times), those goddamned BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and pretty much Dostoievski in general.

Multiple Tries Before Finally Finishing: TRISTRAM SHANDY, TOM JONES -- both of which I'd been banging my head against for much of my reading life until just suddenly Getting Them within the last couple years. THE RECOGNITIONS, a few attempts ended as with the Steinbeck above: I'd hit a brick wall almost exactly halfway through and just put the fucker down, and then I made one last try, bulldozed my way through that interminable indigestible mass of literary gristle Gaddis dumps onto the page at one point, and made it through the rest of the way well enough.

Multiple Tries But Not Today, Sorry, Some Other Time No Really: That goddamned DEAD SOULS, and that goddamned WAR AND PEACE, and Trollope's WAY WE LIVE NOW, and THE PICKWICK PAPERS, and MRS. DALLOWAY, and Pynchon's V. Among others.

Still, you know, never say never.

[brian d]

i gave up on the crying of lot 49. i figured "it's only like 120 pages, i can make it." nope. can't read when my eyes roll out of my head. i seem to remember giving up on the most recent krasznahorkai to be translated (don't remember the name), which was a surprise because i normally like him. i didn't make it more than halfway through the reivers. and the last few times i've tried to read calvino i haven't come close.

[wba]

Can't remember any specific titles, but there's definitely several hundreds of books I gave up on for one reason or another. Many of these I had probably forgotten that I was reading them at some point, cause other stuff entered my life, I misplaced the book, etc. pp - and when I found out about this later, I usually said to myself that I want to read them again from the beginning at some point in the future. I understand that this probably happens more often if you read 20 to 30 books at the same time, as I tend to do for the past 20 years, and you're not a very organized person.

I've read some books for long stretches of time, sometimes several years, because I loved them so much and didn't want them to end and didn't want to leave their world, so to speak. Two I remember distinctly reading for several years years were TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller and LA PELLE by Curzio Malaparte. (Of course sometimes I'm also hooked on a book, and though I don't want it to end, I can't put it down. I remember reading both volumes of Don Quixote in two or three weeks.)

I've never given books multiple tries before giving up on them as far as I can remember. If I give up on a book because I don't enjoy reading it, I'll either never pick it up again, or I'll pick it up at a time of my life I'm (more) actively interested in reading it, meaning I'll finish it, cause I already know "what's coming" so to speak and want exactly that.

Another phenomenon which has happened to me thousands of times on the other hand, is being interested in a book, wanting to read it, sometimes even having borrowed or bought it, having it lying next to your bed, but never actually starting to read it. That's really happened to me a lot in my life. All the unread books I have at home on my shelves alone number 1000+ ... I don't know why that happens exactly, but I'd guess it's the fact that there are so many interesting books out there and life is too short even for reading only a tiny fraction of them.

[liquidnature]

I've had to just become okay with the fact that I will never read all the books, nor watch all the films, nor listen to all the albums or compositions, nor study all the history. Even with what we currently have as of today, this would take many lifetimes. So I think giving up on art is okay. Experience the art that interests you in the moment and which impacts your life (and hopefully, through you, other lives) for the better, while also being open to the unknown.

Which I've said to reassure myself about the so few books that I have read. Films take a few hours, books take days, weeks, or months - to me the choosing much be done much more carefully. So to answer the question, I've only abandoned one that I know of, because I haven't ventured in to any that I didn't think I would like - Dickens' Sketches by Boz of which I read some 400 pages of and felt like I got the gist of it and was ready to move on. I read about 95% of The Pickwick Papers as I had to skip over a few laborious sections.

Now films on the other hand, I have probably either abandoned or skipped through many, mostly because I didn't like them and didn't think it the best use of my time to finish.

[kanafani]

Last two books I've abandoned:
Le Rivage des Syrtes (Gracq) - an overpowering feeling of tedium gradually surrounded me
Le Hussard sur le Toit (Giono) - got about 30% through, realized there were 300+ more pages of intricate countryside descriptions, decided to move on.

[mesnalty]

Interestingly both Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones grabbed me immediately. Maybe because I was born in the postmodern era and the metafictional stuff is more easily digestible than the more straight-faced 18th-century novels.

[brian d]

i loved tristram shandy right away too. i don't get into postmodern lit at all, but i tend to adore the stuff that's more or less proto-postmodern (sterne, rabelais, cervantes, some melville (like pierre), unamuno). i really got tired of jacques le fataliste, though, so go figure.

[mesnalty]

Yeah, Rabelais, Cervantes and Unamuno are among my favorites, too - I'll definitely have to check out Pierre.

[josiahmorgan11]

I abandoned Gravity's Rainbow three times before finally making the push through and loving it. I also abandoned Finnegans Wake once before pushing through on my second try after reading the rest of his works. Though these are perhaps predictable answers? I gave up on William Gibson's Pattern Recognition entirely, absolute turgid b.s. that I couldn't be bothered dealing with, and a few late-career Stephen King works are things I've picked up, started, ditched, etc. I actually struggled with Lolita a few times, too, before finally getting on the Nabokov bandwagon last year.