The Goldfinch thread below got me thinking about books that you just can’t get on with for some reason. They’re often ones that come with a fanfare that you may buy yourself, or perhaps you just picked something up at Waterstone’s, dipped in and thought – yep, this one will be a good read. Or perhaps even more likely you received it as a gift from a loved one.
I got two on my last birthday from someone who knows me well and who had read and enjoyed both of them, admittedly some years back.
Both landed very flat with me though. The first ‘Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories’ by MR James is on paper brilliant, right up my street. It’s a penguin classics with brilliantly written short ghost stories. Brilliantly written they certainly are (James was a late 19th C Cambridge don), scary (with the exception of one) they are not.
After reading the first I could then see the trajectory of all the others which kind of takes away the tension.
The other ‘Hawksmoor’ by Peter Ackroyd was really hard work for me. Just not my style, and dull as ditch water. I’d have given up after the first 60 pages if I could have. It’s very dry and flat with a weak plot line and nebulous ending.
I think the problem is that they are both the type of book that make a big impact on you if you happen to read them at the right time in your life. Maybe I was just out of step with them. I also suspect the person who gave them would struggle with Hawksmoor if she tried to read it again now …
Over to you.
Your point about being out of step with a book is a good one. I don’t persevere with books I’m not enjoying his; there’s always so much in the yet-to-read pile to make it worth my while. I have often gone back to books which I have failed with before, and found them brilliant. They are often the ones with the trickiest styles or narratives, and all I could conclude was that my head hadn’t been in the right place to appreciate them the first time round.
Hopefully this means I will finally get beyond page 20 of Ulysses one of these days.
Like Gatz, I don’t perservere with books I don’t get, usually it takes me 50 – 100 pages in. I tried this year with a well reviewed book with an attractive cover – the fat of fed beasts by Guy Ware. I thought it was pretentious rubbish, or maybe I’m just not clever enough to have understood what the hell he was going on about. Iain Sinclair is a writer I really would like to appreciate more. I couldn’t finish London Orbital, found his digressions just bloody irritating. I’ve got his book about the London Olympics – Ghost Milk – to read which looks like more my thing.
Good call on Iain Sinclair. I enjoy interviews with him, and articles about his ideas, much more than I have enjoyed reading his books.
I was surprised to find that I couldn’t get on at all with David Nicholls’ ‘One Day’. I loved ‘Starter For Ten’, and fully expected to enjoy a book set around a similar milieu with comparable character types. But the first couple of chapters left me cold, and I didn’t feel it worthy of perseverance…a meringe? And as an aside, is Nicholls’ most recent novel worth investigating?
I enjoyed it but then again I loved One Day!
Try his latest – ‘Us’ – I did it in a single day on holiday last month, which is very unlike me.
DuCool and I belong to a book circle which means that I often read books thatI would not have chosen myself. In most cases I persevere and am glad I’ve done so.
But sometimes I give up. With David Foster Wallace’s Pale King ( a great slab of a book) I thought that life was just too short. There were passage of sheer genius. But others so numbingly dull that I lost the will to live.
Yes; [ponce alert] I am a big DFW fan but could not get on with ‘The Pale King’ at all.
Agree with you about Hawksmoor. I did give up after about 60 pages. Another 60 page failure is (probably more understandably) William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch.
I put it down after 60 pages aiming to come back to it when the time was right. I thought a few months later I’d take it holiday to kill a Stansted and Ryanair journey and I can assure you the next 60 pages were, if anything, even worse than the first, hard though that is to believe. Most of the final third was pretty good and you could see what people rave about but then the ending was worse than the start. Terrible book. You dodged a bullet there.
Agreed about Iain Sinclair: he’s very interesting and a unique thinker – I want to like him, but I find him unreadable.
To my shame, I gave up on Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ as it was too damned hard and I was never going to understand it.
Greil Marcus….God, I tried. I know he’s great, so the failing is on my part.
‘Vernon God Little’: very much a Marmite book. I really didn’t like it (mannered and wearing, I guess that’s the point?) but a lot of my friends did, so I’d like to give it another go one day.
