Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Arts and Entertainment => Topic started by: Cudzoziemiec on 21 January, 2013, 09:52:20 am
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I've taken Love in the Time of Cholera back to the library. It was due for its third renewal, which means I'd had it for 3 weeks. That's how long it had taken me to read 104 pages - a bit less than a third of the book. During that time I'd read several other books from cover to cover. I'm sure Gabriel Garcia Marquez really is a great writer, but somehow he just doesn't click with me.
What have YACFers failed to read despite trying?
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The Trial. $DEITY knows, I tried :'(
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The Dice Man. I need solitary time to get through it and I won't get that till easter.
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Many years ago, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence.
I eventually realised that I just couldn't be arsed.
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Anything by Salman Rushdie
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James
I don't like several authors (ie Dickens) but I take the simple step of never starting their books
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The Dice Man. I need solitary time to get through it and I won't get that till easter.
This one is kinda easy reading...no concentration required
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Not my experience. I managed War and Peace, but this one just got stuck.
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Many years ago, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence.
I eventually realised that I just couldn't be arsed.
That is so much one of my favourites that I even retraced the protagonists' route in 2009...
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Beowulf - I bought one with both a modern translation and an old english one, but I can never get myself into it enough.
I also have a couple of french and german books that I intend to read through to revive my rusty french & german, but I never get round to reading them.
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"To kill a mockingbird."
It was one of our set texts at school. I hated it and never finished it.
Also, anything by Dan Brown.
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I also have a couple of french and german books that I intend to read through to revive my rusty french & german, but I never get round to reading them.
I have two Swedish tetraologies to get through. Vilhelm Moberg's superb Emigrants series - also available in English & highly recommended; and Eyvind Johnson's* semi-autobiographical 1914. Both are 2000+ pages & I've read them before a good while ago, but I can't seem to find the time now.
*Who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974. That was the year Graham Greene was tipped to win it, but it went jointly to Johnson & Harry Martinsson. The latter two just happened to be on the committee that chose the winner(s)...
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Everything.
I can manage about 5 pages of any book. I think I've read 2 in the last 5 years. Am really hoping this year is the year I get it back- I've got a houseful of books I once enjoyed, and shelves of new books I'd like to read.
That, and audio books are expensive, and often read 'wrong' with jarring accents and the like.
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Despite going to a grammar school, I've never read a Shakespeare play.
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Anything by JG Ballard. I think I have only managed to finish one of his books but have tried to read a few over the years. I want to read them but it is just lost on me!
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Many years ago, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence.
I eventually realised that I just couldn't be arsed.
That is so much one of my favourites that I even retraced the protagonists' route in 2009...
I'm with both of you here. I started it when I was about 20 and found it just boring, gave up. Then I read it all a couple of years ago and found that it's actually very interesting.
Anything by Salman Rushdie
Oh yeah! Although, judging by what I've just said above, maybe I should try again. :-\
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August 1914.
Never got more than a few days into it...
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Godel, Escher, Bach
Managed about two thirds of it and my brain just gave up the ghost.
On The Road
Didn't make it to the end cos I just didn't give a shit what happened to these losers.
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The Golden Notebook.
The protagonists are so damn annoying, I put the book down.
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The Oblivion Stories by David Foster Wallace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivion:_Stories). Despite them being short stories, I struggled to reach the end of each of the first 3 and then gave in. >:(
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Everything.
Almost everything, at the moment, in my case. Encouragingly, I managed at least half a dozen books last year. Which is a bit less than I used to read in an average week, but it's a start, innit?
Historically there've been very very few books I couldn't read. Watership Down defeated me at about 8, but I tried again a couple of years later and finished it, although I didn't particularly enjoy it. I've never managed to finish The Hobbit or and of the LOTR stuff either, which I was bought for my 11th birthday and has followed me mockingly round ever since. But other than those, nowt that I remember although I have read a load of old shite over the years. Mind, our mam always used to say that in the absence of any better reading material I would read the phone book or the cornflakes box....
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I tried reading a Jack Kerouac book once. Soon decided life's too short. Might give him another go one day, but I've got more than enough books that I actually want to read to keep me going for some years, so probably won't bother.
d.
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In the vain of "Anything by...", anything by Charles Dickens, but especially "Hard Times". Just too bloody bleak, too wordy (says the guy who enjoys the occasional Tom Clancy or James Patterson novel) and, as others have said, LIFE IS TOO SHORT!
Having worked through something like 40 novels in the last 3 months (the only advantage of an hour long commute, each way, every day) I can say that I am still struggling to find another author that I just don't get.
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I've never managed to finish The Hobbit or and of the LOTR stuff either, which I was bought for my 11th birthday and has followed me mockingly round ever since.
I enjoyed The Hobbit, I think I was also 11, but a couple of years later I tried LOTR - managed to write a "review" for school of the whole trilogy despite only having read the first book!
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Anything by Terry Pratchett, I suspect. I tried a few based on strong recommendations and gave up every time. In a similar vein, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I may have finished this one in my younger years, but definitely gave up on the sequels). They're just not me. Try as I might, I can't find them either funny or interesting. To be honest, any kind of 'fantasy' novel is a bit of a no-no, from Harry Potter through to LoTR. My boat isn't floated.
Louis de Bernieres. Good god, I can't remember the book, but it was awful. I was like wading through some kind of sludge extracted from the brains of failed English literature students. Anything else dug from the midden of overwritten, meandering 'literature' beloved of broadsheet review pages, for that matter. I can appreciate some of it may be well-written, but it's like eating a block of butter with a spoon.
Finnegans Wake. That was a bit of a watershed moment when I realised life was simply too short to read books because I thought I should (or because I'd look clever and girls would sleep with me), rather than because I wanted to.
