Fail!

Occasionally I give up on a book. And there are some writers I cannot be bothered with! Time for some confessions, as well as a few reasons…

As a student of English Literature, I had to read a Dickens novel (Hard Times) and a Hardy novel (Tess of the D’Urbervilles); I’ve never bothered with either writer since. Hard Times was short(er) and political and moderately interesting, but I have never once wanted to engage with one of the written-by-the-yard doorstoppers that are sometimes televised as costume dramas. What I’ve read about Dickens suggests he’s over-sentimental and rather maudlin at times. Similarly, Tess was just about OK, but I felt oppressed by the ridiculous sense of fate and doom hanging over the eponymous character all the time, and I have gathered that a lot of Hardy is like that, so I haven’t bothered. It may sound shocking, and surely arrogant, but I don’t have the eyeball time to waste. I’ve managed to get away from the feeling of ‘ought’ and don’t feel guilty.

I tried a Thomas Mann novel once (I think it was Doctor Faustus) and was bored, and gave up. I’ve persisted as best I could, three times now, with Lolita, and failed: as a teenager, in middle age, and more recently, and have given up again; I find the characters so creepy, weird and in the end uninteresting. Sorry.

I’ve read a lot of Soviet fiction, and enjoyed it, challenged by the themes and issues, and the writers’ attempts to write their ways around the censor; the post-Soviet Russian fiction I’ve read (yes, I have finished some novels) I have found tiresome and tedious in the way they revel in gratuitous violence, crime and sex; when they have got this out of their newly-liberated (?) system, then maybe there will be something worthwhile…

Arnold Zweig‘s The Case of Sergeant Grisha – a novel set on the Eastern front in the Great war I began several years ago and then got side-tracked from; I ought to go back to it and probably will. Hermann Broch‘s The Sleepwalkers intrigued me but in the end lost me; Hazlitt‘s essays have been reproaching me from the shelf for over ten years; I want to read Robert Musil‘s epic The Man Without Qualities, but have yet to find myself in the mood; I began Herodotus and then got waylaid by something more gripping, but must go back to it.

I often wonder what is going on. Clearly there is a ‘reading association’ issue here for me: one book may suggest another, so I acquire it with the best intentions, but an association leads me on to something else, and the moment passes, the book remains on the shelf, perhaps never to be opened. Then I do feel guilty, but I know there’s actually very little I can do about it; I cannot programme my reading schedule and stick to it. I have noticed that if it’s a book  I’ve downloaded to my e-reader, I find it easier to give up; owning a physical book makes me feel a bit guiltier.

Why do I give up on a book? And how do I decide? Sometimes the decision is  a deliberate one: I’ll give a book about an hour, or sixty pages or so, to get me really engrossed, and if it doesn’t, then I will give up, usually because I know there’s something else waiting that I will enjoy. Sometimes, as I’ve suggested above, the moment just passes.

When I was planning retirement, I fantasised to myself that I would spend a year reading Shakespeare, and a year reading science fiction, and a year reading travel writing, and somehow deepen my acquaintance with different writers and genres: well, it hasn’t happened, and I don’t see it happening.

Next: growing up? or out of?