I’m starting to give up on books that I feel I should read and I’m reading more of what I want to read, which may not always be ‘literary’ but it makes my life a bit more enjoyable.
I found David Nicholl’s new novel rather depressing, but there’s a lot of interest for the middle-aged mid-life-crisis people among us. 🙂
I enjoyed Vernon God Little though I listened to it as an audiobook.
I agree about Sinclair though I got through and enjoyed Slow Chocolate Autopsy and its short stories about Norton Prisoner of London (who pops up as Sinclair himself in Alan Moores League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Century -comic trivia fans)
I enjoyed Hawksmoor when I read it a few years ago – I found it easier to get into than Sinclair.
I gave up on the Goldfinch. I don’t mind long books but lose interest when I get the impression that authors are trying to write really long (rather than really good) books. Tolkien does this. Lord of the Rings has some fabulous scenes but you could easily shed more than half of the book.
Books you want to read, Ms Blue? I know from your FB page about the angstful tomes you’ve chosen for holiday reading.
Books I want to read are frothy, forgetable and deep as a puddle.
They usually involve some granite-jawed, wise-cracking, world-weary Scottish DCI (with an amazing record collection) putting the world to rights and then enjoying a wee dram.
I am a glutton for punishment. 🙂 I do like the small, domestic drama (Maggie O’Farrell, Helen Simpson, Sarah Waters etc.) but they’re not perceived as hugely ‘literary’ in the way that, say, Jonathan Franzen is.
Nothing wrong with a bit of Scots crime fiction! Try Denise Mina, if you haven’t already.
Thanks Ruby. I’ll give Ms Mina a try.
Interesting comment about writers not being perceived as literary.
Swedish, and I suspect some other languages, has a word skönlitteratur” which tries to make a distinction between run of the mill novels and those which are praised for the quality of their writing and their aesthetic qualities.
I’m rather dubious about this pigeonholing as there are many fine writers who don’t tend to get put in this category, if for example they write genre fiction.
These days perhaps it’s all about the ambitions of the writer. Some intend to write a “literary novel” and aspire to a Booker nomination etc. Others perhaps just want to tell a story, but in fact write just as well.
Most of the books that are mentioned here seem to be by “difficult” writers with literary aspirations. No one has yet mentioned giving up on a Stephen King, although BAD did mention Tolkien. (And I agree with his comment.)
“Small, domestic dramas” are as worthy of our interest as novels with more grandiose pretensions.
Yes, the ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ divide is a specious one and is breaking down anyway; but often used as a way to define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ books (not on this thread).
Jonathan Franzen is an interesting case; a very small audience before ‘The Corrections’, and then a much-read and admired author (for a while, at least). He was in The Graun yesterday discussing how he had to adjust to a new mass audience and subsequently trying to rid himself of his snobbery about ‘those’ kinds of readers. And ironically is now facing a backlash about being a Great White Male American Novelist.
I have no idea what this comment is about; there’s about three separate points there. 😀
Please enlighten us none FB users of your choices of holiday reading @rubyblue
Oh Gawd, I’ll have to be honest now…. In order:
Cat Power: ‘A Good Woman’ : a biography; can’t remember the author. Interesting if you’re a fan (I sort-of am).
1001 Albums to Hear Before you Die: wonderful: filled in a few gaps, is making me want to listen to a load of older stuff that I missed the first time.
Bridget Jones: ‘Mad About the Boy’ (The shame! But it had some nice moments about grief and the tedium/stress of small children. But a bad book, not in a literary sense; but for the presumptions it makes about women, gender, social classs….anyway, I digress)
Kathryn Flett: ‘The Heart-Shaped Bullet’- extremely painful description of her marriage breakdown. Possibly too much for anyone who’s ever been through similar; but good on the psychology behind why we repeat patterns and make a mess of things in the way that we do.
