Books you stopped reading (for whatever reason)

I actually hit upon an idea the other week -- and which this thread has solidified -- which is to do re-reading as sections of big books (or small ones) again.

I want to revisit stuff without the need of having to finish.

Ah! I didn’t even myself realize Ishiguro was not Japanese. Well then! I suck as much as my friend. Ishiguro’s novel still got binned

Nabokov and Conrad good examples of “not of a single place”.

I unabashedly non-guilty pleasure love David Mitchell’s pulpy good time novels and for a long time joked that number9dream was “Murakami’s only good novel” but I should revisit Murakami I suppose

I have a copy of Mishima Thirst For Love I’ve never finished. Different translator, I think; Donald Keene was my favourite. A translator friend tells me Mishima has a couple novels just-translated from Japanese and the work is insanely good; have to order them. Idk I like Mishima but my interest has waned as I’ve aged.

Didn’t love The Dalkey Archive but I didn’t struggle with it. It’s the only O’Brien I haven’t reread

Idk how I feel about Coetzee, I read Disgrace and was like “oh he’s Philip Roth but in South Africa”, but a friend recommended Waiting For The Barbarians and I only got 50 pages in before I put it into the donation stack

JR, Gaddis - realized the payoff would not be worth the immense effort
Pylon, Faulkner - starting reading it before watching The Tarnished Angels, stopped when I realized I was saying the word "yair" out loud every time I read it
Nightwood, Barnes - insufferable pretentious prose
Ada, Nabokov - insufferable pompous narrator. If that's "the point" I still don't want to know
The Process, Gysin - some gross description I don't remember in the opening pages put me off
Dhalgren, Delany - had my fill of depictions of late-60s urban counterculture with hallucinatory/SF trappings
The Tin Drum, Grass - had my fill of unfunny grotesque slapstick making fun of Nazis
Sleep Has His House, Kavan - first she describes some psychological situation from her past, then she depicts it in "dream form", the two parts undermining each other. I loved Ice, though, where the hallucinatory setting stands on its own without explication
Song of the Silent Snow, Selby - liked or loved his previous four books, found this collection of short stories pointless

i would think The Room would be the step too far for some people when it comes to Selby. its rough to get through.

the only Nabokov i ever finished was Invitation to a Beheading. maybe because it was short. i gave up on Lolita more than once. its the kind of writing that drives me crazy. like Pynchon. i'll bet AI robots could write some good Nabokov books. someone should start publishing AI Pynchon books! he would probably dig them.

Dhalgren, Delany - had my fill of depictions of late-60s urban counterculture with hallucinatory/SF trappings
The Tin Drum, Grass - had my fill of unfunny grotesque slapstick making fun of Nazis

These are two of my favorite books ever, haha

Wow Scott! Nabokov is one of my favourites, and Beheading one of my least-favourites. Wish you liked his prose style more, I think he's amazing. If you want a shorter book by him give Pnin a shot

I quit reading the Magicians series somewhere, I think probably 3/4 of the way through book 2. I liked them, but it took me a long time to read them and for some reason i got totally confused somewhere in Book 2, couldn't tell some characters apart, and then figured fuck it I don't really need to read these (I stopped watching the tv series later when it started as well. I guess...maybe I don't like it?)

I haven't finished Dhalgren either, but only because I can never seem to settle into the formal shift in Ch. 7. I think it's a fascinating book.

I should have stopped reading The Magicians but unfortunately I finished it

Ada or Ardor and Nightwood definitely flawed overblown works I had to power through. I guess it's a style. The opening medieval sexual fantasy in Ada had enough charm, the rest is really long and Nabokov is insufferable as a narrator.
I was quite impressed by The Tin Drum. The line between awe and irritation in literary experiments can be really thin. In certain works (Musil a good example), I experienced both reactions almost simultaneously. Mann as an example of an author who made me blush me with one work, and count the pages with another. A book can be a bit like dating.

I haven't read all of Nabokov's novels, but while Lolita is a remarkable accomplishment, the one I thought was most interesting (and entertaining) was Pale Fire.

Yeah on many days Pale Fire is my favourite English-language novel

That one I did finish, though I can't say I loved it.

Thought of another I didn't complete: Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth.

