In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools unsuffered. We hope it’s a welcome break from the world of shit falling on our heads daily in the political sphere.
Tonight’s Topic: Unrequited
In this week’s MC, let’s talk about a topic suggested in the comments during last week’s edition.
What well-regarded book or film or TV series (or any work of art) did you deliberately put aside and not finish, and why?
Craig
Battlestar Galactica. Gave up on that. Nothing made sense about that show after midway through s3
Omnes Omnibus
I made several attempts at Atlas Shrugged. Never got beyond 25 pages or so. I don’t think that counts though.
Bruuuuce
I have never been able to make it through James Joyce’s Ulysses. Three tries so far, and I bog down and fall out every time.
BGinCHI
I know several of you have mentioned “The Crown,” which we tried and couldn’t get into.
I was already pretty much not interested in the royal family. But I’m a hard core Anglophile, so I thought maybe it would trump my dislike for rich, privileged people.
Alas, no.
If I’m going to watch royalty, give me “The Favourite” every time.
WaterGirl
I had to give up on The Expanse when I was watching it on TV. There seemed to be so much time between seasons that it was hard to remember which planet was which and who all the various people were. I imagine it would be entirely different streaming it where you wouldn’t have so much time in between.
Felanius Kootea
@Omnes Omnibus: OMG me too. I’ll give it one more try… Maybe in 2023.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Amazed you got that far.
It’s a terrible novel.
NotMax
Admitting to being in a tiny minority, Snowcrash.
Nothing whatsoever clicked with me.
Rusty
The Sopranos. I couldn’t figure out why I should glorify or identify with a thug. For all the talk of how he was deep, he wasn’t. Did the same things. Which doesn’t mean I can’t be engaged by some who is a criminal. Walter White and Jessie Pinkman of Breaking Bad where interesting characters on an arc, even if the arc bends downward. (I would also say that about Ozarks).
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
The Fountainhead was junky fun. I also bailed on Atlas Shrugged after 20 or so pages.
BGinCHI
@Bruuuuce: I took a great Joyce class at Univ of Toronto (during my first period of PhD course work, yes it’s a humble brag), Ulysses for a whole semester. We did it in sections, with lots of secondary reading and great lectures by the enthusiastic prof.
Still, I threw my copy across the room no less than three times. Only book I’ve ever actually thrown (including Proust).
BGinCHI
@NotMax: WHAT??
Oh my.
Any cyberpunk books you like?
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: The Crown is a great representation of how bad parents can fuck up generations. With a couple of exceptions, one sees either uncaring parents or people so fucked up by their childhoods that despite their efforts they are unable do a good job.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I am persistent.
Mary G
Seinfeld and Lost. Also Real Housewives of any locality.
LuciaMia
Tried reading all of War and Peace. Made it a quarter way thru. My excuse made to myself , it was right after the BBC TV version had aired, ( with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre) that I already knew how it comes out
Almost Retired
Ron Chernow’s Hamilton — after two tries. It wasn’t just the level of detail (which seemed excessive), but the sheer volume of conjecture: “Hamilton undoubtedly would have passed the tavern and noticed the the comely bar wench,” or something like that (not a real example).
On the other hand, I loved Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, which although extraordinarily detailed, was based on extensive source material. But it didn’t inspire me to write an award-winning musical (I can’t picture a tap-dancing Lady Bird).
BGinCHI
@Rusty: I hated “The Irishman” for this reason.
Sick of being asked to care about murdering assholes.
It’s different if they’re characters in, say, a mystery. And as you say, different if they have an arc.
hotshoe
I’ve never watched Supernatural and only know as much about it as I see on Tumblr. But now that I know how it has ended, I def will never begin it because I could never finish it with the tragedy-to-come hanging over it.
(I’m pretty sure that’s not a spoiler for anyone who has been on social media this last couple weeks, but if I’ve spoiled it for you, sorry. )
raven
You know I have a problem. I almost never read books that are given to me. I don’t know why but I don’t.
debbie
Moby Dick. Also Franzen.
Benw
Haha I made it through Pamela! What a slog.
A decade ago I put The Corrections aside for years before I finally finished it. I admit it’s very evocative, but so bitter and miserable
More recently I quit The Boys after 3 eps. Yes, I grasp that there’s no one to watch the watchmen. If only someone made that point using superheroes earlier!
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: If there weren’t so many great shows, I’d probably go back and try again.
Currently watching season 1 of “Atlanta.” Holy shit it’s brilliant: Donald Glover is something else.
schrodingers_cat
I couldn’t finish either War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Too depressing and overly long.
zhena gogolia
@Bruuuuce:
Same here. I hope to do it in retirement. It’s not that I dislike it, it just takes work that I don’t have to give it.
laura
A lot of series give me terrible anxiety – Curb Your Enthusiasm and Breaking Bad – I just can’t. Completely unhinges me.
Benw
@WaterGirl: I loved the first season of the Expanse and completely failed to get caught back up in the second
BGinCHI
@debbie: F Franzen.
I’d rather drink Franzia.
germy
raven
Guitar King: Michael Bloomfield’s Life in the Blues, my brother gave it to me and I can’t get through it.
FelonyGovt
The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel. Every annoying cliche about Jews in New York ever. (I was raised Jewish in NY)
Winston
@WaterGirl: The Expanse?My favorite of all SF? and you gave up on it? I’m just about ready to start from the beginning, again to get ready for season 5. If I could read, I’d order the books, but the print is always so small…….Streaming on Amazon now.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
Oh my God.
War and Peace is not depressing!!!!!
AliceBlue
A Confederacy of Dunces. I thought it was boring; made it about a quarter of the way through.
zhena gogolia
@FelonyGovt:
I agree. And the actress is so not Jewish, which annoyed me too.
How many times are we supposed to be titillated by her shouting the F-word in a club?
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: I knew that would get a response from you.
Barbara
@Bruuuuce: Ulysses, yes, it was the book I could not finish. I once read a very funny article about book reviews for the ages, and apparently, E.B. White in the New Yorker was underwhelmed by Joyce as well. Among other things, he wrote, “It takes more than genius to keep me reading a book.” And I think perhaps that was a bit why I couldn’t keep going. Joyce had an idea, a day in the life, and of course the book is about so much more, but I could never warm to the characters and I found the overall style to be tedious. After multiple starts, I finally skimmed it from beginning to end and put it away forever.
I started Wolf Hall multiple times before I finished, and I was so glad I did. It and its sequel were astounding, although I think the first was better. I am reluctant to tackle the third.
I also failed to finish Middlemarch, though I read enough to understand the plot and characters, and then read the last several chapters.
There are also works that I know other people find excruciating, like Waiting for Godot, that I have watched multiple times.
I am pretty unapologetic at this point in my life. If I don’t like something I put it down. There are just too many good books to read to waste your time with one that you really can’t abide.
dm
@BGinCHI: Having a great class with an enthusiastic professor and a full semester only got me as far as Night Town, and then I faded out. I was still able to recognize the allusion in Firesign Theatre’s How can you be two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all.
Also, I’ve read the same 25 pages of Finnegans Wake four or five times now.
I haven’t been able to get engaged by Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Maybe some day.
BGinCHI
@Benw: Liked season 1 of The Boys more than I thought I would. Some dark shit in there, though.