Maggie O’Farrell : ‘Instructions for a Heatwave’: Very good account of an Irish/North London family in the mid-70s: secrets and lies, etc. More relationship breakdown, sibling rivalry, childhood trauma…
As I said on FB I need Jilly Cooper now for some light relief: a good old jodhpur-clad romp. Oh and maybe read her books, too.
Blimey I can barely string a sentence together today, apologies. Lack of sleep, caffeine deficit.
Please digress more often Ruby, your posts are great.
Insomnia is great for random, unfiltered posts. 😀
Well Bargepole has read one of them!
Which one? ‘Bridget Jones’, I’ll wager.
Have you read Catherine O’Flynn @rubyblue, think you would like her books. I have loved all her books; down to earth, warm and well written.
No I haven’t; thanks for the recommendation. Will go on a search now. 🙂
I have – liked them all, but especially the first. She and I have worked for the same business (not together), and it was great fun identifying exactly who some of the characters in that book were based on.
Have downloaded them to my Kindle- thanks again. Looking forward to them.
@Kid Dynamite – Yes, I’ve played that game too. One of the characters in “What Was Lost” used to be my Regional Manager in the mid-90s!
@kdh haha! MT? It was the version of PP who really made me laugh.
@KidDynamite – no, it was PP. It’s a long time since I’ve read it, but i seem to remember she got him to a tee.
You’re right Ruby. Here, very refreshingly, on the AW nobody disses “non-literary” novels. Anything goes.
If I should want to wax lyrical about my love for the fiction of Barbera Cartland, no one is going to laugh at me.
Not a single one!
Ha – good guess! Sadly not though – rather predictably and tragically it’s the 1001 albums tome 😉
🙂 Good choice. I think everyone should read that. It’s not fantastically written- very variable quality of entries and some horribly clunky and cliched writing- but for anyone like me who has big gaps in their 60s and 70s listening, it’s a really useful read.
Agreed @rubyblue and @bargepole. Have been working my way through the book to listen to stuff I’ve never heard before. Conclusions thus far (I’ve reached the late 60s) –
Some of the jazz is utterly sensational;
the Beatles were light years beyond all of their peers;
And there was an awful lot of shite around in the mid 60s….
@kaisfatdad – about the word “skönlitteratur”:
Perhaps it originally made a distinction between genres (I haven’t researched it) but today it means “fiction” and nothing else.
Strindberg wrote skönlitteratur, but Camilla Läckberg also writes skönlitteratur. There’s no genre or quality distinction in that term at all.
If it isn’t skönlitteratur, it’s “facklitteratur”. It’s only when you get down to genre categories that some are perceived as being “better” than others, but that’s still not built into the genre names, it’s a sort of cultural consensus.
Unless we’re talking about terms like “pulp fiction”, “tantsnusk” etc which are the popular rather than the actual names of those genres.
Thanks @locust for that explanation. I hadb’t realised that.
So now we’ll find Jilly Cooper and Strindberg nestling together in the same section of the bookshop? Scandalous!
I’m always ready when a correction is needed, @kaisfatdad… 🙂
I was in a hurry to finally go to bed when I made my comment, of course I then spent twenty minutes awake in bed thinking about the origin of the word! I realised that it of course has nothing to do with “skön” as in “beautiful”, but comes from the other meaning of “skön” which is opinion, choice etc, as in the old fashioned phrase “efter eget skön” (“at one’s own discretion”) or as in “skönstaxering” (“discretionary tax assessment”).
So it’s a descriptive term telling us that it’s not just dry facts told impartially!
Maggie O’Farrell – one of my favourite authors, though I’ve still to read her last two, the first four, and particularly the first three were so intimate and affecting. I was stupidly pleased to learn she is married to William Sutcliffe, whose books I also, separately, really liked. I now see he has two I haven’t read yet.
On the subject of the main thread, I know it is sacrilege round these parts, but apart from The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass, Away the Crow Road (fantastic) and Raw Spirit, the others I tried to read (The Bridge, and Transition) just left me confused and bored. My loss, I suppose.
My rule of thumb with Banks is that if it was written in the twentieth century it’s much more likely to be one of the good ones, and if it was twenty-first, it’s probably less good. There are exceptions of course – you can reverse the rule for anything with Stone in the title, for a start.