I very rarely abandon a record or a movie once I've started it, but I don't have those compunctions around fiction; because books take longer to read, and I'm not really invested in the history and the technique of literature in the same way I am with music and film.

Yeah I had an American pomo phase in my early 20s where I picked up everything I could find by Barth, Barthelme (Donald) and Coover at the used stores. I don’t think I finished anything by Barth in the end. Love the other two tho

i think i tried pomo people and quickly realized i didn't have what it took to read them. i was going to buy some barthleme the other day though. because he was funny and his shorts were often very short. my kinda pomo. i went to a new new/used bookstore down the road from me - the guy also has a store in brooklyn and please don't let this mean that we are going to be the new brooklyn - and his used fiction was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 80s gen x bookish grad student dude and it made me itchy. so much barth/coover/hawkes and also bellow/roth/updike/etc. so much of it was stuff that was happening in 1986. nothing old or creaky enough for me. it gets harder and harder for me to find a store that sells 50s/60s/70s hardcover OOP fiction. or obscure 19th/early 20th century stuff. the section had to have been 90% dudes. and i read probably 75% laydeez when it comes to fiction. i couldn't help but think that anyone under 50 would just fall asleep looking at all of that on shelves. his new book section was MUCH happier and hipper and i got some great stuff over there. he also had about 10 huge shelves of used poetry and i thought this was admirable because they will no doubt sit there for people to read in the store long after my death.

"Barthelme"

(Donald)

My copy of Coover’s “Universal Baseball Assoc.” sits neatly on my shelf right next to Darnielle’s “Wolf In White Van”, sorted alphabetically by author, but it’s also a topically appropriate adjacency

Also D Barthelme’s 60 Stories is kinda the ne plus ultra of easy pomo reading, I love it

I read Barth's The End of the Road and some Coover and Barthelme over the years but my brain lacks the dendrites or whatever to absorb them.

i have been enjoying diane williams and gary lutz collections of stories. they are inspiring to me in a pomo way. i read a couple here and there for a boost.

I'll tell you who I've been rereading with pleasure: Joy Williams. What a story writer.

Ya she rules. My favourite Carver collection is Cathedral, whereby Gordon Lish had free rein to posthumously divorce the late Raymond from his Hemingway affectations. I found out about Williams via the Lish connection

i've been reading her since breaking and entering came out and been a huge fan ever since. she has truly inspired me over the years. she has always been big with other writers and i think she is finally better known with regular folks as well. partly because of her environmental stances. (i'm sure you will find me raving about her years ago on ILB and wondering why more people don't read her and now i feel like people really are.)

Yeah her early stories and first novel, State of Grace---Florida girl clouds ov imagery around crisis lines, narrative third and other rails---were revelatory to me, though haven't followed her very well since. A relatively recent New Yorker story seemed unfollowable, and interviews can incl. some Joyce-Carol-Oates-on-Twitter-level snobbery, but the early stuff, at least, is fine as wine.

she's 79 and still doing stuff. god bless. i think she's always been a little cranky.

I know that I've heard some of her stories read on "Selected Shorts," and I've loved them, but I can't think of what they were.

I didn't discover her until 2021, and the rhythm, brevity, and its gnomic virtues gripped me from the start

"Marabou" was definitely one.

love that joy williams and gary lutz have come up, they are the greatest

a friend of mine once compared my writing to gary lutz which is an amazing (and undeserved) compliment

ada was one of my favorite books forever ago! reckon these days it'd make my eyes roll so hard they corkscrew out the back of my skull

+1 to the bible-giver-uppers: i was never a believer but in my teens decided i should read it for its literary and cultural value (and also to brag) but within the first few pages god cursed eve and all womankind so i ripped it up and set it on fire because i absolutely do not play that

more recently i tried frederik pohl's beyond the blue event horizon and it was like chapter 1: "no young man, do not commit rape. there is only a 1 in 6 chance you will enjoy it enough for it to be worth the effort lololol" chapter 2: "dear diary, it sure is tiresome to be a forty year old dude on a cramped spaceship with my bitchy wife and her bitchy 14 year old sister who keeps trying to seduce me, guess there's nothing to do but keep beating the ship's (female) computer at chess lololol" and there were some promising sci-fi concepts to begin with but a writer has to be way more entertaining to get me to power through that much hatred