The book I can't seem to finish

mmikaoj said:
For me the most troublesome has been Jack Kerouacs "On the Road"..
Yep thats true, his most famous and publicly appreciated novell. Strangely enough I cant get much longer then 150 pages, ive tried 3 times now.
His others novells I have enjoyed a lot but I cant seem to get trough this one.
Very strange.
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Try reading it while on a road trip! 🙂
 
Ok, I have a confession. During very long car trips I have been known to buy/borrow books on tape of books I wouldn't have the gumption to read by eye. For example, the only way I could have finished Homer's Iliad, was to hear it read by Derek Jacoby. Now that was a great "read".
 
Mine is The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse.I have read the others OK.
I used to find The Naked Lunch (William Burroughs) difficult but finally managed that so perhaps next time I shop amazon I may get The Glass Bead Game again and see if I am ready yet!
Regards
Steve
 
Kerouac's "On the Road"

Great book - I read that while on a motorcycle trip and while staying with my buddy's nephew for several days in his university student rental house in Tennessee.
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It was "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that caused me to get on a bike in the first place. That and "on the road" continue to stir the hippie in me even at 74 years old.
Great thread to read as well.
 
It took me a few years to finish If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (Italo Calvino). I got bogged down after a couple chapters. Then I picked it up again, then forgot all about it for a year, then read a bit more on the way to Roma, then forgot about it again. A few months ago I finally sat down and finished it. A REALLY enjoyable read, but too difficult to read in one go.

I'm halfway through a book called The Occult (Colin Wilson). I haven't read that since a holiday in Gran Canaria a year or two ago. I don't want to skip a few chapters, so it's sat on a pile of things to finish reading.

I ne'er bothered finishing Once (James Herbert). To be honest it was kinda rubbish.


I have a book of 'short' stories by Calvino somewhere by my bed that I need to finish. Currently I'm reading a lot of trade's in the comic shop ("trade-paperback graphic novels" - collected story arcs in volumes). I read Civil War the other day, that was amazing. I now have the other 4 books that join onto the story to read, and then a further few titles to read that I should have read beforehand.
 
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visiondr said:
Ok, I have a confession. During very long car trips I have been known to buy/borrow books on tape of books I wouldn't have the gumption to read by eye. For example, the only way I could have finished Homer's Iliad, was to hear it read by Derek Jacoby. Now that was a great "read".
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Never bothered with the Illiad, bunch of *$%£.. The Odyssey, however, is WELL worth reading. Imagination runs wild. Especially as each chapter is its own story.
 
I remember reading Dickens Hard Times... the first 200 pages was so tough... the last 180 pages I couldn't put it down.
Mobby Dick I wish I'd thrown out.... the great classic is just a lesson in whaling... I felt after reading it I could teach a whaling workshop. I think it went 500 pages before we saw the great white whale.
There was a couple I put down and will never finish, at first I feld guilty but just try to get over it.
 
The Brothers Karamazov was a damn close call to heartbreak... It took me a whole year of reading. Truding the barren wastes of christian theological discussions took some serious effort. Much unlike The Idiot, which I read voraciously and easily. But I think that I will enjoy it more in, say, thirty years' time. It was definitely an old man writing the book and it probably requires an old mind to really enjoy it.
 
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Thank God someone else finds Rushdie as much hard going as I do. A book I wouldn't blame anyone for not finishing is Victor Burgin's "Thinking Photography". He was my tutor at college and is a wonderful lecturer (really the best I have heard), good tutor and I admire a lot of his work. He also had a dry wit in person that was highly enjoyable. However this particular book (and remember I had to look him the eye and tell the truth when he asked if I'd read it, plus quoting from it in essays never did much harm to your marks) is very dense and academic and requires serious persistence to get though each of the essays. It is worth it and Victor is a notorious Leica user (there's one on the cover) http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Phot...9071852?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179175854&sr=8-2
but I must confess now that I'm not obliged, I haven't opened it in 25 years.

