Today is Multiple Post Day.
The fine fellows over at SFSignal are asking what books you have stopped reading and why?
Here is the full question as asked:
In light of my abortive attempt at reading The Gone Away World I started thinking back at other books that I gave up on before finishing. I can’t remember any book in the recent past, other than what sparked this post, that I quit on. For the most, if I read a book I’m not keen on, I can still find some way to plow through until the end.
The only other book that springs to mind is Dhalgren by Delaney. That one I started and stopped several times before I managed to force myself to finish it, and I didn’t like it one bit. I should have left it alone but it’s a classic so I there you go.
But what about you? What books have you stopped reading and why?
My answer:
Interesting question. In my youth, back when my tastes were broad and my reading time expansive, it was a point of pride with me never to put down a book until I had finished it. Consequently, the time when I put a book down unfinished stick in my mind.
The first was TITUS GROAN by Mervyn Peake. I picked it up because it was a member of the otherwise splendid and wonderful Ballentine Adult Fantasy imprint edited by Lin Carter. If you recall, or if you can ask your father or grandfathers about those far-off days, there simply were no other fantasy novels available, aside from Tolkien, Ursula K. Leguin’s EARTHSEA, the Narnia of CS Lewis, and Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. The flood of Tolkien clones was still in the time of Things to Come.
But in reading everything under the Lin Carter imprint, one was from time to time victimized by a divergence in taste between oneself and Mr. Carter. Even my eclectic reading breadth was not eclectic enough to make it past the first 100 pages or so. The disgusting characters, their pointless actions, the lack of anything noble, otherworldly, fine or even of mundane decency and attractiveness galled my young mind. There was no magic in either sense of the word in TITUS GROAN. After page after dreary page of reading about vermin, villains, malcontents and madness — I think I was at the scene when the Lord of the Manor is eaten by owls — I realized I would have more fun doing algebra homework.
Blame my youth, if you will, but to this day I cannot imagine why anyone considers this book a fantasy, except for the mere overlarge size of the house in which the toadlike grotesques slump and commit arson or murder.
In recent years, on the other hand, I have become quite hard to please, and even books of great fame and decidedly well-crafted construction such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series will fail to hold by attention against competing claims of work, playing with my children, writing books of my own, reading history or philosophy or theology, playing City of Heroes (where, of course, I put all my own hero characters as heroes!) and other clamoring time-absorption unknown to younger and emptier lives.
In the case of Mr. Jordan, the fault my mine rather than his. I had just finish a scene that I thought was both fascinating from a reader’s point of view, and brilliant from a craftsman’s point of view. The main character had been sent on a spirit vision walk back through time, and had seen the remnants of the previous high-tech civilization, as it collapsed into barbarism, slowly forgetting the meaning of their ceremonies and laws: but the reader of course recognizes the remnants of everything we’ve taken for granted, from sacred trees to spear-wielding nomads, now in their original context. Brilliant! I wish I had written something half so clever. Nonetheless, and unfortunately, I then realized there was not a single character whom I cared whether he lived or died. I did not care about the gleeman’s checkered past, or the gambling kid’s new found magic spear, or the smith’s apprentice, and I certainly did not care about the non-hero kid who was slowly going insane. Why? The characters did not seem any more flat or one-dimensional than those from the pens of other writers, even in books I adored. I just did not feel the sympathy one was supposed to feel after five or six fat volumes are walking the long path of adventure with these guys.
One drawback of having gray hairs in your beard, is that most of the authors you know and adored in youth, and whose any book, any at all, you would buy as quick as you can say "AMAZON ONE-CLICK!" have passed away. And some of those still alive turn out to be outspoken partisans of freakish political cults, practitioners of witchcraft, spies for the Kremlin, members of the Supreme Anarchist Council and agents of the Si Fan: and they won’t shut up about how much they hate Tolkien and love Mervyn Peake. I don’t begrudge them their chance to be outspoken (they are frankly less so than am I) but neither can I take the guileless pleasure in their work I did in days of golden innocence.
Other books I never finished fall into two categories: (1) I was young and philisitine (2) I was old and consumed with a mind-destroying hatred of collectivists and their political cult, which sadly renders me unable to enjoy perfectly cromulent works by mildly progressive authors.
DHALGREN was the first SF novel I never finished. I don’t recall the reason why. It’s been too long. Maybe it was the lack of explosions and bloodshed.
