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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

‘Not a book to be set aside lightly…

  
 
DaveBCooper
12:44 / 18.01.02
… but one to be thrown across the room with great force’, as I think the saying goes.

Which is to say : Do you always finish books you start reading ? If so, why ? If not, is there a certain point (100 pages or whatever) when you decide not to continue ?

Just curious – some people always finish a book, some don’t, and the reasons why intrigue me…

DBC
 
 
Lothar Tuppan
13:00 / 18.01.02
I think that I was taught to feel bad if I started a book and then didn't finish it.

Programming from junior high school probably.

Now, I'll stop reading books once I'm fairly convinced that they either aren't going to be enjoyable, entertaining, illuminating, educational, informative, etc.

Once I reach that point I usually start scanning the book at twice normal reading speed to make sure that I'm not being premature and somewhere in that process I either reach the end of the book or just pause and...

Throw that damn book against the wall.
 
 
Persephone
13:10 / 18.01.02
I used to... lord I remember doing V (I won't say "reading"), towards the middle to end I was just rolling my eyeballs, practically literally, down every page, turn the page, ro-olll down, turn. What a stupid exercise.

No more, though.

I posted this somewhere else, but hopefully it bears repeating... about five or so years ago I read Henry James's Art of Fiction or Art of the Novel and in whichever it was James says that the novelist's job is to write something that is as much like life as he knows--the twist being "as he knows." So what readers of novels do is search out the ones that are as much like life as they know.

I said this already, too, but the best part about this for me is that I *hate* Henry James novels. I agree with Virginia Woolf who said that Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. Of course neither do I read Virginia Woolf, but that's another ball of wax.

So anyway, nowadays I'm looking in the first few pages whether the book is on my wavelength (or I on its) & if not, we agree not to know each other with no hard feelings and before anyone gets hurt.

[ 18-01-2002: Message edited by: Persephone ]
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
13:18 / 18.01.02
I feel defeated if I don't finish reading something I've started - unless it's a non-fiction bits-and-pieces thing. So I continue on, ire increasing, until I throw the fucker across the room upon completion.

'Cos I'm well-balanced, and stuff.

Though I do figure that there's a settling-in period with a book - if you dump it before the end of the first chapter, or first couple of pages, then it doesn't count as a failure - it's more a postponement.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
14:13 / 18.01.02
I usually feel obligated to finish reading something even if I hate it.

This year for instance (well, I guess last year. How bout, within the last 12 months?), I hated yet finished "The Elementary Particles" by Michel Houellbecq, and "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand (almost 800 pages of hate), and did not understand most of but finished Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge".

I am 150 pages into Mark Merlis's "an Arrow's Flight," (for the biblioteca Barbelith) and I am debating about stopping reading it. I'm not at all impressed with Merlis's style, and the subject matter is pretty far removed from my everyday life, but I'll probably end up soldiering through it.
 
 
rizla mission
14:18 / 18.01.02
Due to the massive backlog of books that I've invariably got built up, if I read about 1/3 of the way through something and can't stand it, it's straight down the 2nd hand shop to exchange it for the price of a Mars bar.

Exceptions being;

a.books that are going to look really cool on the shelf

b.Iain Banks, whose written a number of books I can't stand, but I'll keep 'em, just because he's written so many books I loved.
 
 
Cherry Bomb
18:33 / 18.01.02
I keep trying to make my way through the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" because I feel it would be good to read some Czech writers in preparation for living in Czech, but I just keep thinking of the bit from "Kicking and Screaming" when Grover has this exchange with his girlfriend:

"Oh, I've been to Prague. I mean, I haven't BEEN TO PRAGUE been to Prague, but I've done the whole, stop shaving your armpits, read 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' and realize how bad American coffee is-"

"-American Beer."

"...how bad American BEER is.."

So everytime I pick up the book I feel like kind of a wanker.

[ 18-01-2002: Message edited by: Cherry Bomb ]
 
 
sleazenation
20:59 / 18.01.02
oddly enough its only been recently that it has been revealed to me that most book reviewers never actually read all of the books they review.

Yeah it was always something i suspected but it was still a revelation when i had my suspicions confirmed.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
07:38 / 19.01.02
yeah, I heard someone on the radio last year (can't remember who it was) who was on the Booker committee, saying "I liked this one so much I actually read the whole thing..."
Note to anyone going for a major literary prize- either make it start wonderfully, or look good when scanned. Other than that, it seems content's irrelevant.


I used to religiously finish any and all books that came my way. Then I slid into bad habits... having eight on the go at once, etc. This soon became having one on the go and seven I'd never finish.
Then I deliberately tightened up on this- WOULD NOT start a book if I was in the middle of another.
Sadly, after a few years of being bloody good at that, I've slipped back into my old ways. People will mention books in conversation, and I'll suddenly think "fuck! I'm in the middle of that as we speak! But it's been so damn long since I picked it up that I no longer know what the fuck is happening in it."
Should have corrected that as a New Year's resolution, really, but it's only just occurred to me thanks to this timely thread... (Although I AM gonna finish "Martha Peake" by Patrick McGrath before I even allow myself to be tempted by another book's glamorous cover, charming way with words, or "read me in bed" eyes.)

So yes, there is a point at which I give up on a book... it varies wildly, and I seldom admit to myself that I've done so, so can't really give a reasonable estimation on where it is. But there is one.

I can't think of a book that has actually made me consciously decide not to finish it- the worst written and most tedious are a challenge, the most odious a source of information (even if that information is the answer to the question "what is your fashionable complete bastard thinking this season), but I'm surrounded by books I've given up on inadvertently.

Although there is another bloody good reason why I find myself in possession of half-read books (and it's not just the short attention span)- I tend to lose stuff. Regularly. I'll get pissed, fall asleep on the bus, wake up miles away, manage to make my way home (on at least three occasions without my glasses, without which I'm fucking blind), only to discover that I've left my bag on the bus/in the bus depot/in the gutter/fuck knows. And I always take a book on the bus. On the rare occasions lost property offices actually still HAVE my stuff, I'll have to go miles, to somewhere I've never been before, to pick it up, thus naturally feeling insecure. And what does an insecure Stoat do when feeling lost and alone in alien territory? Find the charity and 2nd hand book shops, that's what.
WHOAH! lapse into incoherence there, for which I apologise, but which I think does answer the question. Sort of.


[ 19-01-2002: Message edited by: Moominstoat ]

[ 19-01-2002: Message edited by: Moominstoat ]
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
10:53 / 21.01.02
There are a couple of books which I've given up reading, 'Ulysses' is one example. WSith bad books, if I can understand (even if I don't 'understand) what's happening, like with 'House of Leaves' which I think is just terrible, I'll probably persevere until the end. With something like 'Ulysses' or 'Naked Lunch', if I don't get it I'll try for about a 100 pages then give up.

Can't remember if it was 'Naked Lunch' actually, might have been 'Junk' or something else...
 
  
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