When Not to Finish a Book

There's a lively debate out there about the virtues of finishing books (or not). I've spent years feeling a sense of obligation to finish every book that I start, and it's only recently that I've allowed myself to leave behind the ones that I'm not enjoying. There's no reason that reading should feel like a chore, especially considering how many books are out there that I do want to read, but will probably never have time to get to. Re-discovering the pleasure of reading is something that I've written about before and think is important.

So, here is a partial list of books that I gave up on this year, along with some very subjective reasons why:

Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement:  
I was really excited about this book when it first came out. I loved The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, but I hadn't read anything else by Tan since I was an undergraduate.

The Valley of Amazement is ok. I didn't particularly care about the main character, and that made me realize that part of what I liked about The Joy Luck Club was how engaging and real the characters felt. I don't always have to like the characters in a novel, but it isn't a good sign when I just don't care about what's happening to the main character.

In the long run, it wasn't the main character that made me give up on this one, but instead a graphic scene involving a medical procedure that left me feeling queasy. Maybe that's being too sensitive on my part, but, added to the fact that I didn't care much about the storyline, I just didn't feel like continuing to read. I don't think that we need to go so far as to put trigger warnings on all new novels, although that's a complicated issue that I will write more about at some point. At the same time, I'm just not particularly interested in reading graphic descriptions of violence or brutal medical procedures. If that makes me an overly sensitive reader, or if it means that I'm unwilling to tackle gritty subjects, that's just the way it is.

Dave Eggers's The Circle: 
Topic-wise, I should have loved this novel. I feel all sorts of ambivalence toward Facebook, and I can imagine really enjoying a conspiracy-theory book about corporate data-mining. However, this one left me completely cold for many reasons, not least of which that the main character is a non-entity.

Even more than that, I found certain elements totally unbelievable. Obviously, something this dystopic is going to have unrealistic elements, but they have to be somewhat credible. It felt like Eggers was slipping up on details that should be easy. For example, the online customer service help desk that the main character works at isn't remotely like a customer service desk anywhere. In what world does a list of FAQ's really answer all the scenarios that your customers ask about? In the tech world? Really? Then, in what world are ALL your customers that satisfied, no matter how brilliant and customer service-oriented you are? Sorry, don't believe it. I didn't get much further than this sequence before I gave up.

Donna Tartt's The Secret History:

I started this book after multiple friends told me that I had to read it, and I have no idea what the hype is all about. The writing isn't particularly engaging, and the storyline is neither believable nor compelling. The main character is a young man who goes off to an east coast college to get away from his awful family, and he becomes absolutely determined to get into this Greek class, despite the fact that the professor is really strange and doesn't want to let him in. The main character follows the extremely insular clique of Greek students around, and they seem unpleasant and totally unbelievable (although my husband tells me that I might have found them more believable if I had gone to Bennington). Eventually, they clue him into what he needs to do to get into the class, and he says the magic words to the professor. When he does get in the class, things get really dull, and he is more and more cut off from anything going on in the rest of the school. As time passes, the students in the Greek class get weirder and weirder, and then it seems that someone dies in the middle of some sort of Bachanalian rite...and then I stopped reading because I really didn't care. 

Bernhardt Wilton's Lookaway, Lookaway:

This novel seemed promising when I read the review, but I very quickly tired of what felt like a caricature of southern life. It didn't seem like Wilton was interested in creating characters so much as types who would behave in stereotypically predictable ways. When the frat boys were about to rape a farm animal, I gave up.

There are a few others that I've given up on in the last few months, but this is a representative sample. Reading this over, I see that characterization is important to me, as well as a realistic plot. It's not that I don't like fantasy, but I don't want to spend the whole novel thinking "who does that?"

What are some books that you've given up on?

 

Joanna Trollope's Modern Take on Sense and Sensibility

 Erica by Donald Durham is CC BY-ND 2.0

Sense and Sensibility has never been my favorite Austen novel, but after reading Joanna Trollope's updated version, I'm looking forward to re-reading it. Trollope's version was the first in the Austen Project's re-writings, and I think that it works even better than Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey, which I reviewed recently. In addition to being highly entertaining, Trollope's version works because, on the whole, there aren't any off notes or any moments where the connections to Austen's novel seem forced. Trollope has seamlessly incorporated modern equivalents for the situations in which the characters find themselves, and I think that she does it effectively - and, for me, she's done it in a way that makes me see Austen's novel anew.

Here's what I mean: years ago, when I read Sense and Sensibility in Pat Spacks's Austen and Richardson class, she remarked that this is a novel about depressed men. She's absolutely right about that - Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, in particular, are depressed figures, and the women's challenge is to change their emotional registers and expectations to match those of the men.

In Trollope's re-writing of Sense and Sensibility, none of this is lost, but she also emphasizes the extent to which Marianne's enthusiasms, depths of despair, and disconnectedness are connected to depression. And she doesn't do this in a way that simply diagnoses her (which I would have hated), but rather makes her character make more sense to me as a reader. It's not that these elements aren't in Austen's novel, but they somehow came through to me more clearly in this version.

Likewise, she translates Marianne's passion for poetry into a love for moody pop music, which Marianne strums on her guitar as she wallows in teen-agerly angst. Even her physical delicacy is made more legible with Trollope's choice to make her an extreme asthmatic.

When updatings of classic novels work, they not only entertain, but also render what is historically distant understandable to a modern reader - even to a modern reader who has spent a good deal of time reading Austen and studying the novels in their historical context. For undergraduates encountering Austen for the first time, her novels can seem incredibly foreign and incomprehensible. Why is it such a big deal that Marianne is sending Willoughby letters in London? Why can't Elinor and her mother just go out and get jobs? How much money do they need? One of the most useful essays on explaining money in Austen's novels is Edward Copeland's contribution to Approaches to Teaching Pride and Prejudice, where he avoids attempting to quantify the value of money in modern terms, but rather in terms of quality of life - i.e., how many servants you could afford on X pounds a year and what that meant in terms of labor you had to do yourself.

For me, one of the reasons that Trollope's Sense and Sensibility works so well is because she renders the circumstances of Austen's characters in modern terms - and she does so in a way that makes me want to revisit the novel. That's not to say that any of these translations are necessarily accurate, but only that they are a useful lens for revisiting Austen's novel.

And, aside from the pitch perfect translation of Austen's world to the modern day, Trollope has done a marvelous job rendering the characters, especially the most obnoxious. Her Fanny Dashwood is brilliant, as are Mrs. Jennings and her son. As a reader, you're right there with Elinor and Marianne wanting to throttle all three of them. What more could you ask for?