BGinCHI
@germy: Is….is that John Cole?
trollhattan
“Gravity’s Rainbow.” Am partway through, don’t know where it might be in the house, and feel like it’s a homework assignment I’ve been long neglecting. When I find it I wonder if I’ll be able to continue where I left off or have to start over. Really hope not because it’s quite a slog.
zhena gogolia
I’ve given up on a lot of books, movies, and TV shows, but the only time I actually took a book, walked out to the garbage can, and tore up the book and threw it away was The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein. I can no longer remember what it was that disgusted me so, but I vividly remember how satisfying it was to tear that book to pieces and discard it.
tom
I never made it past the first few chapters of Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield came across to me as whiny and self-absorbed, and I never connected with the character.
dm
Sorry about the double post. I guess I’m in moderation instead of just being easily distracted and forgetting to press post.
SFBayAreaGal
Handmaiden’s Tale
Too close to my past.
laura
@BGinCHI: oh you turner of a phrase – that’s a good’n for cutting to the quick of Franzen with a superior alternative. Bon mot right there.
NotMax
@BGinCHI
High probability of yes but that’s the sort of question that immediately makes the mind go blanker than an any letter Scrabble tile.
[pause for short rumination]
Would The Stars My Destination count? Also Akira and although it’s not a total categorical fit, Dhalgren.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus:
I can certainly understand not finishing it. You need somebody to guide you through it (kind of like Ulysses, I suppose). But it’s not depressing! It’s filled with the joy of life and love.
Anna Karenina is depressing. But I love it.
Barbara
@BGinCHI: I won’t read or watch anything about the royal family that dates to after 1820 (or so — Victorian era). Prior to that, the royals were enmeshed in political history.
Similarly, I won’t read or watch anything that makes organized crime seem interesting, e.g., The Sopranos.
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: I read that a long time ago and am positive I could not do it again. Same with V.
germy
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: I love this, and am going to start doing this to books I hate.
Benw
@BGinCHI: my The Boys ratio of worthwhile themes to violence and rape is <<<<<< 1
ETA: I switched to The Queen’s Gambit and have fewer than 0 regrets
zhena gogolia
@BGinCHI:
It’s surprisingly satisfying.
mali muso
Game of Thrones. Neither the books nor the show. I do like historical dramas and fantasy but I have zero interest in watching graphic torture.
zhena gogolia
I’ve never watched a nanosecond of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones.
I have to restrain myself from commenting too much on this thread. It’s so interesting to think about what you reject and why.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: So you like cyberpunk adjacent more than the straight stuff, maybe?
That makes sense. Stephenson can be a little arch. Gibson has turned into such an amazing writer over time. Have you read any of his last 4 or 5 books? Pattern Recognition is a masterpiece, I think.
narya
@WaterGirl: I had read all of it, so that part was easier for me. I stopped when it went to Amazon, though, because I won’t do that service. Bummed me out.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: I guess I didn’t get to the fun part. I was bored.
BGinCHI
@Benw: QG was FABULOUS.
TomatoQueen
Middlemarch. I just can’t. Fuckem.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
How far did you get?
SFBayAreaGal
Any books by Charles Dickens. Had to read a couple of his books in Eng Lit in high school. For me it took too long to get to the point of what he was trying to say.
zhena gogolia
@TomatoQueen:
Haha. I’ve read it four times, but the last time was a slog.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
Two names: David Wallace & Neil Stephenson. And I like long books.
edit: I see I have companionship for the Wallace opinion
gwangung
@Benw: This is an improvement on the source material.
germy
Barbara
@trollhattan: I have never found a way to tackle Pynchon’s longer works and David Foster Wallace as well. I read The Crying of Lot 49, which was an outstanding book, I really do want to make progress on Pynchon, but have found it to be really challenging. In truth, I have been reading much more nonfiction over the last few years.
I am in the middle of Shuggie Bain, which was shortlisted for both the National Book Award and the Booker Award. It’s about a dysfunctional family in Glasgow headed by an alcoholic mother.
schrodingers_cat
@TomatoQueen: I like Middlemarch
zhena gogolia
Sposed to be reading Anna Karenina right now. But I’ve been through it too many times.
W&P I can read any number of times.
Comrade Colette
The Godfather movies – all of them, at one time or another. I absolutely hate mobster fiction of any kind. I can’t find anything conflicted, noble, romantic, epic, honorable, or even interesting about it; it’s just endless victimization, and all my sympathies are with the victims.
I did manage to get through the original Godfather novel by Mario Puzo when I was a teenager and complusive about finishing every book I started. Garbage.
NotMax
@Benw
The Boys does a decent job of encompassing everything that went wrong with comic books since Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Not intended as a palmary review.
schrodingers_cat
@SFBayAreaGal: Love Dickens. Especially David Copperfield and The Tale of Two Cities.
Ridnik Chrome
“Rabbit, Run”. Tried to read it twice, and both times couldn’t get past the first sex scene, because it was so ludicrously written.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: 100 pages
HumboldtBlue
Mine actually happened last night.
I had made it to season two, episode three or four of The Crown but stopped watching months ago.
At the urging of a sister I went back to it last night and I now know why I first stopped watching.
The acting, the sets, the camera work are all excellent but there’s a reason it grates on me.
I despise every single one of these people.
I despise their unearned privilege.
I loathe the obsequiousness of the servants and advisers.
I want to punch each and every one of them in the face repeatedly.
They are despicable, terrible people who display absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
They are selfish and childish and haughty and smug, and they all deserve to be beaten with a stick.
zhena gogolia
@Comrade Colette:
The character of Michael Corleone as portrayed by Al Pacino is pretty interesting. But I can’t watch those movies again.
Emma from FL
Anything, and I mean anything, by the Bronte sisters. Maybe it’s because I have not a single sentimental bone in my body. Heathcliff bored me to tears.
rk
Gone with the Wind. Tried to read it many times when I was younger but never got past the first few pages. Never understood what all the fuss was about. Why did it need a thousand pages? Now, when I’m older I despise it even more. Southern belles can go to hell.
Redshift
Not quite the same, but I finished His Dark Materials even though I mostly hated it. It was supposed to be this brilliant work, but it came off to me as an Important Author slumming in the fantasy genre, and because he didn’t have anything to learn from those genre writers, made mistakes that anyone who’s read fantasy wouldn’t.
In addition, I felt like most of the characters were just pieces on a chessboard, and more than once he clearly decided that he wasn’t going to come back to some of them, and slaughtered them so he wouldn’t have to explain why they didn’t show up again
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
You have to get at least 300 pages in to get to the fun stuff!
Brachiator
Oh man, a long list. Let’s see.
Abandoned the TV series Grantchester. The priest hero seemed too fantasy perfect.
I enjoyed having a girlfriend tell me about various Stephen King novels. I have enjoyed some movie adaptations. Don’t care for any of the novels. I think I tried The Stand, but quickly gave up.
The original BG always seemed like a cheap ripoff of Star Wars. Never bothered with the reboot.
I love most things Star Trek. But Enterprise was dull and plodding and I never cared for any of the characters. I abandoned ST: Discovery, but am kinda liking Season 3, even though it still has problems.
Don’t care much for The Great Gatsby, but I did finish it.
I came to a late love of the work of Louis Armstrong. I think the problem is that many of the tunes most extolled by jazz critics are not the ones most worth listening to.
A reversal. When I was younger, I pretty much avoided It’s A Wonderful Life and Casablanca, even though they were regularly shown on a local TV station. When I finally sat down and watched them, they blew my socks off. Oddly enough, for some weird ass reason, I did not see the early scenes of George Bailey’s childhood the first couple of times I saw Wonderful Life.
Love most James Joyce, and think that Ulysses is a goddam masterpiece. I struggled with the Wake.