Hmm, there's also a copy of Robin Lane Fox's The Classical World that's been sitting by the bed for about two years. I got about half-way but despite it being the kind of book that should float my boat, I find strangely tedious for some reason I can't put my finger on, it's just very spotty and has that off-putting Oxbridgy knowing tone. I suspect I'll never get to the end before it falls victim to one of my wife's tidying massacres. I've rescued it a few times, but I think the next time, I let it die.
Jared Diamond. Tried and died with two of his, both were like an endless geography class where the teacher keeps reiterating the same conclusions over and over, seemingly in the belief that in the last fifty pages the reader would have forgotten everything that had gone before. Understandable, my brain had climbed out of the window and gone to play in the park.
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Beowulf - I bought one with both a modern translation and an old english one, but I can never get myself into it enough.
Have you tried the Seamus Heaney version? Worth a go ...
My "highly-thought-of-but-in-my-case-unreadable" book list includes (in no particular order):
Crime and Punishment; Downriver (Iain Sinclair); Tristram Shandy ...
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The Silmarillion. I used to be a voracious reader. I've not enjoyed everything I've read (some books of the summer reading lists for school come to mind) but The Silmarillion is the only book I've started but not finished. I've even read The Bible cover to cover, but this Tolkien work defeated me.
At the moment I'm struggling with Švejk. I've read it before - and enjoyed it - but just not finding sufficient tuits to finish reading it in a different language.
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Moby Dick.
The book is cursed. We chose it as the group read for a group holiday. As we began reading it, bad things happened, cars crashed, luggage was lost, people got ill. We all stopped reading the book and things went back to normal. We all agreed to never try read the book again, and left our copies in the farmhouse we were staying in. So if you find 5 copies of Moby Dick in a French farmhouse, back away, they be evil!
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Agree about The Silmarillion. I tried about 30 years ago but did not get far. At the time I described it as like trying to read The Old Testament as a novel.
At the same time The Gormenghast Trilogy was trendy. I never very far before abandoning it. Perhaps I will try again one day.
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Most recently, Paradise Lost by John Milton. Just didn't enjoy it. It's unusual that I choose to stop reading a book I'm not enjoying, rather than simply skim reading to get the jist of it - I suspect that the blank verse used by Milton just didn't lend itself to that ruse. In any case, this was my third attempt and I just couldn't force my way through it.
I've also put aside books like Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard and Golden Notebook by Lessing. More because I suspect you have to be in the right frame of mind to tackle, although these are in the pile that are (literally) set aside for picking up again at a later date. Always worth giving them another Although the Ballard one might slip into the "no, just not for me" donations box given I've tried it a couple of times.
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The Silmarillion is this: a rubbish.
I enjoyed Švejk up until the moment the author died before finishing it, the git.
Gormenghast was also terrible, but I finally got to the end courtesy of five hours in A&E >:(
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At the moment I'm struggling with Švejk. I've read it before - and enjoyed it - but just not finding sufficient tuits to finish reading it in a different language.
Are you reading it in Czech?
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August 1914.
Never got more than a few days into it...
I had a copy for a few years but it seems to have vanished. Before I got around to starting it :)
I have Solzhenitsyn's Biog. if you are interested
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At the moment I'm struggling with Švejk. I've read it before - and enjoyed it - but just not finding sufficient tuits to finish reading it in a different language.
Are you reading it in Czech?
I probably could, with lots of spare time and a dictionary by my side, but can't see myself ever collecting that many tuits. I've read it in English, now working through a Ukrainian translation.
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Agree about The Silmarillion. I tried about 30 years ago but did not get far. At the time I described it as like trying to read The Old Testament as a novel.
At the same time The Gormenghast Trilogy was trendy. I never very far before abandoning it. Perhaps I will try again one day.
LOL those were two of mine as well! Lorna Doone is the other. Tried several times, can't read more than 10 pages without falling asleep!
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The Silmarillion also. And War and Peace. And Midnight's Children.
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The Silmarillion...
Agree about The Silmarillion...
Agree about The Silmarillion. I tried about 30 years ago but did not get far. At the time I described it as like trying to read The Old Testament as a novel.
At the same time The Gormenghast Trilogy was trendy. I never very far before abandoning it. Perhaps I will try again one day.
LOL those were two of mine as well! ...
The Silmarillion also...
I see a trend developing...
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anything / everything by salman rushdie and umberto eco.
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Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Odd, because I usually like his stuff, but completely lost momentum on that...
...then tried again recently and got even less far. Ah well.
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The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. I read Narcissus and Goldmund and loved it, but just couldn't get to grips with TGBG.
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The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.
I think I've read that. Must have made an impression, as I can't remember anything about it.
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Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Odd, because I usually like his stuff, but completely lost momentum on that...
...then tried again recently and got even less far. Ah well.
Currently 3/4 of the way through that at the 2nd attempt...... it's a bit of a slog though.
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I see a trend developing...
Add me to the list. I loved the Hobbit, then grinded my way through LoTR, though if I'm honest, I didn't really like it all that much. The Silmarillion was just too obtuse. I think I read the first three or four pages half a dozen times before finally giving up.
d.
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James Joyce---Ulysses---and I couldn't understand the film either!
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I'm sure I would have added Crime and Punishment to the list, but it was the only book I had with me on an extended camping trip. I struggled through the first couple of hundred pages, but by about page 400 I couldn't put it down.
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Everything.
I can manage about 5 pages of any book. I think I've read 2 in the last 5 years. Am really hoping this year is the year I get it back- I've got a houseful of books I once enjoyed, and shelves of new books I'd like to read.
This.
I'm not entirely sure why.
I've struggled to read fiction for many years now. Non-fiction's easier as it's more easily read in small doses, or you have a specific incentive to actually read it in order to learn how to get something done.