Not long to wait for the next instalment featuring said character!
Getting older one becomes less tolerant of putting up with many things, including books which seem a struggle. In some ways it’s a shame. Had I had that attitude when younger I would have given up more easily and missed out on so much that was actually worth persisting with, like Kafka, like Beckett like much modern art and challenging music. It’s not necessarily a good thing getting complacent and knowing what you like. In a way it is a kind of death. ?
As mentioned by fellow posters, no longer persevere with books that can’t get on with – lif’e too short and there’s so much other stuff out there.
Could never get on with MR James – just didn’t get it at all.
I loved M R James as a kid, along with Sheridan le Fanu, Arthue Machen, and other antiquated ghost/horror writers. I tried rereading James recently and gave up – not scary, not really anything much. Lovecraft, though, seems eternally reliable.
Jeez Louise you read James as a kid? Where the heck were your parents? Beats watching Tiswas though I guess.
The one scary one I mentioned was ‘The Mezzotint’. A really clever idea that gets right under the skin.
I think the problem I have with him is that most of the ghosts seem to be the sort of thing I remember from watching Scooby Doo. Something floating around in a white sheet.
Oh, just found that story here …
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/mezztint.htm
We can only really go by our own experience: by definition we don;t know about books we gave up on after 50 pages, but we do know about those which we forced ourselves to read (or which we were forced to read, eg at school) which turned out to be not our thing at all.
The problem sometimes with things which are hugely similar to others which you have previously enjoyed, is probably their similarity itself.
Going by the ones Ive forced myself to read beyond the natural give up point (ie presents where I felt I had at least to finish the thing so I could report back) I think the 50 page rule is a good one.
True – if I look to see what page I’m on and it’s before p60 I know I’m not going to finish the book, similarly with films, If I’m checking my watch before the hour mark theylost my interest.
@rubyblue has mentioned the first book that always comes to my mind when thinking of highly acclaimed books I simply didn’t rate at all, Vernon God Little. Overrated and over written for me. I’d say the same about two other Booker winners, Life of Pi and The Luminaries, a doorstep of a book which I stuck with whilst constantly wondering why I was bothering.
Ian McEwan is another one – I liked Atonement and On Chesil Beach but more often that not have been left baffled by his reputation – Sweet Tooth and in particular the execrable Solar are examples.
I ‘ve read McEwan since the early 80s, but couldn’t get past a chapter or two of Solar.
I’m very much a fan of McEwan. I enjoyed Atonement, On Chesil Beach, The Child In Time, The Comfort Of Strangers, The Cement Garden, Enduring Love and Saturday.
Solar is appalling crap though.
Have just started Sweet Tooth.
I remember enjoying Vernon God Little, but I’ve never re-read it, which is unusual for me when I like a book – I’m a big re-reader. Maybe that tells me something.
McEwan has always been more than capable of a dodgy novel. I always thought Enduring Love was pretty iffy, and there have been a few others I haven’t liked at all. When he’s good, though, he’s towering.
The one of his that seems to divide opinion a lot is Saturday. I absolutely loved it, thought it was a fantastic portrait of contentment, which you don’t often see, but the wealth and comfort of the main characters seemed to get up some people’s nose (because we know that middle class people aren’t a fit subject for art unless we’re taking the piss out of them, after all).
The contentment was fine, although he did fit a lot into that morning. The problem was the villain (the Dover Beach scene? Oh dear), and I found Perowne’s actions at the end both utterly predictable and unbelievable at the same time.
I didn’t have a problem with any of that – horse for courses.
I thought Saturday was a short story padded and stretched to make a novel.
The Luminaries was unbearably dull. I bail out on very few books, but that was one.
Amazed we’ve got this far down the thread without having mentioned the following Gread Un-reads:
In Search Of Lost Time, by M. Proust (Fr.) I’ve tried reading the original Fr. but didn’t get much further in translation, grinding to a halt in the third vol. It is evidently very special writing, but the sheer doziness of the narrator has a soporific effect on the reader. I still nurse a half-warmed fish to get through it, though. No rush.
