books you've had to stop reading

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Ravenscrag by Alain Farah - pretentious self indulgent patrician lit-bro shite that doesn't work

I'm never quite sure what 'patrician' means as an adjective. Of course I could look it up on Wiktionary, but what do you mean by it in this sense?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I seldom re-read. But the tale of lucky Pip is one I could revisit again and again.

I've sniffing around the dickens section of waterstones lately. Read 'Treasure Island' on holiday and it gave me a taste for literature that's written in that very vivid, entertaining and (for want of a real word) yarn-y way. Only trouble is all his books are doorstops so I feel I'll never have the time.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Careful Corpsey, that post is just BEGGING for a really puerile selective quotation.

Not that I'd sink to anything as low as that, of course...
 

jenks

thread death
I seldom re-read. But the tale of lucky Pip is one I could revisit again and again.

I am an inveterate re-reader and sometimes I wonder if there is any point in reading anything new and just re-reading stuff I know to be good.
Things like Madame Bovary, The Good Soldier, Gatsby, Sun Also Rises and a few others, I have probably read at least 10 times and not for work purposes. Nabokov said something along the lines of 'there is no reading, only re-reading' in his lectures on the novel.

I actually wrote something about re-reading Great Expectations but I never got round to posting it on my rather pointless blog. Maybe over the Bank Holiday I'll sort it out.
 

jenks

thread death
I've sniffing around the dickens section of waterstones lately. Read 'Treasure Island' on holiday and it gave me a taste for literature that's written in that very vivid, entertaining and (for want of a real word) yarn-y way. Only trouble is all his books are doorstops so I feel I'll never have the time.

I know they look ridiculously big but they move quickly - Bleak House is utterly gripping.

Or try his mate Wilkie Collins, he fits your bill of 'yarn-y' and 'vivid' and 'entertaining'
 

you

Well-known member
Jenks - I forced myself through Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. I had a phobic response every other page. The casual bourgy privilege, the name checking, the oh-so-light-with-theory-road-to-impress-the-ambiguity-of-the-human-condition references to Deleuze, Winnicott, Butler etc ... Ugh. It was so smugly knowing, each paragraph ending with some quip about females being defined by lack or the crippling inexactitude of language or society's construction of normativity.... It just felt like a product of the literary liberal elite, an earnestly hand-wringing musing born of circle-jerk (yes, I am well aware of the irony of employing that term here for this book). I really didn't like it. But I expect many liberal arts and humanities students would.

There, I said it.

Harry's voice was beautifully done though.
 

jenks

thread death
Jenks - I forced myself through Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. I had a phobic response every other page... I really didn't like it. But I expect many liberal arts and humanities students would.

There, I said it.

Harry's voice was beautifully done though.

Sorry about that mate - I felt a similar response to the Tao Lin that you recommended to me - you can't like everything!
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
http://www.mobydickbigread.com/

'Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that. It is a representation of evil incarnate in an animal – and the utter perfidy of that notion. Of a nature transgressed and transgressive – and of one man’s demonic pursuit, a metaphorical crusade that even now is a shorthand for overweening ambition and delusion.

Out of all this, Herman Melville created a work of art as unique as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, as mythic as Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner – it is a true force of nature, set in a century that challenged every tenet of faith that had been held until then. Melville’s book – is it barely a novel – exceeds every expectation of a literary work. It bursts out of its covers with the enormity of its subject – as if the great White Whale itself were contained within.
Now, in the 21st Century, a century and a half since it was first conceived and launched onto a misbelieving world, Moby-Dick retains its power – precisely because we are still coming to terms with it, and what it said. Incredibly prophetic, it foresaw so many of the aspects of the modern world with which we deal with. The abuse of power and belief; of nature and the environment; of the human spirit. It deals with art and artifice and stark reality – in an almost existential manner. It is truly a book before its time – almost ancient myth, as much as futuristic prophesy.

In the spring of 2011, artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare convened and curated a unique whale symposium and exhibition at Peninsula Arts, the dedicated contemporary art space at Plymouth University, under the title, Dominion. Inspired by their mutual obsession with Moby-Dick and with the overarching subject of the whale, they invited artists, writers, musicians, scientists and academics to respond to the theme. The result was an enthusiastic response which evidently could not be contained within the physical restrictions of a gallery space and a three-day symposium.

‘I have written a wicked book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.'
 

luka

Well-known member
i've had to put down moby dick. i put off reading the copy i bought for 20 years. made a fist of it and just read 61 chapters - over half of it.

however i'm totally sickened by the slaughter of whales it describes. yes - it is within the context of an earlier age when hunting whale was incredibly dangerous for men - but even so it disgusts me. melville is entirely wrapped up in the perceived excitement, honour and majesty of the activity.

it's a thoroughly disgraceful bit of writing that deserves none of the respect (oh sacred american tome) accorded to it.
i stopped reading it because of the cruelty. where the cruelty is pitched in that book - it's simply wrong. you can write about cruelty certainly - but it's where you place the reader that matters. you could write a proper book about whaling - but this isn't it.

i'm more than happy to judge people in a prior age. i'd say it's up there with that other "classic" mein kampf. moby dick is a throughly ignorant book.

its literary merits are reasonably thin on the ground too. ok, the introduction is breathtaking. but as soon as the boat sets sail melville spends the entire time letting the reader know how erudite and well-researched he is on the subject of whales.

this is a book which owes its reputation to unquestioning readers - and ultimately its attitude to whales is indefensible.
forgotten about this
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I've never even attempted Ulysses, despite being fairly obsessed with Joyce at points. (I've read Dubliners, A Portrait... and Ellmann's biography.)

One of my friends managed to do it and he said that it is worth it, although there are obviously these long passages which are almost unbearably dull and obtuse.

I'm also put off by the stuff I will definitely miss in there because I'm not Catholic, Irish, and haven't read the literary canon. But presumably every reader who isn't the author of a book will miss things in it.

Ulysses is Corpsey's white whale.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm up to Circe

But I am worried about losing it. Going out tonight so will have to take it back up tomorrow 😨
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Ulysses is Corpsey's white whale.
It's gonna drag him down to the bottom.

I gave up on Alain Robbe-Grillet's last book, there are only so many pages I can take

Don't read this
of underage girls being raped to death or having their tits whipped off as they are sawn in half through the vagina.

It's horrific, repetitive and I wasn't getting anything out of it
 

version

Well-known member
I've considered chucking this Philip Roth thing I've been reading for a bit, keep reading other stuff instead and crawling through it. It's alright, but I'm just not that arsed.
 
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