Could not be bothered with The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. Bailed on Mr Robot.
I fully understand why a lot of people love Doc Martin. But the insipid supporting characters make my teeth hurt. I’ve dipped in and out of the series, but can never watch much of it.
Loved the Lord of the Rings movies. Never could finish the novels. I loved the Lampoon parody, Bored of the Rings.
Uncle Cosmo
A couple of weeks back, In desperation for reading material, I pulled two books down from my shelves that I never finished even when they were required during my college daze: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (IIRC I got to about page 170 of 711 in “German Literature From 1914 To The Present”) and The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (“English Literature 1815 To The Present”).
I might get back to the Mann (where I’m about at page 50) after I finish Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2005)**. I’m never going back to the other. A dozen pages of Mill’s account of his childhood is so appalling that if I had access to one trip in a time machine I might seriously contemplate passing on removing the young Schicklgruber from history in favor of murdering J.S.’s daddy. How in the everloving multiverse of hells could a human being do that to his son???
** Pure masochism – I’ve developed a sick fascination with noting all the cool stuff he predicted we’d have or do by 2020 that’s still so far away it must be lurking in the Hubble Deep Field. Futurists – ptui!
SFBayAreaGal
@schrodingers_cat: Didn’t like David Copperfield. Thank you for reminding me, I did like A Tale of Two Cities.
gogiggs
@Rusty: You aren’t actually supposed to. You’re supposed to see that they’re thugs who destroy everything and everyone around them. It’s just that the writing was good (mostly, I found the dream sequences excruciating) and the leads, at least, were great, so people rooted for them anyway.
By the end, David Chase was so frustrated at audience reaction that he was literally spelling out on screen that Tony couldn’t be helped or changed and all therapy did was give him new tools to be awful. But, fuck you, David Chase, you made the show, you cast the actors. You don’t get to blame the audience for liking it.
The problem with making a gangster show like the Sopranos telling people not to like gangster shows or a horror movie like Funny Games (fuck you, too, Michael Haneke, you pretentious shit) telling people they’re awful for liking horror movies is that the people that get it don’t need it and the people that need it won’t get it.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: We should do a ? club with you as the host for War and Peace.
Barbara
@SFBayAreaGal: Oh, now we have a real disagreement! No, in truth, I totally understand because I have been unable to finish Little Dorrit. In my view, if there is one Dickesn work that everyone should read it’s Great Expectations. I have read that more than once. There is so much commentary on class and relationships, and so much great imagery as well. One striking image: “It was one of those spring days that was winter in the shade and summer in the sun.”
rk
@Emma from FL:
Jane Eyre used to be one of my favorites, but I couldn’t stand Wuthering heights. Heathcliff was a creepy stalker.
HumboldtBlue
@zhena gogolia:
Huh, neither have I.
Well, that’s a lie. I did turn on episode one of GoT a few years ago but I didn’t make it 20 minutes. Turned it off never went back.
@Barbara:
That describes coastal Humboldt weather to a T.
BGinCHI
@SFBayAreaGal: I love Great Expectations, though I can see why not everyone would.
Wondering whether we should have a thread for “books ruined by high school.”
Emma from FL
@HumboldtBlue: And yet, I would rather have them than any and all Tory politicians beginning with Margaret Thatcher.
prostratedragon
Moby Dick, dammit !!
Every few years I give it a try, usually with too little time available for digressions, apparently. I get as far as the first whale sighting –and Melville goes off into this long technical digression about harpoons and Lord knows what else. I know that he is messing with me deliberately, as I wait breathlessly to hear what this whale is like, so it’s kind of funny. But somehow just then some other duty calls, and by the time I could get back to the novel I’d have to start again, knowing that …
I’ve been gingerly poking at it in my mind again lately, so might give it another try after New Year’s. Maybe this time. Note: I have no doubt that it’s a great novel. I just have no direct evidence.
Barbara
@Comrade Colette: Come sit by me. I made a similar comment and feel exactly the same way. Sucking the life out of everyone around you is not interesting. It’s a gang that people try to gloss over with ethnic nostalgia. It’s gross.
germy
Okay, here goes:
Last year I got on a major Shirley Jackson kick. Read all her books and loved them. The novels, short story collections, everything.
And then last month I read Life Among The Savages and hated it.
I didn’t like her kids, I hated her husband… I just found it so odd.
The husband doesn’t lift a finger to help. She’s pregnant and takes a cab to the hospital. The son is supposed to be cute and funny, but to me he’s a monster and a bully.
Frankensteinbeck
@BGinCHI:
Mine, obviously!
@AliceBlue:
Thank you. I head so many ‘this book is brilliant!’ and I got to the first ‘masturbating while thinking about his dog’ scene and put it down. I wasn’t disgusted so much as… it’s just dull and sad. There’s nothing to laugh at in how pathetic he is.
@mali muso:
I was really big into Game of Thrones until… somewhere in the third season, I think? Around the time Joffrey died? It was around there it became clear to me that there was no real story. Martin kinda had an end goal, maybe a point or two along the way pre-decided, but otherwise everything was just happening randomly. I can’t invest in characters and find their deaths satisfying if those deaths are random. The Red Wedding happened because Martin wanted that subplot out of the way so he could pay attention to one he liked more. That’s it. It had no meaning.
Once I saw that, I couldn’t enjoy it.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: I think that’s her day job. Maybe we shouldn’t presume to ask her to do it for free here.
eddie blake
@NotMax:
akira is DEFINITELY cyberpunk.
LuciaMia
@tom: I think thats a book you have to be somewhat closer to Holden’s age. I tried reading it in my thirties and had the same reaction.
Mary G
zhena gogolia
@rk:
Heathcliff is not supposed to be a positive character. I can’t read Wuthering Heights any more because it’s too, too sad. But you’re not supposed to like Heathcliff.
Charlotte Bronte is probably my favorite writer. Anne and Emily are also geniuses. Anne gave a devastating portrait of alcoholism in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Redshift
@BGinCHI: I need to catch up on Gibson. I read all his early work as it was coming out and loved it, but I fell off once I started spending less time reading books (which wasn’t a conscious decision.)
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
The two editions of BSG shared taking place in space. And that’s the full list.
BGinCHI
@Barbara: Can’t wait to read Shuggie Bain.
Pynchon is either something that catches your interest, or it doesn’t. It’s his style, in part.
zhena gogolia
@BGinCHI:
Haha, great topic. I won’t touch Nathaniel Hawthorne with a 10-foot pole.
SFBayAreaGal
@Barbara: Nope, nope, nope. I did not like Great Expectations. I am glad you did.
gwangung
@Brachiator:
Heh. I think it’s an OK one-view type of movie, done up straight.
But I like what one local theatre groups does with it….the cast is a mystery….not only to the audience, but to the other members of the cast. You cast the top folks in local theatre in parts and part of the fun is seeing how who does what (age and gender doesn’t have to match). Entrances are often a hoot, as cast members sit with the audience.
BGinCHI
@Ridnik Chrome: NOT an Updike fan (understatement of the thread).
eddie blake
@BGinCHI:
oh. the guy who won the hugo and the nebula award for his FIRST novel turned INTO an amazing writer over TIME?
yah. ok…
narya
@AliceBlue: Totally agree. Could not finish it, could not figure out the love others had for it.
Also: Dickens. Never saw the attraction. I’ve never read any Tolstoy, either. Franzen and Tom Wolfe–such unpleasant characters! I didn’t want to spend a minute with them.