I think some of it's about ergonomics - I can't read in bed for more than an hour or so without shoulder pain, and don't have a comfy armchair any more. Dead tree books are doubly irritating in this regard, with their weight and self-closing habits, though I'm equally crap at reading ebooks. I'm disinclined to start if I'm only going to end up having to stop after a short time because of pain, or (if it's a decent book) bugger up my shoulders through keeping reading.
That, and audio books are expensive, and often read 'wrong' with jarring accents and the like.
Audio books are a work of Stan, unless you're one of those people who can listen to recorded speech in a moving vehicle without getting travel sick. I don't get why anyone with normal reading ability would want to have something read to them at a frustrating fraction of the proper bitrate, even if it was in the delightful tones of Stephen Fry or Morgan Freeman or similar.
Oddly, radio drama doesn't annoy me. Though it still makes me travel sick.
And yet I'll read vast swathes of random (and I do mean random) crap on the internet. General wiksand; NASA reports; fan fiction (of fandoms I don't even know); academic papers; WW2 submarine manuals; reviews of books I know I'll never get round to reading; websites, usenet and forum posts about all sorts of things I have no specific interest in. I lurked on uk.business.agriculture for months, FFS! I'm reading as much as I ever did. But not proper books.
I think it's related to why I haven't played computer games (other than a couple of hours of Portal) in the last decade. Sure, some of them are quite good, but in doing so there's a world of interesting *real* stuff out there that I'm neglecting. It feels like the information equivalent of people who grew up post-war being psychologically incapable of not clearing a plate.
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Has anyone actually read The Silmarillion? ;D
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My brother did. He was a Tolkein nut. I read William Morris and the Penguin Sagas first (Vinlanda, Laxdaela, Njal's, Egil's & Hrafnkel's), so I realised how derivative it all was.
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I'm sure I would have added Crime and Punishment to the list, but it was the only book I had with me on an extended camping trip. I struggled through the first couple of hundred pages, but by about page 400 I couldn't put it down.
Dostoevsky comes in a different category for me. Probably my favourite author overall, but if I were ever to read two consecutively, it would send me spiralling into a black hole of doom. Writers like Dostoevsky need to be interspersed with books by writers like Wodehouse. :thumbsup:
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Works the other way too - I read a lot of Wodehouse but he needs to be interspersed with something a bit more substantial.
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Audio books are a work of Stan, unless you're one of those people who can listen to recorded speech in a moving vehicle without getting travel sick.
I think thats .... everyone in the world except you. Isn't it? I've never heard of this problem. Have you checked you're doing it right?
I don't get why anyone with normal reading ability would want to have something read to them at a frustrating fraction of the proper bitrate, even if it was in the delightful tones of Stephen Fry or Morgan Freeman or similar.
It's not to slow it down! If bitrate was everything, wouldn't you speed up every movie you watched?!?
It's a lot to do with the delivery. Certainly some readers have f**ked up audio books (there is one that N listened to for 'king weeks, read by this woman with the most whiny irritating voice. Aaaaaaaarghh!). Some really add something. The version of Rogue Male that the beeb did is just superb - they just found someone with the perfect voice, for my ears anyway.
It's a different performance - reading a Shakespeare play is not generally better than watching them. Also I've generally preferred abridged works to the full readings - perhaps because the latter tend to be overlong! Thinking about it, short books do seem to work best - especially kids books, and less dense stuff that you can wash-up to etc. (clearly some books would abridge terribly).
[Has not even tried the Silmarillion.]
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The very worst audiobooks are on Librivox - OK, it seems a bit churlish to complain when the books are read by volunteers and are available for free, but there's a damn good reason why the best audiobooks are the ones read by professional actors. I'm not saying that all audiobooks read by professional actors are good - quite a few are rubbish - but most of the stuff I've sampled from Librivox is truly unlistenable.
d.
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I don't actually believe anyone has read James Joyces Ullyses. This is a book that one pretends to read, or leaves lying around well thumbed, but nobody has read it in full. Its simply not possible.
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I don't actually believe anyone has read James Joyces Ullyses. This is a book that one pretends to read, or leaves lying around well thumbed, but nobody has read it in full. Its simply not possible.
I have read Ulysses and Silmarillion. The former took me three attempts, but is actually good (nay great) literature when you get into it. The latter is entirely forgettable, and was only read because I was young and impressionable at the time - if the telephone directory had been writen by any of Tolkein (or for that matter Frank Herbert) at the time, I would have struggled through it manfully.
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Ulysses is on my to-read pile. I love all the excerpts I've read of it. I read Dubliners last year and absolutely adored that. Ulysses is the same but a bit longer, right?
d.
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It's certainly longer.
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I never got on with Terry Pratchett. I'm actually quite disappointed with myself because my younger son has read pretty well everything he's produced and clearly enjoys it immensely. I enjoyed Hitchhiker's Guide, and I read a few of the later ones.
Mostly, I find Dickens very tedious, but I read Hard Times. That was made a lot easier because at the time the Head of the school I was teaching in was Mr. Gradgrind personified I'd burst out laughing at inappropriate moments. I'm sure it wasn't what Dickens had in mind at all.
Oh, I tried that Louis de Bernieres thing that my daughters enthused about so much but I didn't finish that either. Can't remember what it was called now.
*googles*
Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Just couldn't get on with it.
These days I read hardly anything.
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I failed to read either the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings. Too many descriptions of mountains in them for me.
Other books I've started reading and been enjoying them, only to drift away from them. Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent being one I can actually remember.
I read The Glass Bead Game in an evening but that was during my "experimental" phase so I may not have actually read it all the way through. I certainly can't remember anything about it apart from the boy getting a glass of milk.
Haven't read much recently as having to read a lot of impenetrable academic papers for work means the last thing I want to do at home is stare at ink on dead trees. Or e-ink on long dead sea creatures.
