Thursday, July 20, 2006
Unfinished Part II.
What books have you all started and not finished? I can think of three off the top of my head. Obviously the Dreiser. Also Cheever's _The Wapshot Chronicle_ and Hawthorne's _The Marble Faun._ Also Melville's _The Confidence Man_. Oh, and Thoreau's _Cape Cod._ Never got back to finishing that either.
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The Corrections [because it sucked - both times I tried], Middlemarch [not because it sucked, but because it was MA summer], The Girl with Curious Hair [if DFW had never tried to write fiction, maybe I wouldn't think he was such a fucking poser].
I do, however, regret finishing Nightwood, Surfacing, and The Four-Gated City. Awful "lady writing," all of it.
I'm afraid I'm going to be harmed for admitting this, but I tried to read the whole Tolkein LOTR cycle in junior high. I was not mentally ready.
I enjoyed _The Hobbit_, I read _Fellowship_, and I got halfway through _Two Towers_. Then I realized that pretty much all the characters from _The Hobbit_ were gone, I didn't really know who the current characters were, and I couldn't bring myself to keep going. I've since enjoyed the movies very much and been tempted to pick the books back up, but I've been afraid I still can't do it. I think that as T dreads "lady writing," I find Tolkein to have the kind of C20th masculinity I cannot handle.
But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.
I also didn't finish Vizenor's _Greiver_.
The 911 report. But I am still hopeful.
I was thinking more along the lines of novels . . . then again, I guess the 9 11 report works as well.
Gravity's Rainbow, because I was reading it in five page segments on my lunch breaks each day, and it made no sense.
The Divine Comedy, because I realized I was being pretentious.
Doctorow's City of God, purchased in an airport while my flight was delayed.
You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe, purchased because I thought he was Tom Wolfe. (And for that alone I should turn in my Academic Membership Card.)
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