JOHN IRVING. HAAAAAATE. I loathed Garp, and then read Owen Meany because someone recommended it, and . . . hated that even more.
I adore Stephenson–even when he’s being arch, he’s almost always doing something interesting. (I’m in the middle of “The Fall” right now, actually.) I will say that, although I enjoyed “Snow Crash” well enough, it’s the only one of his books that I haven’t gone back to read again–hell, I even re-read the Baroque cycle! I think he was still figuring out a way to tell the story and explore the ideas together.
NotMax
@BGinCHI
Negatory on that. One of the things am currently perusing is The Darwin Elevator, which I guess could be classed as cyberpunk adjacent.
Oh, thought of another book which gave up on – not because it was awful but because part way through Iost interest in the effort required to keep the cast of characters straight – Foucault’s Pendulum.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’d be happy to do it for free if I could stand to. Maybe ask me when I haven’t just spent several weeks teaching it on Zoom.
WaterGirl
@germy: I want to ask about this, but can me it to the political thread?
SFBayAreaGal
@BGinCHI: Lol. That and books read that you liked in high school
Omnes Omnibus
Not quite on topic, but As I Lay Dying ruined Faulkner for me.
BGinCHI
@HumboldtBlue: Yep, that’s how I felt too. I couldn’t get past it. I usually have a lot of patience for unlikable people, but not in that case.
debbie
@Ridnik Chrome:
Heh. I read all of the Rabbit books maybe 10 years ago. Considering I didn’t like Rabbit at all, it was a bit of a slog. I wanted to see that he stopped being a dick, but that never happened.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus:
Speaking of which — First-Year Studies???
eddie blake
@NotMax:
the boys is some derivative, straight-up LIFTED shit from pat mills and kevin o’neil’s marshal law
the comic itself is pretty fucking awful, but the show has made some SIGNIFICANT changes from the source material, for the better.
debbie
@Emma from FL:
Ah, but the film with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier!
Uncle Cosmo
Concur. I eagerly await the last volume – after which I might start over at the beginning, >3,000 pages back.
schrodingers_cat
I did finish reading it but I found Faulkner too depressing
.@zhena gogolia:
In summer, then.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: I am okay with it. Freshman is gendered and apparently academia is moving away from the term.
BGinCHI
@Redshift: His most recent is supposed to be terrific, but haven’t read it yet.
Redshift
@BGinCHI: I read The Magicians because I got it for free (Hugo nominee.) I really liked the idea to start with, but I never read any of the rest of the series because I found every one of the characters extremely unpleasant, and I didn’t want to spend any more time with them.
HumboldtBlue
@Emma from FL:
Agreed. Ugh, what a horrible human being.
@BGinCHI:
I literally rage-quit while watching last night, cursing at the screen and everything.
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: That whole era of American lit leaves me pretty cold.
NotMax
@eddie blake
The difference being that Marshal Law was intended as a creation taking themes to extremes in service of dark parody.
Not entirely successfully, I’ll grant you.
Tony Jay
@Benw:
I’ve got the entire run of The Boys in graphic novel format and was very, very surprised to hear they were adapting it for TV. Compared to the Ennis version it’s at once tame while also being overly complicated, and the humour seems to have been drained out of it.
I’ll also add that while Karl Urban is a great Judge Dredd he’s just NOT Billy Butcher, who in the original version is a terrifying, crafty, damaged, smooth-talking planned-explosion of a man who we learn effectively died as a human being long before the story starts. The moment we learn that the thing which explains who and what comic-book Butcher becomes never really happened to the TV version is when I lost interest.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FelonyGovt:
I thought you’d have a helluva show if you took out the main character…
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
I HATED reading Scarlet Letter in high school, but in the late 1970s, there was a PBS production of it with Meg Foster and John Heard that just about broke my heart.
Emma from FL
@debbie: Great cinematography. But it was the same story.
Ascap_scab
Heroes on NBC:
This was before binge-watching. I got through season 1. Interesting premise. People (and us) discovering they had “superpowers”. Then NBC started bouncing them around to different days and times and the storyline got weird. It lasted 4 seasons with ever falling ratings, I gave up midway through season 2.
Falling Skies on TNT:
Aliens come to Earth to steal resources and enslave humans. It started off well but “jumped the shark” for me when, with no training, the series hero, a history professor, jumps into an alien spacecraft and flies to the moon in season 4. I never bothered with season 5.
zhena gogolia
@debbie:
Ooh, that sounds good. I like them a lot.
NotMax
@BGinCHI
From that era of American lit I did like Omoo.
Moving ahead several decades, how do you feel (if at all) about William Dean Howells or Theodore Dreiser?
Yarrow
@Mary G: Oh, yeah, “Lost.” The first season was good and it went off the rails in the second season. I quit.
eddie blake
what have i ditched. hmm.
i’ve never not finished a book or a comic, it’s just not in me. even if i don’t like it, i wanna understand the flaws in the construction. but i’ve ditched a bunch of tv and anime.
the most recent?
the flash– too many very stupid people who were supposed to be very smart people.
supergirl-devolved into a soap opera.
the expanse– interest sort of petered out in the fourth season.
BGinCHI
@eddie blake: That’s not what I meant.
I read all Gibson’s stuff when it came out, and it’s great. But he really matured into a different kind of writer. I think his novels after, say, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties are different. More grounded in the now, and, for me, more urgent.
He’s one of my favorite writers and thinkers.
Salty Sam
“Black Mirror”. Normally dystopia doesn’t bother me, but this show brings it to another whole level. I tend to binge watch- but I slowed down on BM, watching an episode every few days or so. Even then, I would feel pretty icky after an episode, and finally gave it up.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
It was! I think it was just a four-parter, so not too demanding.
AM in NC
Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. I figured I would love it, and I couldn’t get through more than 100 pages of what I thought was fairly over-written prose. My husband and my mom felt the same way, interestingly. On the other hand, we all LOVED the miniseries with Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn.
Only book I’ve literally thrown across the room is David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. It felt like a hostile act against the reader, and I was not going to subject myself to that.
Ridnik Chrome
@Redshift: I finished his newest book a couple of months ago, and then went back and reread its predecessor, the first “Jackpot” book. The series has an interesting premise, and Gibson takes it in some unexpected directions.
schrodingers_cat
Madmen. I only watched one season. Everyone was pretty unlikable.
eddie blake
@NotMax:
yeah. when it got to marshal law vs pinhead, i was like, “oh COME on!”
debbie
@Yarrow:
I couldn’t quit it; I totally hate-watched the whole series. I had to see how it ended.
BGinCHI
@narya: I really, really liked Anathem, but have had a hard time getting into some of his other books (like “Cryptonomicon”). But it’s probably me. Got too busy, or something interfered.
I meant “arch” for people not into that genre.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Succession. I feel like they’re just on the edge of becoming a really good show, it’s just missing…. something. Really good actors, some decent characters and story lines, just that something that’s missing. I watched most of it waiting for that I never did watch the last episode of season 2, and three or four months later, I’m not that interested to go find out how it ends.
eddie blake
@Tony Jay:
yeah, like i said earlier, i think the boys is a pretty shitty, unoriginal comic book. there are a LOT of changes from page-to-screen, most of them for the better, and IMO, one of the BEST is the presence of mr. urban. dude could read the phone book and make it captivating.
J
@zhena gogolia: I read it, but I was a philosophy postgrad at Princeton when the book came out, and I wondered whether it would be of any interest to someone no ticking of the correspondences between characters and their real life models.