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Graham Greene was recommended to me by my older daughter as well. I quite enjoyed the Quiet American but started Our Man in Havana and got completely stuck.
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I got through the Silmarillion at, I think, the second attempt. But it was definitely hard work, not least for the reasons described below:
Tolkien's The Children of Húrin (and the condensed version of the same story found in The Silmarillion). Húrin and his brother Huor fight in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, where Huor dies and Húrin is taken prisoner by Morgoth. Húrin refuses to tell Morgoth the location of a nearby Hidden Elf Kingdom, so Morgoth curses his family, and forces Húrin to watch the unfolding misfortune playing out on Túrin, his son, and Túrin's sister Nienor. By the time the story ends, Túrin has killed his best friend accidentally, taken a kingdown to its fall, failed to save his girlfriend, and unknowingly married Nienor. When she finds out, Nienor throws herself off a cliff (whilst pregnant with Túrin's child). Túrin kills himself with his sword. His father, no longer a prisoner, accidentally leads the enemy to the city he had tried to protect in the battle, and then he and his wife find their children's tomb; soon after she dies of grief. Hurin tries to avenge his children's death but only succeeds in bringing down a curse on another Hidden Elf Kingdom, and is finally told by Melian that he's only helping Morgoth with his actions, and he kills himself. The End.
- Everything in the Quenta Silmarillion is this, except arguably Beren and Luthien. Finwe's family ends up entirely wiped out after he gets killed by Morgoth who then steals the Silmarils.
- His eldest son Feanor leading a Badass Army on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge to retrieve the Silmarils that ends up killing him, 6 of his sons, the surviving one (Maglor) spent wandering the shores of the world singing in despair.
- His second eldest son Fingolfin and his three children Fingon, Turgon and Aredhel all get killed achieving nothing.
- His third son Finarfin survives, but four out of his five children get killed (although Finrod dies saving the aforementioned Beren).
- And then there are 3 of the 5 great battles against Morgoth that end in tragedy: The Battle of the Sudden Flame: Everyone Burns, The Battle of Unnumbered Tears: Everyone Dies, and the Final Battle: Everything Gets Destroyed. The Battle of Unnumbered Tears gets special mention though: it's the first coalition of all the races together to fight Morgoth, and the greatest army seen so far in the world outside of the gods. It gets crushed so badly and so many people die that Morgoth literally makes a hill out of the corpses. Worst is that they never had a chance: the only power strong enough to defeat Morgoth was the Valar, who sunk Beleriand in the process.
- By the end of the First Age, the only names characters left alive (out of a cast of several dozen immortal elves) are Galadriel (Finarfin's daughter), her husband Celeborn, Elrond and Elros (Turgon's grandchildren), Gil-galad (Fingon's son), Cirdan, and Feanor's grandson Celebrimbor(who eventually gets killed by and used as a banner by Sauron, not necessarily in that order either.)
I guess Earendil persuading the Valar to deal with Morgorth for once and for all comes under the bittersweet ending (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/BittersweetEnding/Literature) category, given that the Valar break the world in the process. In the history of Beleriand and Middle Earth, bittersweet is practically a happy ending... ;D
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I don't actually believe anyone has read James Joyces Ullyses. This is a book that one pretends to read, or leaves lying around well thumbed, but nobody has read it in full. Its simply not possible.
There was a thread (on ACF, or the old C+?) about books that people had on their shelves or coffee table in order to look cool/improve their mating chances... :demon:
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- Feanor leading a Badass Army on a Roaring Rampage
I like the sound of that ;D
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- Feanor leading a Badass Army on a Roaring Rampage
I like the sound of that ;D
You note that it did not end well... ;)
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- Feanor leading a Badass Army on a Roaring Rampage
I like the sound of that ;D
You note that it did not end well... ;)
My rampages rarely do...
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I did read Ulysses, in the summer between the end of A levels and the beginning of university, on the basis that it was one of those books I "should" have read. Despite reading each page, with the words in what I assume were the author's intended order, I never understood it. Also, I thought it was hideously pretentious crap.
I have started and not finished a number of sci-fi books because although I would like to enjoy sci fi, I don't. Also Tolkien: I read the Hobbit but nothing else of his fiction. I find reading Tolkien is remarkably like talking to a really stoned adolescent boy, and I know this because when I was an adolescent girl I did a lot of that. ;D I do like Tolkien's non-fiction though.
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The Social Construction of Reality, by Berger and Luckman. At some point the mind rebels against the constant stream of mixed Latin, Greek, French and German terms that get bandied about, and concludes that this sort of knowledge is unreal and probably unnecessary.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Jcma84waN3AC&oi=fnd&pg=PT1&dq=social+construction+of+reality&ots=WE47Z5KkLJ&sig=ecBDzx22xMElIrzDqV7AjJ8zyMg
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Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour.
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The Dice Man. I need solitary time to get through it and I won't get that till easter.
This is the only book I can remember making a conscious decision to stop reading. Just couldn't cope with the idea of anyone's life being so unstructured & open to chance! :sick: :-[
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Ulysses (never tried) , Moby Dick (struggled through) , the Silmarillion (failed): fair enough. But some of these seem very readable to me - To Kill a Mockingbird? Our Man in Havana? JG Ballard? Each to their own of course and I'm sure my particular bete noir - Catch 22 - will surprise a few people. I just found it unfunny. And I like every Dickens I've read/reread apart from The Tale of Two Cities: it was the worst of books. I think some books have to be read at the right time of life. I read 'On the Road' at 16 or 17 and loved it. I thought I'd read it agin a few years back and couldn't see what I'd originally seen in it. Ditto for The Catcher in the Rye.
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I couldn't finish Catch 22.
Or the Catcher in the Rye.
Maybe it's books with "catch" in the title.
