Literary Masterpieces You've Often Attempted, But Never Finished

augie march!

(out of fashion? the prose is excellent but it's never had any steam, for me, tbh. got all the way to the falconry stuff as a teenager, still failed.)

I've read 2/3 of Proust, didn't like it, have never really started on the third volume ie: last third.

I read a few Cantos (is that the word?) of Dante's Inferno, decided I disliked most things about it and I should stop.

Most of the other big long difficult books, I haven't even seriously started yet. If I seriously started them I might finish them. DON QUIXOTE a possibility. I made it through GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by sheer persistence and hated it.

I had three books like this:

- Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki.
- Independent People by Laxness.
- Life and Fate by Grossman.

I did make it a point to return to them and they are all read now (well nearly done with Laxness).

Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries is what remains.

The only other thing that is relevant and staring at me is my copy of a translation of the complete Zibaldone (Leopardi). Haven't started and I have never been a dipping in and out of books person either but given the demands of adulthood (rent payment) I will have no choice.

i've finished the aesthetics of rock more than once (even if meltzer never did lol)

i've never got very far in ulysses which is why i voted tory in 2017 obv but my reasons for distraction at point of exit are emotionally impeccable (nothing to do wiith joyce)

The shadow q of the thread is when are you really finished with books and in that sort of vein I can see that different translators are picking up parts of Proust (think copyright has run out).

I picked up Smollett's translation of Cervantes and want to re-read it in that.

I just got Proust in 2 volumes translated by C.K. Scott Montrieff a couple of weeks ago after meaning to read him for years. Now will see when i get a chance to get to them.

I think I have started Crime & Punishment by different translators a couple of times and not finished it. Also was getting into Gunter Grass's Tin Drum when at the time I was interailing in my late teens and it got lost en route. I have meant to read it ever since and bought it a couple of times to do so. Still not got beyo0nd half way point.

I think I have more books that have been bought and not started than books i have really started several times. & still I am getting through a number of books a year with this last one having been particularly good. Not sure if that will continue beyond this weekend. Full time course starting might throw that off.

tbftm these books are all p long-ass and i'm an easily distracted gemini ♊️

what's the shortest mastepiece you started but never finished

I have made it through Ulysses twice, but I cannot get past the first few pages of Finnegans Wake.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux),

everyone always fingerwags me when i fwakesplain but by its own structural diktat it is not a book you "finish"

nor is it IMO a book you need to read "in order" (so-called)

That's how I regard Ulysses.

🚀

what's the shortest mastepiece you started but never finished

I don't know if it's a masterpiece but it's respected round here and pretty slim - Ann Quin's Berg.

I've got about 2/3 through The Golden Bough twice - as Aimless said about Decline and Fall it's a stamina thing, I put it down for a little break which becomes a long break which becomes oh there's no point going back.

i bought the golden bough bcz of m.r.james and doubled down when i discovered that two of its chapter titles (legendary RockFact klaxon) form a couplet in a doors song: "not to touch the earth! not to see the sun!"

but while i imagine i read those chapters i'm not sure i ever read any of the rest of it (♊️)

As for the shortest - Heart of Darkness? I think I did actually get through it on the second or third attempt but it's a bit of a slog, given its slimness

I recently put Herzog to the side, not helped by the fact that the plant sitting above it had just been overwatered. The unilateral whining of the sophisticated solitary poor chump of a professor dwelling all despondent and new wave style at having had a beautiful wife and kid and mistress... that stuff just enrages me.

In similar fashion, Hopscotch, but the jury is still out. Maybe I'll focus on the core story and get this at least done.

I've powered through many books that I felt like abandoning. Melmoth the Wanderer, Absalom Absalom, The man without quality, The Golden Notebook, Gravity's Rainbow, Perdido Street Station, Doctor Faustus, The book of Dave, An Orchestra of Minorities (Obioma).

Two that I did abandon were Wizard of the Crow (Nguni Thiongo) and Abyssinian Chronicles (Isegawa), both written in a very similar half-slapstick half-dramatic satiric style and both in dire need of editing.

I need to read some Ngugi , my Dad taught at Nairobi University at the same time as him in the late 60s. I remember my Dad took my elder brother to meet him once when we were in Kenya I don't remember if I was taken along too.

I've finished 5 other Pynchon books but have given up on Gravity's Rainbow twice.

I didn't give up on Swann's Way so much as I just kind of detested the narrator and stopped.

The shortest "masterpiece" I've never finished is The Crying Of Lot 49, and I've made several attempts at Gravity's Rainbow without getting too far. Pynchon is just not for me I guess. I was a decade ago gifted a copy of Against The Day and I've never even opened it

Finnegan's Wake I've read a couple times, and go back and read sections of it. The pleasure for me is reading it aloud to myself and enjoying the sound of it and the syntaxian jokes rather than trying to be in decipher-mode

A book series I bought based on ILX recommendations was the Gene Wolfe series but I stopped, about 2/3rd through the first volume. Something about his plot structuring makes me lose interest? I should try again everybody loves this guy

what's the shortest mastepiece you started but never finished

― mark s, Wednesday, September 28, 2022 2:34 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this came up in one of the reading threads recently but: the turn of the screw!

can't make it past Tom Bombadil in LOTR, 3 attempts so far.