Don Quixote (pron. “Don Kwixote” if you’re a literary snob. “Don Kee-ho-tay” if you’re a tourist) by M. Cervantes (Sp.) This starts off well, but gets as lost as its hero too quickly to bother with finishing. Kudos to the Spains for producing one work of literary merit in its entire national cultural history, though – that’s more than the Welsh or the Dutch managed)
Finegans Wake (I spelled this wrongly so you can correct me and thereby get some enjoyment from this comment that would have otherwise eluded you) by Jim Joyce. Its towering brilliance renders it unfortunately unreadable. A few hair-tossing literary ponces claim to have finished it (eg A. Burgess) and spend the rest of their lives buttonholing anybody too drunk to run away about how great it is and by extension anyone who’s read it is ie them.
And – nearly anything by Thomas Pynchon.
re Proust, surely you found the style exquisite and the characterisation superb. The long, evocative passages…
“… passagezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz …”
‘Grinding to a halt in the third vol’…show-off.
Another one of the great unread (selon moi): Middlemarch. Taken it on more holidays than I care to remember, always the same battered old Penguin, never got further than about page 10. I probably need a lengthy stay in hospital – or prison.
Is it a George Eliot thing or limited to Middlemarch? Silas Marner is a very good read in my opinion.
Strange to hear that Middlemrch is so problematic for some of you. It’s a while back, but I remember liking it a lot.
I’ve never actually tried anything else by her. All a bit weird really – I should give her another go.
I agree on Joyce, you can add Ulysses. What a pile of wank that is.
It certainly is a pile of wank if you make it to Molly Bllom’s soliloquy at the end …
I’m sure you’ll agree that this is all we need:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VTFuYvSzZA
‘hair-tossing literary ponces’ haha, yep AB fits that mold. He once said a very funny thing about Shakespeare – on Wogan or something I think – ‘The French claim Shakespeare as their own. They call him Jacques Pierre’
Re Finnegan’s Wake I do not believe for a minute that anyone has ever read that and actually enjoyed it. In fact I doubt if anyone has ever finished it at all.
I may have said this before…Burgess read EVERYTHING. When I was briefly his paperback publisher, I supplied him with a box containing all manner of mass-market fiction – crime, SF, thrillers, even a few bodice-rippers. He wasn’t interested in the stuff I published, which I fondly imagined was ‘literature’.
Don Quixote – I think it’s pronounced ‘donkey shot’ here in Germany, though that could be something quite different that was being described.
Finnegans Wake – I haven’t read it (I found Portrait of the Artist…. and Dubliners heavy going, light weight that I am). But I really liked the multiple meanings in the title, e.g. Fin – end, egan – again, wake – funeral party and end of sleep.
I like ‘extreme horror’. There are some great reads in the ‘extreme horror’ genre, but thanks to Kindle publishing’s ease of distribution, some diseased-but-no-talent minds and the genre’s predilection for sentence fragments, there are an awful lot of really, really bad ones.
As a consequence I finish only a few of those I start. My reading life is one of hope — the books are usually frontloaded with a decent first chapter to snare people who download samples — followed by disappointment when the rest of it turns out it be rubbish.
The most genuinely extreme horror I have ever read is a true account of the 1980 riot at the New Mexico penitentiary by a convict who witnessed it. Inmates took over the prison and went all Lord of the Flies …
curious as to what you call “extreme horror”, Poppy. I was talking with a couple of friends in the pub the other night about the dearth of current decent horror writers – the only one we could come up with a couple of novels behind him was Adam Nevill. I enjoyed Gary Braunbeck’s Cedar Hill novels, but he seems to have gone quiet. There’s a few who have put out some good short fiction – Paul Meloy, Priya Sharma, Ray Cluley off the top of my head – but I don’t know that they count as “extreme”, and they haven’t been tested at novel length yet.