THE FEMALE MAN by Joanna Russ. I was too young to recognize feminist madness for what it was, but I was wary enough to know the author was trying to put something over on me. Also, no explosions and bloodshed.
THE GHOST BRIGADES by John Scalzi. OLD MAN’S WAR starred a basically likable protagonist, and we feel sorry for him as of page one, paragraph one, line one, because he just finished burying his beloved wife of many years. The sequel starred a villain trapped in an inhuman, artificial body. I just did not like the main character enough to continue. If I had had more time to read, I’d give it another try.
CHUNG KUO by David Wingrove. This ran afoul of my narrowmindedness. The author established that the enemy of the static world-empire of the Chinese were American businessmen, but their motivation was not a desire for liberty and individualism, their desire was for change for the sake of change. In other words, the Chinese were Law and the Americans were Chaos, and neither one stood for anything that anyone could sympathize with.
JONATHON STRANGE AND MRS. NORREL — I actually bought this turkey in hardback on the strength of the recommendation of strangers. Long and dull and boring and Laodicean and lukewarm, not to mention tepid, tame, tedious, tiresome, tiring, trite and I wonder what in the world all the hype was about. I guess it pays to be friends with Neil Gaiman. And I had seen the same theme done better in GREEN MAGIC by Jack Vance in less than 5000 words. Also, no explosions and bloodshed.
BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson — once again, ran afoul, through no fault of the author, of my narrowmindedness. When the communist are introduced as sympathetic characters, and then the Environmental terrorist bombers are introduced as characters, who want to preserve the "environment" of Mars (a lifeless abomination of desolation) and are willing to commit sabotage to stop attempts to make Mars a place people — or ANYTHING — can live, and they are not portrayed as the utter and absolute nutbags that such a person would need to be to prefer his own death and those of his loved ones to preserve the sterility of ice-covered rocks of rust — that lost my sympathy. And there was no character I liked, no hero, not even anyone of ordinary decency. On the other hand, it had the best hard-sf I had seen in fifteen years or more — if someone told me Mr. Robinson had actually been to Mars to do his research, I would not doubt it. The scene where the space elevator is sent crashing around the equator is simply a classic: it was as good as anything Arthur C. Clarke ever wrote, or better. Hard SF at its Hardest. I wished I could have liked the book.
DAEMONOMANIA by John Crowley. When one of the characters, a magician, wakes up and thinks he just used the ghost of his dead little boy as a catamite, I realized I was reading a book where the main character was a sodomite-incestous-necrophiliac-pederast-murderer. The scene was portrayed not as a scene of horror, but merely one of autumn-hued nostalgia and wonder. Now, perhaps that little boy was merely the spirit of Cupid, the pagan love-god, drawn by black magic into the magician’s soul, and so here the author was merely toying with sodomite-incest-necrophilia-pederasty-murder as a symbol for something like man’s dangerous relationship with the spirit world. Then I realized I really did not want to read a book (even one written by an admitted genius as Mr. Crowley) where the author chooses as a symbol to make some point about man’s dangerous relationship with the spirit world or something sodomite-incest-necrophiliac-pederasty-murder. I read the final book in the series, and found out it was just that same old Gnostic crap again. The Fundy Christians were the same old bad guys as they always are in Gnostic stories. The protagonist was a drug-taking adulterous loser who never finishes anything he starts. However, this is a book that is so well written, that I think I owe to myself, if not to the author for whom I have infinite respect, to try it again, to see if I can see it from the point of view the author meant me to see it from.
THE COOL WAR by Frederick Poul. Usually an author I like, but the distaste I had for the characters left a stain of moral nastiness on my heart. I was too young to be wary, but I thought the author was up to something.
THE GOLDEN AGE by Some obscure midlist author. What a load of Ayn Randian bullpockets! All those stupid made-up words and nothing happens for about a zillion pages. And half the time everything you think is happening is just an hallucination of some sort. And the Utopia in the far future did not have nationalized health care, did not show a proper sensitivity for diversity, and there were no persons of color among the various robots and posthumans! He did not mention the injustice of the illegal war of convenience in Iraq even once, which is what all the socially activated authors do. The main character is some sort of selfish villain who bucks the system and defies authority, and so I kept expecting the plot would really be about how he grows and develops into a proper class awareness and race-sensitivity and learns to love Big Brother like that delightful book by George Orwell, which has such a happy ending I just love it. But that never happens. The only thing I liked was the rocket-powered penguin.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