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(http://www.prettygoodbritain.com/pics/frenchlit.jpg)
Turns out it's just the right size for putting my computer at an ergonomic height.
In the same vein:
(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y289/nicknacknick/pinker_zpsa0839020.jpg)
I haven't managed to read this either.
Yes, we're very big on dust here. ::-)
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I couldn't finish Catch 22.
Or the Catcher in the Rye.
Maybe it's books with "catch" in the title.
I'd forgotten about Catch 22. I don't think I got as far as page 22. :D
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In terms of sheer obstinacy, my aunt deserves some sort of prize. She started reading Middlemarch one summer holiday when she was in her early 20s. Next summer she started again where she'd left off. The summer after that she started again... She eventually finished it when she was 54!
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Middlemarch takes a long time to get going and I can easily imagine a lot of people would give up on it before they get to page 200. But if you stick with it, it will reward your perseverance many times over. The last 700 pages just fly by.
d.
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Many years ago, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence.
I eventually realised that I just couldn't be arsed.
That is so much one of my favourites that I even retraced the protagonists' route in 2009...
I'm with both of you here. I started it when I was about 20 and found it just boring, gave up. Then I read it all a couple of years ago and found that it's actually very interesting.
I bought it in the US about 20 years ago, and seriously struggled. This was at a time when I was travelling extensively, so got through a huge number of books. I almost didn't bother bringing it back home.
I tried again about 3 years ago, and found it quite enjoyable, but still only got about 3/4 the way through - though that was probably due to me reading whilst travelling, then being home for a while it sat unloved in my flight bag and I didn't get back into it but got distracted by the huge pile of "to read" books by my bed. One day I'll finish it.
MrsH didn't manage it either.
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Has anyone actually read The Silmarillion? ;D
I have.
I wish I hadn't.
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Moby Dick.
The book is cursed. We chose it as the group read for a group holiday. As we began reading it, bad things happened, cars crashed, luggage was lost, people got ill. We all stopped reading the book and things went back to normal. We all agreed to never try read the book again, and left our copies in the farmhouse we were staying in. So if you find 5 copies of Moby Dick in a French farmhouse, back away, they be evil!
I agree about Moby Dick although for me it was just hard going rather than cursed.
Also Catch 22.
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Just thought of another one: The Collector Collector by Tibor Fischer. What is known in Ye Shedde as PISIP.
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I'll read most things, I read very fast and have even finished a Dan Brown or two (although they were pretty dire).
I have read the sodding Hobbit - twice. Once by myself cos my older (cool) sister's mates were HUGE Tolkein nerds and then bloody school foisted it onto us in English. Hated it both times. I got about 3 pages into Silmarillion before giving up on that. I probably tried LOTR but had already decided I hated Tolkein. I don't like the films either. Deeply Tedious Pretentious Crap.
I can't get into Pratchett's books either, I keep retrying because most of my friends love him and I like the ideas and concepts and the films have been enjoyable but in written form it doesn't speak to me.
I don't like Dickens, I have got through two I think and while I see it's supposed to be good the experience is like eating dry crackers with no water.
I enjoyed War and Peace, I was named after a character in it and I spent 2 weeks of lurgy reading it on a Palm IIIc in bed which was ideal. I think there is something to be said for getting 200p into Russian authors' books for the tone to get into your head and into the zone.
I don't think I finished Zen and motorcycle maintenance, I got bored.
George Elliot is an acquired taste I believe, if you don't mind being depressed horribly by her books *shudder*.
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Barakta, you're not the first person on here to have had trouble with Dickens! While there is no shortage of good stuff to read instead, I hope you'll try him again sometime. I'd start with the "Christmas Books", which are novellas, really, then maybe Little Dorrit, A Tale Of Two Cities or Nicholas Nickleby. The latter is incredibly gripping, and while it is brutal in places, it's also very funny in others. It's easy to lose patience with Dickens but I think it helps to remember that most of his work was written as instalments for his magazine, so he had to keep churning. You've certainly got enough staying power if you've read "War and Peace", which I also loved. How about Anna Karenina?
Peter
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I thought Catch-22 was absolutely brilliant. I enjoyed Catcher in the Rye as well.
Sorry, strayed off-topic.
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Prize winners usually
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I've struggled with Dickens in the past but last year I made a concerted effort to read the Pickwick Papers and finished it. God, it was tedious. Very funny in places but not enough to really sustain the interest for 900-odd pages.
I think I like Dickens as a storyteller more than as a writer, though he has his moments - the opening passage of Bleak House is magnificent (maybe I'll read the rest of that one day).
d.
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I hated Captain Correlli's Mandolin, though I did finish it. Everyone in it is really stupid.
The book I have read least of before deciding it was crap was the first one of the many Shanarra (Shanaharana? Sha-something) whatever, by Terry Brookes. God it was bad. I read one and a half chapters.
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Well I loved 'The Silmarillion' :D
'Song of Stone' by Iain Banks was pretentious shit and ghastly.
'The Museum of Innocence' by Orhan Pamuk, none of our Reading Group could finish it. The newest one which they could not finish was 'NW' by Zadie Smith.
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The Dice Man. I need solitary time to get through it and I won't get that till easter.
I wouldn't bother if I were you!
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How To Teach Quantum Physics To Your Dog.
I can only read a few pages at a time and then end up leaving it for weeks, by which time I've forgotten what little I understood.
Plus it makes my brain hurt and feels too much like being at work.:(
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Thanks Mrs P - that reminds me:
A Brief History of Time; and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind
Just the wrong kind of abstract for me, I think :-[
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Many years ago, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence.
I eventually realised that I just couldn't be arsed.
Took me a couple of attempts---but eventually read all of it including the philosophy sections at the end.
However, in spite of several attempts, could not get more than about 50 pages through the follow up---Lila.
