Ugh! Why did I read that book?!??!?!

I think the book I read that was most in need of an editor was "Hannibal" - by the "Silence of the Lambs" guy.

I locked myself out of the car at Target one day. While I waited around to see if anyone would turn in my keys (after giving up on finding them myself) I went to the book department and picked up this awful thing to kill some time.

I cannot even begin to explain why I finished it.

I was in a doctor's waiting room, having a smoke and being bored (late 1960s--they still had ashtrays in waiting rooms then), when i picked up a book and began idly leafing through it. The title was Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled Due to a Lack of Interest. As that was already a trite saying by then, i didn't have much hope, but it disappointed even my low expectations. The author described herself as a "housewife," and her story was her "adventures" becoming an undergraduate. She decided to major in English. After several hackneyed accounts of her exposure to "hippies" and silly young people, she describes meeting her English advisor. The gentleman was of east Asian extraction, and she immediately described him as a Jap, and then wrote: "How could he be an English advisor--it's not his language? Didn't we fight those guys in the last war?"

At that point, i began to randomly turn pages and rip them out. I probably had about thirty of them in my pocket when i finished my cigarette and the nurse called. I ought to have burned the book, but i'm opposed to that sort of thing on principle, and certainly don't intend to victimize myself because an author is a racist idiot.

I voted for "turn it into kindling."

I have the 40 page rule. If I'm not into it by page 40, I give up.
I was forced to read "Mill on The Floss" in high school and hated it. I know it's a classic, but I just could not relate. I remember forcing myself to read for 15 minutes at a time. It was like learning meditation. I kept having to still my "monkey mind" to focus on the story.

The Mill on the Floss definitely sucks. I'm a big fan of 19th century literature. I'm a big fan of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). The Mill on the Floss definitely sucks. In school, i was always affronted by being made to read any specific book. I was always happy to accept an assignment to read "a" book and report on it--but i hated having a particular book assigned. I was made to read portions of the The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. I've read every novel Dickens ever wrote--except The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield, which i refuse to read.


Oh, and The Mill on the Floss really sucks--did i mention that?

Thank you Setanta, for 20 years I thought it was just me.

Mary Ann Evans came from an evangelical family, and was very close to her brother, who was a perfervid evangelical. But when she moved out into the wider world, and when she became a writer, and took a wide and deep interest in the expressive, performing and plastic arts, she lost her own evangelical fervor. As she read more, and especially in philosophy, she discarded the evangelicalism of her youth. She became estranged from her brother, the man she most loved, even well into her young adulthood. The Mill on the Floss is definitely not a classic. It is indifferently written, the internal chronology limps along, with "Eliot" obliged to back-track in order to keep it intact. The style of language is unremarkable, and the characterizations are shallow and predictable. It is one of the most florid and embarrassingly melodramatic Victorian novels to have survived the era.

It is asserted, however, to be a metaphorical autobiography. The death of brother and sister at the end of the novel is supposed to stand for the death of the love between Miss Evans and her brother. That may well be true, and could account for the turgid melodrama which clogs one's esthetic arteries in reading it. That is no reason, however, to rate it a classic. Silas Marner is not bad, and although somewhat preachy, still investigates aspects of human character which are interesting. Adam Bede equally suffers from predictable melodrama, but in investigating the evangelical mind and the issue of unwed pregnancy, was daring for its time, and it wears well as entertainment reading. Middlemarch is a tour de force, and represents Miss Evans' most thorough examination of the evangelical mind and of middle class society in general. I am now reading Daniel Deronda, which many assert to be her best novel--i still find portions of it turgid, and her explorations of character to be forced--nevertheless, in the era when "psychological" novels were a novelty, she deserves credit for a fine effort.

Her skill as a writer will never approach that of Austen or Dickens--but she is far an away a much better writer than Anthony Trollope, whose pallid and predictable novels are rated classics. She is also far more interesting for exploring character than any other writer of her time, saving only Austen or Dickens (and perhaps Thomas Hardy, who could be considered a late contemporary).