Fairly interchangeable with what you might call splatterpunk, I suppose. Jack Ketchum is the master. I can’t recommend him enough. The Girl Next Door is his masterpiece, but it’s very gruelling. Try Off Season, I would, the first of his ‘Dead River Trilogy’. Edward Lee is good, too. Give ‘Header’ a go. Bentley Little is good. Brian Keene… Um… Edward Lee has a messageboard which is a good source of other worthwhile stuff.
For me, chicklit in general, and Bridget Fucking Jones in particular, qualifies as Extreme Horror.
There is a lot that is shit, absolute shit, about the Bridget Jones books. The really horrific thing about the books is the seeming timelessness of the ‘rescue’ trope: sensitive yet absolutely Alpha male rescues helpless, scatty, disorganised but lovable woman.
Having said that, the last book in the series is very good on grief, women and ageing, sex, loss, and the chaos of children. It’s not enough to redeem the book but neither is it to be completely dismissed.
I don’t really know ‘chick lit’ at all but BJ appears to be by no means the worst of the genre. Tangent- Marian Keyes, who is often dismissed as ‘chick lit’, can be a perceptive writer, and it’s by no means all shopping and fucking. Although both will probably appear at some point.
“Grief, women and ageing, sex, loss, and the chaos of children. ” That’s enough for Brian Sewell’s complete dismissal right there!
I’ve had my suspicions for a while, now I am certain. You are Brian Sewell.
Splatterpunk. There’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time. A long time *stares into the middle distance like Obi-Wan on Tatooine*. Skipp and Spector and all that. Takes me back to the days of my Fear magazine subscription coming through the letterbox and my dad calling me weird.
Sure I read some Bentley Little books in the late 90s. One called The Store maybe? Don’t remember them being especially gore drenched though. There was that whole generation of writers who stopped getting published in the UK when the 80s/90s horror boom lost steam, and I lost touch with them all.
I’ve only read one Bentley Little — The Circle — and you’re right, it probably doesn’t belong in that category. I loved it though. Must read more!
Pretty much agree with you about Iain Sinclair up to a point. I like him when there’s a limit (Like London Orbital obvs, his new one where he walks the overground sounds like it could be good) but sometimes he’s just unreadable. But a fine thinker, a fascinating article writer and a great interviewee.
Another prime example of this is Will Self. I like him on telly, love his interviews, don’t mind his journalism, cannot, for the life me, get along with his novels. There’s a real hint of “less than meets the eye” with his actual work which doesn’t seem to be there with his hackwork. Maybe I came to him too old?
I have read a lot of Martin Amis, and the only book of his which I quite liked was Money (and that was basically “man signs bad contract which you might have missed because of the purple prose around page seventy, and if you didn’t spot it then it only proves the author’s point that no one pays any real attention to proper culture these days”), literally everything else I have read by him is shite. Including London Fields. I used to think I was missing something with him. Now I don’t.
Last one I’ll mention is Dickens and I know for certain there that the problem is me. It’s the names. Who the fuck was ever called Pumplechook?
Ah yes, Will Self. I forgot to say above that the foreword for Hawksmoor was by him. If ever I needed a red flag warning that the book I was about to read would be dense and convoluted there it was staring me right in the face.
Im not a fan of WS, his columns, comedy, panel show work, radio, books anything. He just doesn’t do it for me. Reading anything by him always reminds me of the famous Hancock scene where he reads Russell and has to look up every second word in the dictionary. There’s just something about his personality that I really don’t like.
*own-trumpet-blowing alert* I, er, discovered Will Self, published his first three books – Quantity Theory of Insanity, Cock and Bull and My Idea of Fun. Then I was fired, but that’s another story. He was alarmingly clever, and super-cool, definitely something of the night about him with his gothic looks and floor-length greatcoat. And those first three books were great. (As an aside, he drove nothing but used Citroen CXs, buying another one when the current one died, which happened about once a year. They were cheap, but always too expensive to repair.)
But once I was no longer professionally require to read his books, and as he became more famous and omnipresent, I gradually stopped doing so, finding less and less to admire. Over the years he’s become a kind of caricature of himself, a bit like Russell Brand only with longer words.
