Abandoning books, and restarting them

I find it hard to abandon books, once I’ve started them.

Not impossible by any means, but hard. Years ago I read a novel by Aldous Huxley which I loathed so much as I was going through it that I almost didn’t finish it. I pushed on though, and in the last chapter Huxley turned it around for me and with his ending made the whole book marvellous.

Huxley did me no favours with that particular feat. Most books if you hate them by the penultimate chapter will not redeem themselves with the final pages. Hell, most books if you hate them by the second chapter likely won’t redeem themselves.

These days, I’m more prone to giving up and I feel less shame for it. I dropped Julian Rathbone’s rather epic novel Joseph some fifty pages from the end when I realised that I couldn’t bear to spend another page in the company of the protagonist. I don’t read novels for sympathetic characters, I couldn’t care less as a rule whether I like a protagonist, but I struggle a bit when a novel consists of the author being sadistic towards creations he himself made loathsome.

All of which takes me to an old post. Back in January 2009 (ouch, now that is shameful) I posted about books I had started but neither finished nor abandoned. The original post is here and it described seven unfinished books.

It’s been over 18 months since that post, so, how am I getting on with those books?

Well, I finished Zanzibar which was my then current read without any problems. I returned to What I Saw by Joseph Roth two months later and finished that (my thoughts on it are here, in summary though it’s a great little book).

And then there’s the other five. Ahem. Here’s what they were:

The Histories, by Herodotus;

The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart;

Libya, From Colony to Independence by Ronald Bruce St. John;

What we talk about when we talk about love, by Raymond Carver; and

The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford.

At the moment, I’m clearing out my flat of excess clutter. Part of that sadly means a lot of books going out the door. Two of them are books on that list.

The Undercover Economist is a good book that just didn’t interest me enough to finish. In essence, it’s a bit like Freakanomics but with a less annoying tone and a lot more humility. If you liked Freakanomics you’ll probably like this. If you didn’t like Freakanomics, you might still like this because it’s better written. The author, Tim Harford, has a great website here and seems a pleasant and intelligent guy. It’s a shame I didn’t like his book better, but that’s a reflection on my interests rather than his writing.

The other book on the list that’s going out the door is The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart. This is a fair sized book that I got half way through, and then one day I put it down and without consciously realising it I just started reading something else. It’s a well enough written book, it has good characterisation and although the basic story structure (Arthurian myth from Merlin’s perspective) is old Stewart still manages to make it fresh and original.

This is a book with a lot of fans, and from what I see rightly so. The problem is I just don’t care. Years ago I noticed that my grandfather, Jim, wasn’t using a bookmark for his then book. I asked why not, and he answered that if you couldn’t find your place in a book you weren’t enjoying it enough for it to be worth reading.

I have a bookmark in The Crystal Cave, but if I didn’t I’d never have known where I was in it.

So, it gets abandoned. It’s solidly written and a fine readable novel but whatever it is that connects me personally to a book just isn’t there. The near 250 pages I’ve read so far are no reason to read the same again. If you’re interested in retellings of Arthurian myth this is a classic of that niche genre and you should seek it out. If you’re not, well, I’ll leave it to you to form your own view because I don’t have the will to open it to look for illustrative quotes.

And there we are. What of the others?

The Libya book I wasn’t that far into and it’s been so long I’ll just restart it at some point. It’s survived the current flat cull though as the subject matter’s quite interesting. As a rule I dislike restarting books but when I haven’t got that far in and don’t remember it well can be worth doing.

I’m shocked to see how long I’ve left The Histories. I’ll try to continue that as it’s still rich in my memory. A marvellous book that deserves far better than the treatment I’ve given it.

And that only leaves the Raymond Carver, or as we now know the Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish. I enjoyed the stories I read, and as I write this I find I remember some of them well. I’ll probably start it again from scratch, like the Libya book. Although I do remember it it’s a short work and the stories won’t suffer from rereading.

So, there we are. Two books abandoned (not counting the anecdote about Joseph at the start of this post), two to be restarted and one to be finished as soon as I’m able. All that’s left is to ask whether anyone reading this has their own views on when they abandon a book, when they restart it, and when they plough on regardless of how little they may be enjoying something.

The chemistry between a book and reader

John Self at his blog The Asylum once spoke of the chemistry between a book and its reader. That personal connection without which even the greatest book cannot sing. Whether a book speaks to you or not is an intensely personal matter, and perhaps a slightly random one too. I’ve read books I could tell were well written but that didn’t move me, and others which felt written for me personally but which I know others found dull or ordinary.

One of the most exciting things for me in literature is that feeling I sometimes gets that a book was written for me alone; that a paragraph or section was written with my thoughts in mind; that had I the talent I could well have written it myself.

I recently finished Raymond Radiguet’s Count d’Orgel. I didn’t take to it. Others have, but for me the chemistry was lacking. It had a foreword though which did resonate, and by one of those small coincidences that life is so full of was directly relevant to a blog post (this one) that I was already planning. Here’s that foreword:

Tis the good reader that makes the good book;
in every book he finds passages which seem confidences
or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant
for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility
of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as
in a mine; until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What got me thinking about all this was György Faludy’s My Happy Days in Hell. After the LRB Central European Classics event (which I wrote about here) I was browsing the new Penguin Central European range in the LRB bookshop. I wasn’t sure about the Faludy, so I flicked through the pages to get a feel for it. I opened it at page 135, and I read a passage that had I but the talent I could have written myself. It’s not a happy passage, but it’s a true one for me and not all truths are happy ones.

Here’s the quote:

Now again I could have screamed with despair. One day, twenty or fifty years hence, what did it matter, I would have to die and from then on it would be as if I had never lived. Billions of new variations of man would be born, but my variation would never, never return. I would rather be sick and miserable, a cripple suffering the pains of hell, than not be at all. Yet complete annihiliation was inescapable. God willing I should one day be given a place of honour in the Kerepes Cemetery of Budapest, there would be a marble column with my name on it in gold – but who would care? By the year three thousand everyone would have forgotten my name, by the year five thousand the marble column would have turned to dust, the cemetery would have disappeared under a wheat field, a heap of ruins, an industrial plant or the jungle, the language in which I wrote would also have disappeared and the nation to which I belonged would have died out. Even this second annihilation would not be the end. Then the sun would lose its heat, the earth collide with another heavenly body or explode, and Michelangelo’s statues and Beethoven’s symphonies would be flung after me into Nirvana.

I love the little “God willing” joke in that passage.

Now, as I say that’s gloomy stuff and I’m generally a pretty cheery fellow (as was Faludy I understand). What’s interesting though for me is that it’s a feeling I’ve often had. That realisation that not only will I end, but so will all memory of me, and then all memory of the civilisation of which I was part, and then the species and all evidence that life ever even existed. It’s a bleak and sobering thought. It’s a thought so large it’s hard to know what to do with it (but of course, it also leads to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what I do with it).

As La Rochefoucauld said, we cannot look directly at either the sun or death.

So, Faludy, writing years before my birth, wrote my nighttime terrors down on a page. The section just before that one speaks of waking up in the night panicked, and of rushing out to find company. I’ve done that in the past. It happens less now thankfully. Across this dizzying void though and this existential fear there’s an improbable miracle. That not only am I not the only one to have felt this (I never thought I was), but that someone wrote it down and left it there for me to find.

That’s a wonderful thing. And whether it’s a passage like that which speaks of secret fears, or a passage that speaks of hopes or dreams or deepest beliefs, there’s something quite magical in the fact that we can open a book and find within it ourselves.