BGinCHI
@Redshift: I liked it, esp the opening.
But less so the books after.
piratedan
The Great Gatsby because FUCK those people….
Mike in NC
I hated “A Confederacy of Dunces”.
Bruuuuce
@Ascap_scab: The problem with Heroes was that Season 2 fell right in the middle of a writer’s strike, and quality was demolished. Never came back to its first season’s levels
eddie blake
@BGinCHI:
i too, REALLY enjoy his brain and the things he produces with it. i was kind of blown away by the sprawl trilogy, and i totally agree that he’s grown as a writer. i was just being a dick.
zhena gogolia
@J:
My then husband had been at Princeton and he knew who the models were, but he hated it too.
Benw
@NotMax: as a pre teen comics fan I was a huge nerd for Miller’s Daredevil run and DKR. I was a bit older when I realized how much Miller had put his thumb on the narrative to make DKR Batman work as a hero. I think a lot of people missed that dark grittier didn’t mean smarter and more mature.
also I’ve never seen palmary before so thanks for a new word!!
jeffreyw
@NotMax:
I love the audio book. I’ve listened to it end to end several times. It was playing mostly as I slept – I listen to audio books so I can sleep. The narrator has to be pretty mellow, not for me an ensemble cast doing enthusiastic readings.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: I haven’t read very much of either. I liked A Hazard of New Fortunes, but that and some of the short stories are all I’ve read. Social realism isn’t really my bag.
Dreiser is from IN, so I read him a long time ago. He’s dull, then has amazing stretches of prose, but again, it’s not really a good fit for me.
Prefer Sherwood Anderson.
RSA
I’m this way too. I’m at a time in my life, a time that’s lasted a while now, where it’s hard for me to watch characters make decisions that would seem to lead inevitably to bad results. Characters I care about, at least.
This is another factor. I’ve sometimes said to friends that with some shows I get the feeling that the world would be a better place if most of the main characters were to die in the first episode. I’m oversimplifying, I know, and their answers were solid: you can learn something important about the human condition even from bad people. But it’s often too emotionally demanding for me to last out.
In this same vein, a memorable book that I gave up on after multiple tries was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I could see the artistry in it, but it was so unrelentingly grim! I guess I want some optimism in my reading material?
HumboldtBlue
@Benw:
Indeed, always love learning a new word. Get to throw this one at my pop.
eddie blake
@Benw:
batman tells you straight out. “we’re criminals. we’ve ALWAYS been criminals.”
don’t think he’s SUPPOSED to work as a hero.
narya
@BGinCHI: No, I know what you mean. I really loved Cryptonomicon, and have both reread it multiple times and handed it off to others who I thought would like it (and they did). There are very few authors in my personal pantheon–am almost certainly going to like what they’ve written–and he is definitely one.
Ridnik Chrome
@BGinCHI: Oddly enough, I liked his book reviews. I feel the same way (though to a lesser degree) about Zadie Smith. Really enjoy her essays and reviews, but her fiction bugs me. Not because it’s badly written, but because she has a tendency to throw in scenes or characters in order to make a point (or sometimes just to be clever) at the expense of making the story less believable.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@BGinCHI: My only experience with Dreiser was forcing myself to the end of American Tragedy. I think that was the book that converted me to believing it’s okay to abandon a book.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
The Walking Dead. Hadn’t read the source material. Premiere was awesome, but the show turned into an extended exercise in recreational sadness. NOPE.
prostratedragon
@gogiggs: Thank you. Never understood why people think we have to celebrate the central figures in essentially moral counterexample tales. Maybe we’re supposed to see how these bad guys ruin lives and destroy even what they profess to love or find honor in.
FelonyGovt
@schrodingers_cat: I agree about Mad Men. I lived through that kind of misogyny at work and had no desire to relive it no matter how handsome John Hamm is.
Brachiator
@zhena gogolia:
Who was the critic who said (of the film version, I think) “Loved War. Hated Peace.”
NotMax
@BGinCHI
Strictly IMHO Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham is a severely underappreciated gem of the genre.
eddie blake
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
agree one hundred percent, captain. i ditched it a LONG time ago, but yeah. like, 45 minutes of sad and stupid a week. no thank you.
Mike in NC
@RSA: I had ‘Blood Meridian’ on my old Sony Reader and it took me a year to finish it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): there was a tweet going around a few years back about the stages of watching each episode, or maybe it was every other episode, of The Walking Dead, something like: Eh, I guess I’ll give it one more shot….. Oh my god! THat’s so gross… Ugh, I am giving up on this show… OH MY GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY DID THAT I LOVE THIS SHOW CAN’T WAIT TILL NEXT WEEK!”
I gave up when they introduced the baseball bat character, Nagin? I don’t know why he was the last straw, but he was. Carol’s story arc was great though, and IIRC totally deviated from the source.
RSA
@HumboldtBlue: Count me in for thanks as well for the word palmary. Funny thing, when I googled:
A century later, I’m thinking that’s no longer true. Laurels, maybe?
WaterGirl
Arrow. Loved Arrow. Then after a few seasons, they seemed to be meandering all over the place, and they lost me.
LuciaMia
@HumboldtBlue: And their constant excuse or blame is “Our duty” A ‘duty’ that seems to make noone happy.
J
I admit that Ulysses is tough going, but I urge those who have put it aside to persevere: the wonderful things about it are so wonderful. I also suggest not worrying too much about the ‘Cyclops episode’ and all that; it can be read as (just) a novel. My own experience of the highly regarded, but put aside and never finished masterpiece is with Proust. I read the first two volumes in the old Scott Moncrieff trans. a million years ago and loved them. The problem is that every time I return to the books, there is a new translation, which is praised for overcoming all the terrible faults of the old one, which I really like. (Solution; just read the old one.)
dexwood
@BGinCHI: The worst college lit class I ever endured was 19th century American Lit. It was a summer class, 6 weeks, 3 days a week, 90 minutes, just after lunch in a too hot classroom. Nearly everyone was nodding off. Post-prandial lassitude defined. I never wanted to look at a James Fenimore Cooper book again.
SFBayAreaGal
The last two years of the X-Files. It was a grind. I felt like the producer, director, and writers burnt out.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Winston:
Nice thing about a Kindle, or any e-reader or e-reader app, is that you can make the print as large as you want.
Benw
@eddie blake: oh he definitely is, well at least as an anti hero the reader is definitely encouraged to root for him in the climactic fight with Supes, I think and in forming the Bat army
Tony Jay
@eddie blake:
Then we disagree. The original version is Ennis saying why he dislikes the metaphor of superheroes as godlike role models while turning the comic book idea of ‘Government-backed anti-cape conspiracy’ on its head. It’s gross and ugly and deliberately offensive at times, but that’s just the setting for a funny story about damaged people in impossible situations and it’s still way more interesting than the TV version.
Urban, yes, he’s always good – he’s just not playing Billy Butcher.
Steve in the ATL
I see a lot of comments on B-J about retreading books or even entire catalogs. With so many greats books out there, why not try something you haven’t read before?
Similarly, with so many great books available, do schools still have kids read utter shite like Silas Marner? No wonder kids don’t read anything but comics now!
PS—I am not a crank.
LuciaMia
@debbie: OMG, yes!I loved that production!
Steve in the ATL
@RSA: nothing good happens to anyone in any Cormac McCarthy book
PJ
@Uncle Cosmo:
I try to finish every book I start, no matter how much I become disenchanted with it, but Mann defeated me.
