Just out of curiosity, do you ever start books that turn out not to appeal to you and then force yourself to finish them or do you stop reading them? Do you ever blog about books in the category of being something you just can't finish? (I not sure I recall ever seeing a blog of your's calling out books you dropped). Postscript: the reCAPTCHA verification asked me to select frames in the picture that contained bicycles. How fitting for your blog.
Scott, I often bail out of books that aren't grabbing me, but often that is a result of my not being in the tight mood for a particular book at a particular time, rather than it being a particular reflection on the quality of the book. I mostly subscribe to the "if you can't say something nice, you don't need to say anything at all" school of thought, so I tend not to document the books I've abandoned. I will say it took me multiple tries spread over the course of several decades to make it through Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. I would loose momentum, start reading other books concurrently with it, abandon it, pick it up years later, and then wind up starting again. That said, I list Pynchon among my favorite authors.
"The best laid plans and the best engineering ..." brings to mind (perhaps deliberately on your part ?) the lines "the best laid plans of mice and men ..."
Just out of curiosity, do you ever start books that turn out not to appeal to you and then force yourself to finish them or do you stop reading them? Do you ever blog about books in the category of being something you just can't finish? (I not sure I recall ever seeing a blog of your's calling out books you dropped).
ReplyDeletePostscript: the reCAPTCHA verification asked me to select frames in the picture that contained bicycles. How fitting for your blog.
Scott, I often bail out of books that aren't grabbing me, but often that is a result of my not being in the tight mood for a particular book at a particular time, rather than it being a particular reflection on the quality of the book. I mostly subscribe to the "if you can't say something nice, you don't need to say anything at all" school of thought, so I tend not to document the books I've abandoned. I will say it took me multiple tries spread over the course of several decades to make it through Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. I would loose momentum, start reading other books concurrently with it, abandon it, pick it up years later, and then wind up starting again. That said, I list Pynchon among my favorite authors.
DeleteCorrection "right mood", not "tight mood" in the above response!
ReplyDeleteI'm about 250 pages into Termination Shock (your fault I picked it up). First book in awhile I keep thinking about when I'm not reading it. -LL
ReplyDelete"The best laid plans and the best engineering ..." brings to mind (perhaps deliberately on your part ?) the lines "the best laid plans of mice and men ..."
ReplyDeleteRegards,
Sekhar