In fact there is a potential interesting thread here---books you liked with follow ups you hated. Catch 22 (I think it is brilliant) is a good example. I did read all the follow up as an exercise in gritty determination (early mental training for Audax!?!) which I seem to remember was something "Gold"; it was truly DIRE!!!!
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Thanks Peter I may shove some of those onto my ebook readers for times I may consider reading those.
I also loved Anna Karenina, I've read it at least twice as I have a lovely old twin book set copy as well as electronic ones.
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So everyone's happy with Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad (except for bikenrrd with The Secret Agent)?
I find Hardy a breeze, though felt completely wrung out emotionally after Tess and Jude; and Conrad's writing dense but rewarding.
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I did read the Silmarillion when I was 14, it was just a phase..... though I've read LOTR multiple times.
I've not touched Hardy since having to read "Far from the madding crowd" for my GCE, "Love in the time of cholera" was left on a railway bench when I had to change platforms and I couldn't be arsed going back for it.
Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren" was stuffed back into the bag on a long flight. I must give it another go sometime.
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So everyone's happy with Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad (except for bikenrrd with The Secret Agent)?
No, I find most of the 'classic' authors to be tedious drivel.
A little like Kim, sometime in my mid 20's the switch got flipped. More or less when I did the last batch of vaguely serious computer programming I did. I stopped playing games and almost entirely stopped reading fiction.
Back in the day, I read the Hobbit, LOTR and the Silmarillion. I think some people were trying to read the Silmarillion as a book, but it's really a potted episodic history. Tolkien also said the LOTR is definitely not allegory: It's just a story, so I never found it pretentious as it wasn't pretending to be anything. Looking for anything beyond the tale and the songs is a bit pointless.
When I came back to reading more fiction I tried a few of the 'classics' again.
Moby Dick seems to crop up a lot, but I enjoyed it. I actually read it because (for reasons too tedious to explain) I was looking for a description on early whaling, and found a note on Wiki that the best was to be found in Melville's work. Dickens - er, no thanks. Khalil Gibran, Hardy, Lawrence, Joyce, Peake ditto. Erskine Childers ur-espionage tale the Riddle of the Sands was one I couldn't finish. Somehow it should have pushed lots of buttons but didn't.
Some Virginia Woolf I can just about read. Jeanette Winterson started well, but I drifted away when she wrote GUT Symmetries and haven't felt the need to drift back.
I read Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series more or less as it was published, then the second set, then... ... ignored him for twenty years, and when I tried to read them again, I gave them away because they were so unreadable. As were all the other books of his that I've tried to read.
For as long as I can remember, the only author I've found consistently good is Alan Garner, but he doesn't provide light relief. That usually ends up coming from Patrick O'Brian and Terry Pratchett.
The rest is non-fiction. I think I may not finish the OS X server manuals though, and the SGI IRIX admin manuals are somewhat neglected these days. Currently I'm also not managing to read VSM, Hydra and Signiant manuals, preferring instead the heady whiff of new cameras as I delve into the innards of Sony HDC2500s and Canon XJ27 Digi-Super box lens manuals. They're not readable, but I have far more need to read them than read Jane Austen.
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Well I loved 'The Silmarillion' :D
'Song of Stone' by Iain Banks was pretentious shit and ghastly.
Not his best. I thought it was his last attempt to write something different. Since then he's been treading water & rehashing his old stuff.
I read ""The Dice Man" when I was about 11, I think it corrupted me......... :o
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With all this talk of Silmarillion (I never finished that one either) I am reminded of one of my favourite quotes (apparently a true story although it may have been Dyson not Lewis who uttered the famous words)...
While CS Lewis and Tolkien were at Oxford together they were formed a reading group where they would share their works by reading to each other. On reading yet another chapter from LoTR, Lewis lost patience interrupting him with Oh no! Not another fucking elf!
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Many years ago, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence.
I eventually realised that I just couldn't be arsed.
Took me a couple of attempts---but eventually read all of it including the philosophy sections at the end.
However, in spite of several attempts, could not get more than about 50 pages through the follow up---Lila.
I've read it a couple of times but it's hard going. Especially as all the characters appear to be gits of the first order.
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I must be odd. Read Moby Dick at about 13 and enjoyed it.
Read Lila - I didn't think the narrator was a git, just more than a bit pathetic.
ZatAoMM led me to my current profession, it mislead me that the job would be interesting.
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I can't get into Pratchett's books either, I keep retrying because most of my friends love him and I like the ideas and concepts ... but ...it doesn't speak to me.
I like Pratchett, but I fee exactly as above about Malcolm Pryce, Jasper fforde and Robert Rankin. I've read the first novel by each of them, enjoyed it, and been unable to read any of the subsequent ones.
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Erskine Childers ur-espionage tale the Riddle of the Sands was one I couldn't finish. Somehow it should have pushed lots of buttons but didn't.
+1. It wasn't bad, but incredibly slow and just ... you know ... boring.
Yet it came with so many trusted recommendations. I reeeeeally tried to finish that one. >:(
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So everyone's happy with Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad (except for bikenrrd with The Secret Agent)?
I find Hardy a breeze, though felt completely wrung out emotionally after Tess and Jude; and Conrad's writing dense but rewarding.
Not a fan of Conrad. Not particularly fond of Hardy's novels but I do like his rhymes.
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So everyone's happy with Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad (except for bikenrrd with The Secret Agent)?
I find Hardy a breeze, though felt completely wrung out emotionally after Tess and Jude; and Conrad's writing dense but rewarding.
I still haven't finished Nostromo, despite a couple of tries.
I think Conrad's a wonderful writer, but as you say, it's so dense that I need a decent run-up.
I read half of Heart of Darkness on a train journey once, but when I picked it up the next day I had to go back to the beginning.