Oh, and The Mill on the Floss really, really sucks, in case i had failed to mention that.

I ought to take note that Austen is not a contemporary--she was dead before Evans, Dickens, Trollope or Hardy were born.

ogod.

I started Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer over the holidays. I was in the middle of New York Burning (Audio version) but wanted something to have on my lap on the beach. It was a mistake. Not because the book is bad, it has the cleverness and oddball angles of Everything is Illuminated, it was a mistake because it, at least the first two hundred pages, acts like a depressant on me.

There are pictures of a man falling from the World Trade Center. Pictures which are central to the story but which for me conjure up deep pressures in my head.

I have the book on the big hassock with some other books. I move to pick it up every now and again thinking that, hoping that, Jonathan pulls some redemption out of his pages at the end. I need him to. My hand moves towards it but somehow ends up grasping The Best Recipes in the World.

I voted Other.


Joe(I wonder how you make Osso Buco?)Nation

I really liked "Extrememly Loud and Incredibly Close" but yes, it is depressing. Of course, it discusses events that were extrememly louder and incredibly closer to your physical vicinity than mine, so I can understand what you're saying.

Yeah.

"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" is probably my all-time hated book that I actually finished. It was for a book club. <shrug> As I've said here often (so apologies to people who have already seen me say so umpteen times), what's good was stolen wholesale from Deborah Tannen (without credit), and what's left is horribly, page-tearingly, spit-upon-it bad.

I'm currently half-heartedly struggling through "The Life of Pi" -- I almost always like Booker Prize winners, and I'm a fan of magical realism et al (which this isn't quite, so far anyway, but it's not that I don't have a tolerance for the fantastical). It's just badly written -- the Indian "voice" is especially grating to me, and patently false -- and the whole religious struggle part is deeply boring (and that's before we had the recent fun and games here...!) It strikes me as sloppy and lazy and just poo.

But a lot of people I respect like it, so I read a bit more to see if there is any redemption, and get more annoyed...

I'm about to read The Life of Pi, as soon as I finish my current book, what's your advice, Sozobe: to start, or not to start?

Oooh, I dunno. I am not liking it but I know a lot of people who do. Maybe start and see what you think?

I'm embarrassed to admit I even read this, let alone finished it...

Pass It On.
I actually finished the damn thing just to see if there was some trick ending that would change the whole thing, like, "and then everyone died anyway"

The one they actually went and made a movie of for chrissakes.

I will ususally give a book a generous # of pages before I give up on it. In Pass It On's case I finished it because you only had to read every tenth word of every other page to get the gist of it.

I am so embarrassed.

Oh - I also read "Elvis and Me" while at an airport.

I didn't finish "The Life of Pi" -- one of the very few books I've ever given up on.

I was surprised because so many people had recommended it to me.

I'm glad to see that I am not the only person on the planet who wasn't enthralled.

I re-try the first chapter.

If I can't make it through a second time, I put it in the yard sale/Goodwill box.

I've come to accept that I just hate everything by Anne Tyler other than The Accidental Tourist. She is just suicidally depressing <gag>

Oh yeah, the life of pi. I read that a while back. The beginning really dragged, but it gets better near the end.

One of the best birthday presents I've ever given myself (for my 40th birthday) was permission to stop reading any book after 40 or 50 pages.

At least three quarters of the duds on my reading shelf come from the public library and go right back there. The others are paperbacks that I've bought--usually from A2K Amazon or A2K Amazon second hand. If I've paid Good Money for a book I'll give it several tries--after all, I'm a woman of magnificently varied moods--but eventually Enough is Enough and the books goes either to the library book sale or into the Family Grapevine box.

I recently read all of a novel that I didn't really like, but a friend had given it to me and I felt obliged to read it. Actually, the plot kept me going, but overall it was too sweet-natured for me. Which is odd, because the story has to do with terrorists taking over a group of people.

The novel is "Bel Canto" which I know a lot of people liked....

I never finish a book I don't like, no matter who wrote it.