I enjoyed Cock and Bull, but thereafter nothing more by him. From seeing him occasionally on t.v, I’d agree he has morphed into a bit of a caricature.
Ditto, don’t get Martin Amis at all. Never much liked Kingsley either. The boy’s book on Stalin – Koba the dread – was unintentionally hilarious, Mart discovers that Stalin was a bit unpleasant and so on for another 200 words until even he runs out of words.
His work did go through a long period of loss of mojo, but last year’s Zone of Interest is a real return to form with a vengeance.
I did finish Hawksmoor. I thought it was ok, though couldn’t see why it merited the adulation being heaped on it at the time. To be fair, it does contain the phrase “I was wont to make a stool-pan of my britches.” which I rather liked. Indeed, it is the only thing i can now remember about the book.
A book that I disliked so much that I was unable to finish it (the only one, in fact) is The Flounder by Gunter Grasse. I loved The Tin Drum, so was really looking forward to this one but… I think it was the recipes and poems that made it difficult, though the whole talking fish thing didn’t help.
“I was wont to make a stool-pan of my britches.”
Yes, that made me laugh too, there were some doozies.
Just could not get on with those Stieg Larsson books – massively successful so the blindspot is obviously Bargepole’s!
I am persevering with The Martian just now – on the recommendations of several of this parish and persevering is the right word. I get the impression that the author is an uber nerd. Page after page of scientific calculations, to the point where I stopped processing them and just glazed over. There is so little about Mars – it could be Milton Keynes and so little about the isolation of the character. There is a problem with some piece of kit. He fixes it. There is another problem. He fixes that.
It’s like a Haynes manual
I didn’t like it, largely because the narrator was such a wisecracking pain in the arse I really didn’t care how many potatoes he had on the go. I have quite high hopes for the film though, because I thought that another failing of the book was conveying the grandeur and alienness of Mars, and that is one thing Ridley Scott should be able to pull off.
was at a talk by Tom Gauld (illustrator) and saw this thought it summed up the home library experience.
Though of course this may not work as I am limited by the host sites I can access from work.
http://www.picoolio.net/images/2015/08/24/tgcomnewslibrary3397c.jpg
http://i1322.photobucket.com/albums/u577/Mrpolly/tgcomnewslibrary_zpsbrmge3bk.jpg
http://i1322.photobucket.com/albums/u577/Mrpolly/tgcomnewslibrary_zpsbrmge3bk.jpg
bollicks
That’s a bit like my library, if you add the ones that
– I wait until I learnt enough of the language to understand the nuances of the story.
-I keep in a sealed box because I’m afraid of the parasites living there
-I bought to help a friend working in a bookshop to earn a living, not knowing if I would like to read he book on the first place.
and the ones I keep as a person keep an abandonned pet to give away to a good family,
Do you need more books @hubert-rawlinson ?
Thanks for the kind offer, but as we are thinking of down-sizing in a couple of years, then I don’t think I need to get any more.
gatz- as regards ‘Ulysses’, I read it several times over the course of a few years. The first time, I read it very painstakingly, giving it the attention it deserved. Another occasion, I read it extremely quickly, just letting it cascade over me. Another time, I read it as a comic novel, a more erudite version of ‘Puckoon’.
Having read ‘Ulysses’and all his earlier works, I then borrowed ‘Finnegans Wake’ from the school library. It did provoke a reaction from others. I was rightly called a ‘pretentious wanker’ by an older pupil. After three days, I think I’d struggled to page 20 or so. I, reluctantly, gave up, but have promised myself that one day I’ll try again, using a version with full, explanatory notes.
Personally, I gave up on fiction some 25 years ago, with rare exceptions. I’d found myself being disappointed all too often by recent fiction.