I've always struggled with DH Lawrence. God, it's just so florid. Sons and Lovers, I gave up on when I was just too irritated by the characters. I thought his poetry was better.
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I read (and didn't mind) The Silmarillion. It fills in the back story of the Lord of the Rings. Bit turgid.
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Catcher in the Rye. Read it on holiday, but only because there wasn't anything else. What was the point?
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The Dice Man, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, were set books on my Degree course.
I had to agree with Persig about shimming out handlebars with offcuts of Coke cans. Sound advice, which has stood me in good stead over the years.
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I find Conrad somehow similar to some of Graham Greene, although Greene is both lighter and gloomier. Perhaps you know what I mean but if you don't I'm afraid I can't explain it! :( I like them both. Hardy I used to hate, from having to read The Woodlanders when I was 15, but have read some recently and quite liked it.
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I'm also in the 'I seem to have stopped reading fiction' camp. Not too good on books at all at the moment. Must do something about that.
But back to the topic...
Dickens. I like A Christmas Carol, but haven't managed to get into anything else (not that I've tried hard).
Thomas Hardy. Being a folk musician and living as close to Dorset as I do, this is almost heresy. I've started the Trumpet Major twice, but again, not really given it a proper go.
Actually getting properly into a book and then just abandoning it:
Thomas Covenant. I struggled through the first three, got half way through the first book of the second trilogy and realised I just didn't care about Covenant at all!
I loved Lord of the Rings, managed the Silmarillion, but failed on Unfinished Tales.
Enjoyed 'My Childhood' by Maxim Gorky (which was a set book for English O level) but the translation of the next volume of his autobiography I found was an official Soviet one and was completely unreadable.
D H Lawrence. Mother studied him for OU, and I tried some of the books. I was probably too young (early teens) to appreciate them.
August 1914 and one other of Solzhenitsyn's. Gave up on both.
Glass Bead Game was an 18th birthday present. I just couldn't get into it at all then, but tried again in my third year at uni and enjoyed it.
Can't think of anything else at the moment.
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Moby Dick.
The book is cursed. We chose it as the group read for a group holiday. As we began reading it, bad things happened, cars crashed, luggage was lost, people got ill. We all stopped reading the book and things went back to normal. We all agreed to never try read the book again, and left our copies in the farmhouse we were staying in. So if you find 5 copies of Moby Dick in a French farmhouse, back away, they be evil!
I agree about Moby Dick although for me it was just hard going rather than cursed.
Also Catch 22.
Maybe the more literary of you lot knew this, but I didn't: Moby Dick was considered unreadable by just about everyone in its day - even the critics thought it was rubbbish [mentioned on some artsy programme yesterday]
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The Trumpet-Major is possibly Hardy's worst book. Try Far From The Madding Crowd first, then Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
I am having trouble reading the Reg Harris biography. It's written by someone who doesn't seem to know much about cycling (20mph for the first half of a TT is good?) and Harris is not in the least bit likeable or interesting.
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The Dice Man. I need solitary time to get through it and I won't get that till easter.
IIRC I read it on a beach in Goa.
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Moby Dick here too - got all the story elements I should supposedly like but never been able to get into it, despite about four attempts.
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Maybe the more literary of you lot knew this, but I didn't: Moby Dick was considered unreadable by just about everyone in its day - even the critics thought it was rubbbish [mentioned on some artsy programme yesterday]
I think mixed reviews describe its reception better. But it is worth to remember that many major literary works that now are considered masterpieces, had very bad reviews when first published. Slight deviations in form or content from what was customary could lead to scathing reviews. Melville's style with mixing real facts and tall fantastic tales was disliked by some contemporary critics, but later authors and critics saw it as a strength and began praising the book again.
I thought it was very good when I read it some decades ago; a little heavy with its Christian symbolism, and very long of course, so I can see why not everyone likes it.
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Another +1 for the Silmarillion.
I have read all of Moby Dick, and, apart from a few amusing chapters on whaling, and why whales are clearly fish to any right-minded person (sure, they have lungs, give birth to live young which they suckle, have horizontal flukes instead of vertical, and all that stuff, but they live in the sea, so they must be fish!), I regretted it. I only read it because I was trying to find the source of a quote for a Guinness advert (the one with the surfers, and the horses/waves, and the voiceover saying that "This one waits; tick follows tock...") and "everyone" said it was from Moby Dick. I can assure Everyone that they are Wrong. I checked.
I've found Dickens a lot better since I borrowed a lot of audiobooks (I listen to them as a bed-time story). Hugh Laurie as Pip led to a confusing mental crossover with Bleak Expectations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleak_Expectations) one dozy evening. :-[
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tick follows tock ... I've been meaning to find this out for years. Google gives the blurb from the agency responsible:
"
Set to techno-punk rhythms of Leftfield. Since the client felt the envelope could be pushed further, a new prose was created by a literary concoction of Moby Dick with influences from Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. The last line was inspired by James Joyce from his novel Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man where he goes on to talk about how man must rid himself of social trappings before he can become a true artist.
"
So everyone is right :P
clicky (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vtdqL2XqrE8J:http://orchardfresh.blogspot.com/2009/05/literary-references-to-guinness-surfer.html%2Btick+follows+tock&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&hl=en&ct=clnk)
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My son has been reading Lord Of The Rings. It's hard to get a teenage boy to read but he's generally quite enthusiastic when he finds something he likes - he raced through The Hobbit. He's been struggling with LOTR though and finally admitted to me over the weekend that he was finding it boring. So I had to explain to him that it was perfectly OK to feel like this and he shouldn't struggle on with it when he's not enjoying it. You should have seen the look of relief on his face... Poor thing. ;D
He's now switched to The Picture Of Dorian Gray instead and is loving it. :thumbsup:
d.
