We've all had them, the books we just couldn't pick up. For whatever reason, it's a book everyone says you have to read that you just can't get through. Sometimes, you give them another try. Why's this a bestseller? Why is this a classic?
I've run into it with Russian novels. I've found them hard to read in print. Then a friend of mine, who knew a Russian speaker and an actual Russian, said they don't really translate well. So I listened to Crime and Punishment on audio. Made a huge difference.
But what of books you just couldn't finish no matter what? I went through a list of classics that included Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain. It also included a book that gets highly praised: Portrait of a Lady.
The book begins with Henry James doing his own literary criticism. Um...Aren't you supposed to let other people do the critiques? But Henry just had to provide a few pages reviewing his own book. Okay, fair enough. Stephen King sticks this stuff at the end of his because who wants to read the author's self-indulgent prattle? So I skipped it and moved on to the novel proper.
I'm aware books written before 1900 have a slower pace than those written since World War II. Hemingway made his reputation trimming the fat from his prose almost to the point where you wish he'd put words back in. (That said, The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and To Have and Have Not are masterpieces. Fight me.)
But Henry James spends twenty-five pages where bankers spend the whole time looking down on the common folk. By Page 10, I'm wondering why I'm supposed to be reading this. By Page 20, I hate everyone on the page so far. By Page 25, I throw the book across the room.
But wait. This is a classic. Hey, I slogged through Moby Dick, and I'm glad I did. That story is imprinted on modern storytelling. It's in the DNA of two Star Trek movies. (First Contact is explicit about it when Lily yells at Picard. "Captain Ahab has to go fight his whale!")
So I did like I did with Crime and Punishment. I went audio. Now, I know there are people who think audio is cheating. Since they're wrong, I'm going to ignore that. Anyway, I made it a little farther before I realized the William James was the smarter brother. Without him, Freud's cigar would just be a cigar. (Wait...Freud did say that. Um...He'd have never invented his famous slip?) I not only hated the bankers, but the titular lady did nothing for me, either. I felt like my time was being wasted.
I'd gone through this before. In high school, we had to read The Scarlet Letter. Also in high school, we read the Cliff's Notes to The Scarlet Letter because most of us hated that book. No Moby Dick. No Tom Sawyer, by America's greatest writer. We did somehow manage Tale of Two Cities. But The Scarlet Letter? By about halfway through the book, I was praying time travelers would gift the local indigenous tribe with a small thermonuclear device, maybe a neutron bomb. Now, let me qualify this by saying Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's greatest short story writers. That said, I don't like this one. But I love Stephen King, and I'm still angry about Cell.
Currently, I have one book I've attempted to read over the years with little success on audio. When The Bonfire of the Vanities came out, I attempted to read it. Again, like The Scarlet Letter and Portrait of a Lady, I had to wade through characters I'd generally avoid in real life. Both times I attempted to read it, all I took away before I put the book down was that New York in 1985 was a miserable place to live. Wolfe's other famous book, The Right Stuff, had that can-do, go fever zeitgeist of the early space program. The Mercury Seven were fun to be around even at their worst. The only thing missing was Yuri Gagarin, who'd have fit right in with them.
I'm attempting Bonfire on audio. I think part of the problem is the inciting incident comes about 15% into the narrative. The paperback listed on Amazon is 702 words, so about 108 pages or so. The average novel is around 300 pages, so by page 100, we all know the characters and several major events have happened. It doesn't help the book as an early eighties Rolling Stone hip vibe, something I have even less patience with now than I did at the age of 20. I'm sticking with it, mainly because I listen to it in 100-page sips. I still don't like the people in this book, but eight years of Game of Thrones and five seasons of Succession have awakened my inner schadenfreude when these people manage to screw themselves.