I started on a volume of his novellas and short stories. I managed to get through Death and Venice, Tonio Kroger, and Mario and the Magician before giving it up. They were all a slog – endless dry descriptions of self-serious people trying to form a thought or make a decision and failing. I realize this is something we all do, but Mann’s own lack of sense of humor is fatal. I just could not give a shit about any of these characters or their trivial and oh so weighty predicaments.
prostratedragon
@gogiggs: [umkay, I’ll try again, and maybe a bit better]
Thanks for your main point. If the central figures are bad guys, then there might be some point being made other than to justify or magnify their behavior; better to think of the stories as surreal, though not stylistically, rather than real. In the two cases that I know of, not having caught up with Breaking Bad, they could be illustrations of how to destroy the family which you claim is the reason for what you do, with serious side journeys into the hypocrisy of that claim as well as its inefficacy.
As for who can benefit, I suppose anyone whose conscience can be piqued by noticing in themselves high-handed ways by which they have unilaterally placed their families at risk, like Tony or Michael, or Faustian bargains they have made, like Carmella (episode “College”) or Kay.
eddie blake
@Tony Jay:
yeah. you should probably read more pat mills
PJ
@gogiggs: The problem with any movie is that, if it is done well, it will make the subject matter, no matter how awful, entertaining.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@PJ: I know I started Buddenbrooks. I’m reasonably sure I read it all the way through, but I can’t remember a single damn thing about it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Neil Gaiman. He bores me silly.
Btw, BG, I read WINTER COUNT this week. Good book! Thanks for the recommendation.
Uncle Cosmo
A few years back at The Book Thing** I stumbled upon an absolutely-free pristine trade-paper edition of the first volume of GoT. And I thought maybe this was a sign.
It wasn’t. It was like slogging through molasses. I fought my way to roughly page 330 when it occurred to me that I really did not give a rodent’s rectum about any of the characters. Not one. I was utterly indifferent to their fates. So on my next weekend visit to the Book Thing I dropped it into the donation hopper. I hope someone enjoyed it.
** The end of the calendar year will mark a full year of their being “temporarily closed.” I would hope by now they’d have completed and submitted the paperwork to regain non-profit status – but the general slowdown in government operations may have caught them slowed down as well. Not that it matters, Miz Rona would have kept them closed all these months…
HumboldtBlue
@RSA:
Agreed, maybe that’s why we haven’t run into palmary before. And the spell-checker did not recognize it as a word.
@LuciaMia:
Yes, everyone is miserable in a gilded cage. Makes me wonder how much Diana impacted her sons, they at least seem to have some human qualities.
Steve in the ATL
@Frankensteinbeck: you are dead to me.
@Mike in NC: you are also dead to me.
A Confederacy of Dunces is one the greatest novels ever written by a non-Balloon Juice author.
dexwood
Neil Gaiman. He bores me silly.
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m with you here.
Tony Jay
@eddie blake:
Thanks. I’m 48, British and have been reading 2000AD since Dredd had the goggle-eyed helmet.
Maybe you just didn’t get it?
eddie blake
@Tony Jay:
oh i got it. i’d also read it before when mills wrote it the FIRST time.
eta- i’m from brooklyn. i’m a year younger than you, and have been reading mills’ work since the early eighties.
you’d have to be riding on a REAL short bus not to get the boys.
Uncle Cosmo
@BGinCHI: I recall that I read it not long after it came out. It made so much of an impression on me that I don’t recall much about it. Except that I didn’t think much of the chess part. I say this having been a serious tournament player until the end of the 70s.
Bluntly, I’ve never read a novel in which chess played a major role that was worth a damn. Nabokov’s Luzhin’s Defense comes closest, but still.
Craig
@BGinCHI: Great writer. Put the hook in me from the first line of Neuromancer.
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Sold
Uncle Cosmo
@zhena gogolia: I have a copy of AK on my shelf – I may have made it 5 pages in at last try. (Next to it is a copy of Android Karenina – picked up at a dollar store just so I could put it right there, & IMHO worth every penny for schitzengiggles even if I never crack the cover.)
eddie blake
@Craig:
a great line. was actually thinking of that the other day when we were setting up the flatscreen. these days, a dead channel is bright blue.
Almost Retired
Some of the books that are not getting much love here — Confederacy of Dunces and Pynchon, for example – are favorite reads of my 24 year old self – when I was a regular at the magnificent Either/Or Bookstore in pre-gentrified Hermosa Beach. I’m frightened to read them again, for fear of the “what the fuck was I thinking” syndrome. That’s something that happened when I re-read a Tom Robbins novel I pulled off the shelf at a B&B last year.
RSA
It’s funny how poorly that opening line has aged (as striking as it was!) for what’s sometimes described as a genre-defining novel.
Speaking of striking, it’s also funny how an older technological opening is still okay:
I might have trouble re-reading some passages from 1984 these days, but that’s just me.
zhena gogolia
@Brachiator:
That would be my review of the Bondarchuk version.
zhena gogolia
@Almost Retired:
I loved Confederacy of Dunces when I read it, probably 30 years ago. But I haven’t read it again. I don’t know how I’d react now. I thought it was hilarious.
Bex
I hated Hamnet, which surprised me because I usually love books set in that time.
WaterGirl
@dm: You are the 3rd person today to end up on the banned list for no apparent reason. I just un-banned you and set your comments free.
You should be good now.
J
@Uncle Cosmo: Though people whose taste I respect admire it, I’m with you about GOT. The first few times that the author dispatched–in a horribly gruesome way–a character whom he’d used all his skill to make us like, I found it bracing. But n times later, I began to think he was a one trick pony, and that the point of the trick was to take the book seriously (if it’s relentlessly unpleasant, it must be serious mustn’t it?)
grandmaBear
Loved War & Peace, Brothers Karamazov, finished Anna Karenina but hated her as a character but couldn’t finish Crime & Punishment at all. Made myself a bucket list of books to read when I turned 60 -books I always intended to read, or ones I’d read when too young & hurried and got through a few, but couldn’t do that one. Recently I’ve been sticking with more light weight material- I need less stress and haven’t been able to focus well enough for longer novels.
I had a text in college, which I was assured later was actually a decent book, The ABC’s of Language and Linguistics, that I never got past page 3 on. I kept it on my nightstand for years as a sure thing to put me to sleep – absolutely dependable.
I also hated Confederacy of Dunces, though I did finish it.
Mark's Bubbie
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Just not my cuppa.
I enjoyed A Confederacy of Dunces and Portnoy’s Complaint when I was young and re-read them many years later… big mistake.
Tehanu
@zhena gogolia: I loved Jane Eyre until Wide Sargasso Sea absolutely ruined it for me.
Also I see I’m not alone in loathing Game of Thrones. I gave up on the series at the end of Season 1 and on the books about halfway through #5 — the series, because I got grossed out by all the gratuitous sex and violence, and the books because I just lost interest, which I don’t think I would have if I’d liked any of the characters.
I actually did finish The World According to Garp, after which my lifetime rule of always finishing a book went out the window. If it hadn’t been a library book, I would have thrown it into a sump.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@SFBayAreaGal: Remember, he was paid by the word and the books were serialized, so naturally they are long and wordy. Of course, I haven’t touched Dickens since HS and Tale of Two Cities.
grandmaBear
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I read Bleak House a few years ago & thought it was great.
dm
@trollhattan: There’s a not-bad audiobook of Gravitiy’s Rainbow, which I used recently to re-read the book (I last read it 40 years ago, and there was a lot I was hazy on).