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tick follows tock ... I've been meaning to find this out for years. Google gives the blurb from the agency responsible:
"
Set to techno-punk rhythms of Leftfield. Since the client felt the envelope could be pushed further, a new prose was created by a literary concoction of Moby Dick with influences from Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. The last line was inspired by James Joyce from his novel Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man where he goes on to talk about how man must rid himself of social trappings before he can become a true artist.
"
So everyone is right :P
clicky (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vtdqL2XqrE8J:http://orchardfresh.blogspot.com/2009/05/literary-references-to-guinness-surfer.html%2Btick+follows+tock&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&hl=en&ct=clnk)
I've read that before in various forms, and yet I disagree. I've scoured all of Moby Dick (how ironic) looking for any of the phrases from that advert, and they just aren't there. No-one can give a chapter reference, or anything more specific than the quote you posted above.
I think the truth of the matter is it was made up by an advertiser, who claimed that it is "based on" or "inspired by" Moby Dick to try and make it sound deeper than it actually is.
Remember kids - just because it's on the internet doesn't make it true. I once did loads of research into Victorian Nipple Piercing, because "Everyone" said that Victorian ladies pierced their nipples, and they included citations to books to back up their claims. I wondered what said jewellery looked like, so I tracked down the books, tracked back loads of references, and eventually found that all the Victorian nipple-piercing tales originated with one book which was published in the 1960s. This book had no references to any of its sources, and also claimed that Victorian ladies had ribs surgically removed to wear smaller corsets (http://www.snopes.com/horrors/vanities/ribs.asp) and that Roman Centurions wore heavy woollen cloaks which they held in place by attaching them to nipple piercings. In short, it was a crock of made-up nonsense, but because it was written down and referenced with proper citations, it was a Fact.
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Kathy, your life sounds like one long stream of disappointment!
Citoyen's post has reminded me: The brightest kid in my school had peculiar parents. each of the 6 kids was given a reading list (I think it was 100 books to read by age 16?). I can only remember that it was quite an interesting mixture - but totally lacking in modern stuff - and included the Willard Price books. (Which I happen to think were pretty good adventure yarns for perhaps a 12yo, and probably had quite a lot of educational content). I don't recall Silmarillion being in there.
The kids are all ex-Oxbridge doctors and stuff, I don't think their odd parents did them any harm.
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Kathy, your life sounds like one long stream of disappointment!
;D
I'm just bitter about all the time that Moby Dick stole from me...
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Life, The Universe And Everything. Convoluted nonsense to the power n. Switched the radio adaptation off after 5 minutes, too.
Catch 22. What is the big deal?
Wiggins, My Time. That's been on the bathroom floor since Christmas Day. Stuck at page 120-something. I suppose I don't want him to turn out like Lance.
Weighty tomes I've just never started (attention span of a concussed squirrel). With the possible exception of Pirsig, reading Tolstoy, Dickens, Solzhenitsyn etc. never helped me to true a wheel or finish a build. If it's relevant or interesting it will get read. If it isn't it won't.
What?
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Maybe the more literary of you lot knew this, but I didn't: Moby Dick was considered unreadable by just about everyone in its day - even the critics thought it was rubbbish [mentioned on some artsy programme yesterday]
I think mixed reviews describe its reception better. But it is worth to remember that many major literary works that now are considered masterpieces, had very bad reviews when first published. Slight deviations in form or content from what was customary could lead to scathing reviews. Melville's style with mixing real facts and tall fantastic tales was disliked by some contemporary critics, but later authors and critics saw it as a strength and began praising the book again.
I thought it was very good when I read it some decades ago; a little heavy with its Christian symbolism, and very long of course, so I can see why not everyone likes it.
I have read all of Moby Dick, and, apart from a few amusing chapters on whaling, and why whales are clearly fish to any right-minded person (sure, they have lungs, give birth to live young which they suckle, have horizontal flukes instead of vertical, and all that stuff, but they live in the sea, so they must be fish!), I regretted it. I only read it because I was trying to find the source of a quote for a Guinness advert (the one with the surfers, and the horses/waves, and the voiceover saying that "This one waits; tick follows tock...") and "everyone" said it was from Moby Dick. I can assure Everyone that they are Wrong. I checked.
Going way OT here - but not only whales, also ducks, swans, even beavers were considered fish in the middle ages, as the Church forbade eating meat on Fridays and certain other days - so first fish were exempted, then gradually just about every creature that comes into contact with water was classified as a fish in order to allow obedient Christians to eat it.
I've never even tried to read Moby Dick, but I do know that the ship's first mate does not make good coffee.
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I rather like Moby Dick. I've probably read it two or three times and think it has stood the test of time well. It's a great big tale contained within a really well described world, complete with erroneous science. I quite often pick it up and just start reading it anywhere, as I know the story well. Same with Catch 22 and The Dice Man.
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon has been on my Kindle for a while waiting to be read.
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Going way OT here - but not only whales, also ducks, swans, even beavers were considered fish in the middle ages, as the Church forbade eating meat on Fridays and certain other days - so first fish were exempted, then gradually just about every creature that comes into contact with water was classified as a fish in order to allow obedient Christians to eat it.
There's been a discussion on another forum I'm on about whether beaver (or possibly just beaver tail) counted as fish during the middle ages.
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It did.
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That wasn't the conclusion arrived at on the other forum. It seems to be a set of reports which go along the lines of "have you heard about those people in a-place-far-away where they're so stupid they consider beaver tails to be fish". It's all second hand reports. All the documented evidence (such as the 'rules' of the various monastic orders) do not seem to mention beavers and seem to be fairly explicit in stating that anything with four legs is meat.
The animals that are forbidden during fasting are "animals that take their rest on the earth, and of those that breathe the air and their products, such as milk from those that walk on the earth, and eggs from birds."