I'm slogging my way through the 650 page Adventures of Kavalier and Clay right now, and it's odd. I'm admiring the heck out of it, but I can't seem to get engaged. I keep thinking that something's going to click, and I'll tear through the remaining 400 pages, but it's not happening. I remember when I first started Midnight's Children, I felt the same way. Impressed, intrigued, but after a slow jog through maybe 100 pages, I got distracted and on to other books...a year later I finally picked it up again and it became maybe my favorite book. Maybe that's what I need to try now...
I waited for Midnight's Children to click for the duration of the book. I never really got into it. Don Quixote I enjoyed, but was less than amazed by as well.
With Don Quixote, the translation can make all the difference. Some are absolutely soporific compared to others. Let's see.... speaking of books in translation: I've dug The Odyssey on several occasions, but getting through The Iliad was brutal. It took me two or three starts to get through David James Duncan's The Brothers K. I'm 0- for 3 on my attempts to get through The Brother's Karamazov.
I first tried to read Dickens' David Copperfield 10 or so years ago and couldn't get past the first 50 pages. Now it's one of my favourite books.
Lusiads - Camoes Ulysses - Joyce Dubliners - Joyce (I stoped at "Two Gallants ") something else always comes along when I'm reading Dubliners. I'll pick it up once I finish Epitaph of a Small Winner.
Which do you recommend?! Is the Edith Grossman one good? I picked it up cheap at a book fair, but I can get most on the kindle.
The Iliad? Really? I found the Odyssey much harder going, though as a classicist think they are both fantastic, and get better with each read.
I don't have a copy of DQ anymore, but I remember having a Penguin paperback and a Signet in the house after my wife and I got married. I tried one (can't remember which) and nodded of practically right away. Then I picked up the other and finished it in about 10 days. I think the Grossman gets pretty good reviews. Another one I looked at (skimmed but haven't read) is by Burton Raffel, who has a great translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (which I need to add to my "struggled with" list). But if you can get Grossman on the kindle, I'd do that. Gotta make that thing pay for itself! Yeah, I know: I've never met anyone else whose had the experience I've had with those two books.
I read the Raffel translation and liked it. We're limiting this to works that we ended up liking or appreciating, right? I struggled with A Remembrance of Things Past, The Mill on the Floss, Emma, and The Magic Mountain. All were good, although I'll maintain until my dying day that Proust is vastly overrated. I've also read just about everything that John Ashbery wrote up until the early 80s, plus one or two of the books he's published since then . . . but come to think of it, I'm not sure how highly I regard most of it. I don't think there are any poems of his that I like that aren't also in his Selected Poems.
Took me two tries to do Gravity's Rainbow, but I tore through it the second time. Same with Dhalgren. The Norton Don Quixote is a good translation. Have petered out on the way through Proust and Tolstoy often enough that I'm not going to try any more. I loved Kavalier and Clay, though.
I've been reading Kavalier & Clay for 2 years now. Its just not gripping me. I appreciate the story, the writing is nice.......but I just don't really like it enough. Almost reminds me of Messud's "The Emperor's Children" which was beautifully written, but after reading it, I wasn't sure I had liked it. (Especially because of the ending.)
That last one reminds me of an SF joke I heard a long time ago: Name three places no human being has ever traveled: 1) The dark side of the moon. 2) The far side of the sun. 3) Past page 97 of Dhalgren.
Gravity's Rainbow is definitely top of the list. And Giles Goatboy. Loved it, but the joke just gets tired after 600 pages. I got through about 3/4s of both of those and don't feel guilty about it. The Iliad I'm not longer interested in trying. Never made it past page 3, I think. I read a prose version of the Odyssey and have read it more than once. Cervantes definitely requires a good translator. The one I read (2x) was from the 60's, can't remember his name. The Old Testament. If I was stranded on an island with nothing but that, I'd die of boredom. When I was young and ambitious I tried to read Thomas Wolfe and Proust, but I didn't try very hard. The only Russian novel I remember quitting on (of about 30) is Dostoevsky's The Idiot. It''s considered one of his four "great" works. Just absolutely tedious.
Ohhh, Bonfire of the Vanities is such a lovely book once you get past about 75 pages. The "Masters of the Universe" chapter is some of the finest writing of the past 25 years. (Lets pretend the movie never happened.) The Idiot, ironically, is Dostoyevsky's best book. (Since the main character is crazy, its the only one of his books that makes sense.)
Bonfire of the Vanities is a fantastic book. One of my favourite modern novels, but it does start slowly.
Hey, me too, come to think of it. Although I did finish it. While I was reading it I enjoyed it but it's not like I ever had trouble putting it down, and it didn't call to me when I wasn't reading it, the way most books do.
Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury was equally brilliant and frustrating to read. The first 50 pages was pure work, the following 150 or was a battle to get through but an incredible read to say the least.
Certainly that's part of it. But also books that critics, your friends, your professors love (and you can appreciate/understand what they like about them), but that you just can't get into for some reason.
I think he/she meant Thomas Wolfe of "Look Homeward, Angel" fame, which strikes me as exactly the type of book people often start and don't finish. Your comment on Kavalier and Clay is verbatim what I say to fans of the book all the time. I use some of Chabon's shorter essays in teaching sometimes, so I feel kinda guilty about not finishing his damn masterpiece.
Oh......I haven't even heard of that one, to be honest. My sister has been trying to get me to read K&C for years now. I've also read some of his other stuff (the Yiddish Policeman's Union, for instance, which went sooo much faster). And, ironically, I've probably read 75% of K&C by now because I kept skipping ahead because the part I was reading at the time just didn't grab me. But I just can't get the requisite interest to finish it.
Well, thus my comment of getting past the first 75 pages. Personally, I think Bonfire of the Vanities, despite one annoying problem*, is the best book of the past 30 years. It has given us characters that have since become absolutely iconic and we can't even picture the 80s (or the last decade) without them - the yuppie Master of the Universe (who really wants to be in ********ing Architecture Digest?) with the Yale Chin (I mean, really, Tom ********ing Hanks as Sherman McCoy?), the resentful DA who sees colleagues do better and the great precursor to "How to lose friends and alienate people". Its just phenomenal writing and easily Wolfe's best work. (And infinitely better than A Man in Full or I am Charlotte Simmons, for which he seems to have read some Greek philosophy and decided he needed to spend a lot of time telling us that.) *The DA that disappears halfway through the book only to reappear at the very end. His story was running in parallel.........and then it suddenly just drops off the face of the earth.
we had to read that in junior high. got through it, but I hated it. The second paragraph is one sentence. It is something like 120 words, but I can't remember the exact number
The opening passage simultaneously put me to sleep and and sucked me into a life long love of Faulkner.
I know what you mean. I'm not exactly sure how I learnt to love it - now I just think it's a great story with some of the greatest characters ever in the history of literature. Elementary Particles by what's his name that controversial French writer, now there's a book that I've tried to finish about 10 times and still haven't managed.
Houellebecq. Ugh. I read two of his books out of a sense of obligation to a friend, and hated them both so much I wanted to bleach my brain after I was done.