I didn’t read much if any fiction myself for many years till someone introduced me to Alice Munro a few years back and to my surprise I was riveted. Incredibly evocative and brilliantly nuanced stories, I highly recommend her. If you’re not familiar with her already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro
I’ve just fallen asleep reading this thread – virtually every boring book ever written is mentioned here. I read Ulysses as a 17 year-old and absolutely loved it. In the fifty years afterwards I have never ever dared to go for the re-read, I prefer to absolutely love it.
Thanks @locust. That really was an eye opener. I’d got completely the wrong end of the stick there. I had just, understandably perhaps, presumed that it meant the classics and more literary fiction. The kind of stuff they read over there on Östermalm (the Kensington of Stockholm, if any one else happens to read this).
That was a wonderful word you used recently: tantsnusk.
(Note for non-Swedish speakers: it means books aimed predominantly at a female audience. A fairly easy read with a generous helping of romance and rumpy pumpy. Jackie Collins is a good example.)
Very difficult to translate. Not really chick lit. Bodice rippers? But that suggests it’s vintage bonking rather than being in a modern setting. Mills and Boon are a bit like this but not so racy.
Any ideas?
Re “tantsnusk” – maybe the genre called ‘shopping & fucking’ (S&F) ?
I find that generally avoiding winners of the Booker Prize proves a good rule of thumb.
Re: Booker prizewinning turkeys.
Yes, there have indeed been a few stinkers that have won the prize.
But I certainly enjoyed, and would recommend these three:
J. G. Farrell The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
J. M. Coetzee Disgrace (1999)
Peter Carey True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)
There have been more good than bad – completely agree about Kelly Gang and Disgrace which are brilliant. So too, Alan Hollinghursts Line of Beauty, Rushdie’s Midnights Children, and the two Wolf Hall novels amongst many others.
That’s my view nowadays especially after they dismissed William Trevor’s Love and Summer for being too slight. I never realised that weight of book mattered more than literary merit. However, in addition to J G Farrell which I also enjoyed, I think Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Remains of the Day also won, and really enjoyed both of those.
I was generalising of course, but the thing that I most dislike about the Literary Clique is its sour faced dislike of … God forbid…. Popularity ! The art of entertaining through genuinely popular storytelling seems to be not worthy of esteem, but pompous long winded semantic wankery is just the ticket. Hur feckin; rah.
Might I diffidently suggest that this Literary Clique of which you speak is about as imaginary as the Afterword Clique? Of course most literary publishing, criticism, journalism etc is London-centric, because that’s where it happens, and that annoys the hell out of (a) people outside London, and (b) people who can’t get published. But if there is a clique, it’s one in which no two people can agree about anything, ever. The people who work in these fields number no more than a few hundred, and they can’t help meeting each other eventually.
Genuinely popular storytelling can be brilliant on all levels (see Senor Garlic’s list below) or it can be terrible (cf 50 Shades of Grey – now there’s pompous long winded semantic wankery for you). Some critics might have a taste for stuff that’s experimental, or impossible for ordinary mortals to read (Finnegan’s Wake, anyone?), but they can safely be ignored.
What about the luvvie lit gits on telly, jawing away about some effete dross tome ? All silk cravated flowery dressed hmm hmm I seewhatyoumeanquitequitetheessencespoktomeandyet hmm hmmming jockeys. Earl Grey Prat Cavaliers.
Don’t watch them then, it’s obviously not good for your blood pressure.
Bring back the Bards!
Re Peter Carey. Also won with Oscar and Lucinda. That was excellent too. Great Writer. There’s been plenty of good reads winning: Last Orders by Graham Swift, John Banville’s The Sea, Julian Barnes, Julian Barnes Sense Of An Ending, Remains Of The Day. All pretty readable. The shortlists also throw up worthwhile stuff.
I tend to agree with you, Owlsley. Which makes me think that being nominated for the Booker may not be such a good thing for an author who wants to reach a broad audience. Being pigeonholed as high-brow will no do them any favours.
Indeed. Most of their ‘high brow’ is as pleasurable as being buggered by A.S. Byatt with a pneumatic Swarfega strap on as she repeatedly bashes you over the head with a thesaurus.
Surely the use of Swarfega would make the experience more pleasurable, rather than less?