Um… There are probably better ways to spend one’s time. I haven’t read everything by Pynchon, but I think some of his later works are better.
Gravity’s Rainbow has a warm place in my heart because my living group in college used to recruit freshpeople by staging a banana breakfast during housing week.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
I could never get interested in The Sopranos, Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad. I got farther in Breaking Bad than the first two but I don’t think I made it to the second episode.
SFBayAreaGal
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I honestly didn’t know that.
Still doesn’t make his books anymore appealing.?
dm
@prostratedragon: There’s a wonderful documentary about people who are deeply under Moby Dick‘s spell, Call Us Ishmael, (https://www.amazon.com/Call-Us-Ishmael-David-Shaerf/dp/B07QVBD1FK). One is an artist who did a drawing for every page in the novel, another is Laurie Anderson, with excerpts from a reading of Moby Dick by the likes of Tilda Swindon.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@AM in NC: @AM in NC: Mark Rylance is fabulous. Loved him Bridge of Spies too.
dm
I’m not sure I can do another run-through of Revolutionary Girl Utena. I suppose it counts as “haven’t finished”, since I never watched the movie.
Spanish Moss
“One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Both my husband and I have tried it a couple times each (such an important book, a classic!) and couldn’t get very far.
I am surprised to see “A Confederacy of Dunces” as a popular item on this thread, I loved it.
“The Brothers Karamasov” is an important book to me, but I only made it through on a bet. I loved “Crime and Punishment”, but Karamasov was punishment. My future husband and I were playing each other on a tennis ladder at work, and when sharing a beer afterwards discovered we were both reading Karamosov at the same time. What are the odds in a high tech field? We were both struggling to finish it, and agreed that whoever finished it second would buy a beer for the person who finished it first. The rest is history…
RSA
@Uncle Cosmo:
I had a similar reaction, but I slogged through all the books. (I liked some of Martin’s earlier short stories.) For a while, when friends would talk about GoT on TV, I could keep up because I knew the plot lines.
On the other hand, by the time the TV series was produced, I’d realized that I just didn’t like the story. I found out along the way that Martin based GoT on the War of the Roses, and I’ve never really read historical novels, so that may have been a part of it.
Not to mention waiting forever for the payoff of different plot points. I think I’m not alone in my feelings there, among both book and TV fans.
dm
@WaterGirl: Thanks. Maybe because I’m using a VPN?
zhena gogolia
@Spanish Moss:
It took me five tries to get into One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I adored it.
CatFacts
Downton Abbey. Got partway through the first season and went, “I saw this back when it was called Gosford Park. It was better as a 2-hour movie with some bite.”
Gosford Park’s great, though.
WaterGirl
@Mark’s Bubbie: Your comment was released from moderation.
With an apostrophe in your screen name, every single comment will need to be manually approved. So you might think about changing the name, or using an * instead of an apostrophe.
You can get creative. Welcome!
Spanish Moss
@zhena gogolia: I expected to like Solitude, but really didn’t get far on either attempt. It could have been a timing thing (with whatever was going on in my life at the time, probably a lot of young children). What did you love about it? Maybe I will give it another try.
Ugh, I misspelled Karamazov several times. Don’t you hate it when you notice it just after the edit window has closed?
WaterGirl
@dm: Well, it was odd, and I’ll tell you why.
If I was banned, for instance, it would typically show both the email address I use for BJ and my IP address.
In your case, your IP address was in there, but your email address was not. And the email address that went with your IP address in the WordPress banned list has never been used for a comment here.
So I left the email but removed your IP. Send me an email if you have trouble again so I can get it sorted out.
BGinCHI
@Steve in the ATL: I knew I should have died young.
BGinCHI
@Uncle Cosmo: The TV series. Haven’t read the novel….
BGinCHI
@Craig: Yeah, reading that back when it came out was seriously amazing.
We didn’t even have computers!
OK, there were computers, but almost nobody had one. Those books were cool.
BGinCHI
@Bex: Interesting. I’ve been debating whether to read it, occupational hazard and all that.
What’s wrong with it? Curious.
Uncle Cosmo
@dm: I have a warm place in my heart for The Crying of Lot 49 – it was required reading for the second half of a course in contemporary poetry & prose that I took as a college sophomore in 1968-69. The first meeting of the prose part consisted of a 2+-hour lecture on TCOL49 delivered by the grad student who was teaching the course – you could not have imagined all the stuff he unpacked from that slim paperback (that took all of 90 minutes to read, even stopping to laugh like a loon every couple of pages**).
That grad student, FTR, was one Edward Mendelson, now professor at Columbia, literary executor for the estate of W. H. Auden, and acknowledged as one of the (if not the) foremost experts on Pynchon’s work in the freakin’ world.
** One favorite line among many was in the embedded description of the imaginary play The Postman’s Tragedy, by John Wharfinger – to wit, the shortest line of blank verse ever written:
T- t- t- t- t-.
I was seriously writing poetry at the time, and fascinated by scansion, so it may be a fairly parochial and obscure in-joke…
Scout211
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Yes! Neil Gaiman is just a mess.
My book group read the Ocean at the End of the Lane and none of us liked it or understood it. It was a mess. We asked the member who had recommended it what it meant. There had to be some symbolism or metaphor hidden in the book somewhere that we just missed, maybe? She said, “I don’t really know. It’s just Neil Gaiman!”
Huh?
Nope. No Neil Gaiman.
J R in WV
Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce. Tried Gravitiy’s Rainbow, twice, gave up completely, won’t try again nor his other works. Same for Joyce. Hope this doesn’t mean I’m shallow…
Not fond of Russian authors, either… Too many characters with multiple names.
I like dense, thick novels. Neal Stephenson’s work, for example, so that isn’t the problem.
JanieM
Very late to this party and need to catch up with the comments, but: The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Could not finish the book. There may have been a time in my life when I could tolerate the depiction of brutality and torture, but the last few years have not been that time.
Uncle Cosmo
@SFBayAreaGal: Another factor that no doubt structurally distorted Dickens’s books was the serialization, which all but demanded a cliffhanger ending to every episode – in order to persuade the readership to buy next week’s scandal sheet to find out what happened!
Not that it makes the product any better, but maybe more forgivable. (I loathed A Sale Of Two Titties ;^D in HS but as a college freshman Hard Times was enjoyable.)
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
Madmen. I think I watched one episode. I wanted to like it but it felt like having to watch every crapy promotion that they were supposed to be creating. The concept was good, I think, but I didn’t want to live in that world. Hell I grew up in that world, well not exactly in it, but feeling like it was only around the next corner was a lot of the 50s and 60s of LA.
JanieM
@Steve in the ATL:
Why ever go to the same restaurant twice? Why ever order the same dish twice? Why ever drink the same kind of whisky twice? Why ever hang out with the same friends twice? …
I reread books because I like hanging out in particular worlds, and also because they are different books, and I am a different reader, as the years go by.
currants
The fourth in Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels. Because it’s the last one and I don’t want them to be over! (Yes, I’ve read some of her other work and I love it, but…not the same series.)
J R in WV
@SFBayAreaGal:
OMG, THIS !! Can’t read Dickens unless at gunpoint! Terrible writer, working for the $$/word. No plot, no characters, nothing there!!!
Not fond of Catcher in the Rye either, nor any of his other work, none of it!
currants
@JanieM: YES!
