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Filed under: Life, Reading | Tags: Booking Through Thursday, books, memes, Reading
I would enjoy reading a meme about people’s abandoned books. The books that you start but don’t finish say as much about you as the ones you actually read, sometimes because of the books themselves or because of the circumstances that prevent you from finishing. So…what books have you abandoned and why?
I don’t like to abandon books once I’ve started. It seems like giving up and letting the book defeat me, but I have a few times. Once was in college. I was taking a class, and we were assigned Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis to read. I couldn’t do it. About halfway through, I started to go cross-eyed every time I picked up the book and started reading. It’s probably the driest fiction I’ve ever read. And for me to say it was dry means something. I suppose that’s the danger of having an emotionally detached doctor as a protagonist. Fortunately, we weren’t being tested on the book. It was just for a discussion, and I bluffed my way through.
Another was Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. The prose was just too dense. The book had been called the “thinking person’s Da Vinci Code“ Well, the characters think, and think, and think some more, and then get drunk and talk about what they’ve been thinking, and then they think about what they said. So in that sense, yes. Somewhere, there’s a happy medium between those two books.
My wife wins the prize though. She stopped reading The Da Vinci Code with thirty pages left until the end. Granted, we were both in law school, and the school year started and working full-time and going to school at night doesn’t leave much time for leisure activities, but still….
What’s the worst typographical error you’ve ever found in (or on) a book?
My copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a typo on the cover. It says d’Ubervilles (leaving out the first r). It’s almost an excusable mistake. I didn’t notice it until I had finished the book, but it’s still embarassing given that it was an edition published by Penguin Classic.
Filed under: Reading | Tags: Booking Through Thursday, books, memes, Reading
Do you have “issues” with too much profanity or overly explicit (ahem) “romantic” scenes in books? Or do you take them in stride? Have issues like these ever caused you to close a book? Or do you go looking for more exactly like them? (grin)
I approach this issue in books the way I approach it in movies. If it’s appropriate for the story and the characters and not gratuitous, then it’s okay. After all, you can’t have a dirty New York City cop saying, “darn it all to heck,” and expect people to take the character seriously. And there are certain situations where that one word is the only one which can adequately convey the feelings of a character.
On the other hand, I think in most situations less is more. A recent series of Batman comics, designed to be a “grittier” reimagining of Batman has him saying at one point, “I’m the [expletive] Batman.” (You can read about it here.) People read it and laughed. They weren’t supposed to. I’ve also been turned off to a book by an “overdescribed” love scene, even if the scene itself was appropriate to the characters and the situation. Adding in every detail just makes the writing awkward, which is pretty much the opposite of the effect you want. (By contrast, read Madame Bovary.)