However, his book "Some Cities" is really worth looking at - great pictures, more accessible and just as worthwhile.
 
Oh the great Russian classics. I will confess that I thought the second half of "Crime and Punishment" went over the top. It is simply too convincing to be an easy read - you really feel as though you are disintegrating with Raskolnikov. A truly great work that takes character to get through.
 
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Jamie123 said:
Surely not as entertaining as the bible 😉
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Ha....actually I'm hoping the opposite. I forgot that I did try the Bible in my younger days of indoctrination by the tali-Baptists.

On the other hand I have HST's "Kingdom of Fear" that I've been itching to crack into. Maybe I'll treat myself to that next.

Speaking of photography books, I first checked out "The Negative" by Ansel from my local library, then got all 5 of his books via internet & bookshop, breezed through "The Camera", and now I'm still mired in the middle of "The Negative". Who knows if I'll ever jump back into that one- much less try "The Print" & his other two on natural & artificial light photography.
 
nico said:
Jon,
Andrea Camilleri is one of my favourite italian living writers. I thinks his prose is a fine mix between italian language and sicilian dialact. In his books there are also brilliant hints of humor and fabulous food descriptions. So I'm curious to know what you think about translation (I suppose you're reading it in english) ...
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nico: Sorry to be late, but I have only just seen this, and I didn't read the book as planned. I went out with a camera instead that day. No good photos so I should have read the book.

Still the book is in my bag ready for a bad light day and time to waste in a cafe.

One question: 'his prose'? I was thinking that Andrea Camilleri is female.

On another note: Did you see that Michael Dibdin (the 'Inspector Zen' detective stories set in Italy) died recently? I think he wrote very well about Italian day to day life, and all his books are very readable so his name doesn't really belong in this thread.
 
I've read that book. It has several references to Indian politics during the 70s(?) which bear little relevance elsewhere in the world today.
My struggle was with Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason when I was 18. I think I got through half the book after several attempts and restarts! I would probably put it down after the first two pages if I were to start now at 36.
 
ClaremontPhoto said:
One question: 'his prose'? I was thinking that Andrea Camilleri is female.

On another note: Did you see that Michael Dibdin (the 'Inspector Zen' detective stories set in Italy) died recently? I think he wrote very well about Italian day to day life, and all his books are very readable so his name doesn't really belong in this thread.
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Hi Jon,
the answer to the question is yes he's male and he's quite old (more then 70 y.o for sure). He was a tv writer. As a novelist his most famous serie is the one about "Commissario Montalbano" a sicilian (leftwing?) police man. He wrote also beatiful novels - still set in Sicily - with different narrative tecnique but still melting dialect and "official" language. All of his novels are - imho - great because they can be considered -at the same time - as a genre entertaing reading but also a deep depiction of actual sicilian (and italian) society. Sorry for this long reply but he's one of my favourite italian living novelist :angel: .
Sorry again but I never heard about Michael Dibdin but I'll look for his novels because i like to see how non native novelists describe italian society...any title to suggest?
Ciao
 
Never had much trouble with fiction; if I didn't get it, I just let it go (and I majored in history and literature.) But if you really want to feel like your brains are being taken out with an ice cream scoop, I could point you at a couple of Photoshop how-to books. There's no reason that technical books have to be badly written, but they usually are -- they feel like somebody wrote an outline and then a hired factory crew filled it up with words.

Also, in my experience, the "For Idiots" books are; I struggled to get through the inane time- and space-wasting jokes and cutesy prose. I tried reading them because there are a number of things about which I'd like to know just a little bit, rather than a lot, but I couldn't handle the bad vaudeville acts, and so gave them up.

As a reader of history, I find that academics, despite their poor reputation as writers, are often quite good; and the further they are from the English and philosophy departments, the better they seem to get.

JC
 
.... finishing ...

.... finishing ...

do you think he/she will "finish" his/her book?
 

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