I learned that early as a teacher, too. If I couldn’t make it through a book two semesters in a row without being bored out of my mind, off the list it went. I like to spend time with books in which I can find new ideas/images/nuances every time I read them, even if I have to read them for work.
currants
@J R in WV:
SAME. But…I feel that way about most Victorian writers, tbh.
Uncle Cosmo
@J R in WV: Re Pynchon, try The Crying of Lot 49 – it’s much shorter than the rest of his stuff & there’s a fair chance a fair amount of it will make you laugh out loud. (It features as protagonist one Oedipa Maas, whose husband “Mucho” Maas is a DJ at radio station KCUF in San Narciso, California…& gets wackier from there.) I dunno – it may be too juvenile for us auld phartz – but give it a shot anyway.
BGinCHI
@J R in WV: Hmm. Great Expectations is a beautifully-structured, character-rich novel. I’ve taught it 2 or 3 times and it was fantastic in class (the real test of a novel’s mettle).
SFBayAreaGal
@J R in WV: Pretty close to what I felt. I will admit I did and still do like A Tale of Two Cities.
HumboldtBlue
@BGinCHI:
My favorite part of the Queen’s Gambit was learning about the author, Walter Tevis.
JanieM
Hmmmm. I’m 2/3 of the way through Our Mutual Friend for the umpteenth time. Well, I stopped counting a few iterations ago, but I’ve probably read it every 5-10 years since grad school in the seventies. My favorite Dickens novel.
Tastes differ, and thank goodness for that.
JanieM
@JanieM:
@currants:
I should also have asked, why ever listen to the same music twice?
*****
@currants: I couldn’t even get into the first Ferrante. Maybe I should try again, so many people have praised the set to the skies.
dm
@Uncle Cosmo: The Crying of Lot 49 I should do again. It’s another book I haven’t read for forty years, but I have a group of friends for whom “Write by W.A.S.T.E.” remains meaningful.
BGinCHI
@HumboldtBlue: I read that too.
Amazing he wrote The Hustler & Color of Money…..
J R in WV
@HumboldtBlue:
This!!! The British upper class are despicable and disgusting people with almost no exceptions~!!!!!!~ Arrogant and condescending, with no excuse for either sentiment!
Frosty Fred
I used to feel as though starting any book was a commitment and I needed to follow through, but as I get older and life literally does get shorter I have changed my mind, and feel free to quit one if I’m just not getting it. Red Mars on page 100, as I recall.
One thing I’ve found, that I don’t see mentioned, is that really good writers like Barbara Kingsolver and Jane Smiley make their worlds and characters too real to me–I’ve had to quit some of theirs because I see foreshadowing of bad things coming to characters I already care about. In fact, now I think of it, I haven’t read anything by either one in years, and I used to follow them devotedly.
Barbara
@Frosty Fred: Kingsolver is someone I have never cared for. I hve read several Jane Smiley works, and had the experience you are describing with Greenlanders. It was agonizing to read the last third but I had to finish it.
J R in WV
@RSA:
I read a couple of Cormac McCarthy’s things (word used intentionally!), and while they were kinda well done, good characters, plot, etc… Too grim, way too much hate and death. Won’t ever pick up another book, or watch another movie/TV show related to McCarthy’s work.
J R in WV
@FelonyGovt:
Me too, all the characters were people I would have hated in real life. Hated people who smoked in the presence of other people. Hated people who got drunk at lunch, etc, etc. Won’t watch a show with characters I hate right off the bat.
J R in WV
@Steve in the ATL:
Another one I agree about… nothing there, no redeeming qualities whatsoever!!!!! Terrible!!!!
zhena gogolia
@Spanish Moss:
You can’t really misspell it unless you’re using Cyrillic!
I can’t remember what I liked so much about Solitude, but it really hooked me and drew me in, and then I read several more of his novels. But I’ve kind of been off that kick for a while. I still have fond memories of the Cholera one, though.
HumboldtBlue
@BGinCHI:
Hell, I may have gotten the link from you. But yes, ain’t learning wonderful?
Zelma
I mostly read genre fiction for pleasure and if I don’t like a book, I’ll read the last two chapters and put it aside. I too got bogged down in Hamilton and also the recent biography of Washington.
I also gave up on The Crown pretty early, even though I subscribed to Netflix just to watch it. Which is strange because I’ve been a royal watcher all my life. I blame it on the fact that I share a birthday with the queen. Maybe it was because I’ve read an embarrassingly large numbers of royal biographers over the years and so it was all very familiar. I already knew how screwed up the family was.
I don’t get involved in TV series, but I have walked out on some movies – Gone With the Wind, Carousel, Clockwork Orange come immediately to mind.
Groucho48
Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazov, for me. I’ve probably attempted Moby Dick 8 or 10 times. Never got more than half way. Just too many tedious descriptions and digressions. As for Brothers, not sure why I could never get into 8t. I’ve read and enjoyed several other of his books, but, not this one.
Mo MacArbie
The comments. Made it to about #80 and had to hit the next thread. I guess I missed if this joke’s already been made. Mea culpa.
Bex
@BGinCHI: What little I read of it was dull and dreary. When I get to “who cares” with a book, that’s it.
zhena gogolia
@Mo MacArbie:
I loled.
Miss Bianca
@AliceBlue: Yeah, late to this thread, but I’ll chime in on Confederacy of Dunces. Just could not see what the fuss was about.
Also, too, The Silmarillion. I found learning that Lord of the Rings was basically just a footnote in the Middle Earth saga was not as interesting, even to the budding scholarly mind, as I thought it was going to be. Gave up reading the footnotes to the footnotes and just went back to LOTR
ETA: Oh, yeah – never made it through Anna Karenina either. Sorry, zg!
lurker
Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Brilliant but depressing. I was fine with it until he killed off the only likeable character.
Rusty
@BGinCHI: I had the exact same response to the Irishman. I saw the scene where he beat up the guy who was rude to his wife or daughter, and was done with the series
Miss Bianca
@gwangung: What a great idea!
Miss Bianca
@BGinCHI: It took me forever to finish Anathem – had to start it three times before I finally did it – and I’m in the middle of Cryptonomicon now – along with three or four other books. I’ll finish it, but it will probably take me a year.
currants
@JanieM: I completely understand that. There is SO MUCH going on and all of it unfamiliar, but you’re treated as though you know all these characters. That can be daunting, if not off-putting. I have a friend who I knew would love the books if I could get her through the first 50 pages or so–but I know her well enough to know those first pages were going to be the test. She’s finished all 4 and is on to others of her books.
So what I told her is what I’d recommend to anyone, first time or trying again:
Just let the words flow over and past you. Eventually they’ll make sense, and you’ll find you understand the characters’ relationships with one another and the places/actions. At the end of that book, you can go back and scan the beginning again (or look at the character list, which I don’t advise until you’re well into the book and puzzled by something). It’s worth it (IMO).
It’s amazing and luxurious writing (and I’m speaking of the TRANSLATION, which is just remarkable!), and the time/place it evokes is memorable (and seems much closer to early 20th century than it does to space travel, to me, at least).
currants
@SFBayAreaGal: YES. Especially in connection with Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast!
currants
@Frosty Fred: Same–but that has become true for me only in the last few years. (It’s always been true for me with video/movies–which may be why I watch so few of them and read so many more books.)
There are those who call me...tim... (Still posh)
I walked out on Walking Dead during the Flu Season. Never went back. Some sad wretch coughed blood in my beloved Herschel’s face, and that was all she wrote. The non-stop parade of misery came at a time of great personal and financial turmoil for me and the fam, and the last thing I needed to see was Endless Bummer.