I like the idea of the hobbits getting as far as Tom Bombadil and deciding "This sucks, let's go back"

Snap on Proust (stopped at S&G), Cervantes and Musil.

Faerie Queen was the one that haunted me (I was otherwise fairly solid on Eng. Lit. & poetry canon 1500-1800) - ditched during book 2 or 3 a lot. Finally went all the way during high pandemic.

I've tried The Man Without Qualities four times.

I lapped up Joseph and His Brothers, though, one of my great long novel experiences.

Gravity's Rainbow was the big one. I had mostly started reading that (and Infinite Jest and One Hundred Years of Solitude) to impress a girl in high school. Although I plowed through IJ no problem and made it through One Hundred Years of Solitude as well, Gravity's Rainbow always put me to sleep. I think I tried 3 or 4 times to read it, ultimately topping off around page 300.

In college, getting my B.A. in lit, I was assigned Beckett's Three Novels in one of the last classes I took. I pushed my way through it, but it broke something in my brain and I've never returned to literary novels since. I've tried, on occasion, but I never got the feeling back.

Can't think of a short one---what's the roadblock in The Turn of the Screw, Brad? I've never tried it (did like 1961 film adaptation The Innocents)[

The Crying of Lot 49 was a slightly longer version of a story originally published in the big slick pages of Esquire. Wiki:

Pynchon described in the prologue to his 1984 collection Slow Learner an "up-and-down shape of my learning curve" as a writer, and specifically does not believe he maintained a "positive or professional direction" in the writing of The Crying of Lot 49, "which was marketed as a 'novel', and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then."[6]

I probably read it, when I was mostly reading music mags and the backs of LPs, because it was so short and had Beatley drawing of girl dancing in a miniskirt on cover. Haven't re-read it lately, but always got the ending and the fascination with conspiracy, secret order, meaning of life thereby, also the humor and rock bits.

Slogged through GR much later and loved bits of it, but main suspense was would the characters who appealed make it through the massively overworked machinery of the novel, more than their fate in WWII.

Richard Meltzer's The Aesthetics of Rock.

In the reprint I read, Meltzer helpfully included an introduction where he indicated which pages had the "good stuff". I just started reading those pages and continued back or forwards until BS overpowered insight.

Something that stops me reading a book is when I understand the concept but don't like the actual writing. So when I realized Dhalgren was a surreal rendering of the late 60s counter-culture, or The Tin Drum was "what if I'd had magic powers as a kid in the Nazi era", I said I can't invest dozens more hours on words that don't hold my interest.

I was okay with Ulysses, Brothers Karamazov, Dr. Zhivago, LotR, Ada, most of Woolf.

Never made it through Anna Karenina.

As for the shortest thing I've never gotten through, I nominate Nabokov's Invisible Things. It should be renamed Unreadable Thing.

In college, getting my B.A. in lit, I was assigned Beckett's Three Novels in one of the last classes I took. I pushed my way through it, but it broke something in my brain and I've never returned to literary novels since. I've tried, on occasion, but I never got the feeling back.

Er, no. I mean The Trilogy is essential. And I feel like the late pieces are worth exploring.

Beckett's Murphy is laugh-out-loud funny almost every page.

I'm a Jamesian who can't stand The Turn of the Screw.

why is that?

I usually love James' patient accumulation of nuances and filigrees but I get the sensew/TTOTS he was trying to do with prose what film can do better.

Read Molloy when I had just been thrown out of uni, completely revelatory and still one of my favourite books.

Also Mercier and Camier
xp Lot of adaptations too---could be a book, Henry James Onscreen (covering TV as well as movies).

Turn Of The Screw finds James attempting a Victorian pulp horror pastiche and it really doesn't suit his prose style, I too found that thing a slog

It is weird to me that I was able to blow through Confidence-Man (with all its footnotes) and Ulysses without drowsing even once but find a single page of Pynchon to be textual Ambien

I did "finish" Bouvard & Pecuchet but once the game became rote I entered into skim mode

A book that took me many attempts but I did end up finishing (and subsequently re-read and re-read) was Pale Fire

Snap on Proust (stopped at S&G), Cervantes and Musil.

― woof

i of course cannot read "S&G" as anything but "simon & garfunkel"

i love reading pynchon but i am just not smart enough to read him, i try and after ten pages or so my eyes start glazing over and i realize that my brain has rejected it

his other books i don't have that problem with, i just give up on them before finishing them. honestly i give up on most fiction before finishing it though so that's less significant.

i'm less invested than i used to be in reading books by Extremely Intelligent White Men. i read "the book of the new sun" pre-transition and liked it a lot and tried to re-read it after transition and realized oh wait, this is a fucking misogynist piece of shit

i still like pynchon though as far as i can tell

Marcel Proust's Sodom and Garfunkel

For a long time I went to bed on a winter’s day in a deep and dark December.

I wonder if it might help those bogged-down in Sodom & Gomorrha to know some of what’s coming up. It can definitely feel at first like not much has changed from the previous volume, more of the same endlessly chattering Guermantes and Cambremers. But this volume is full of amazing stuff, and it starts building to the darker turn of the "Albertine novel".

I still haven’t read any of it. Dare I bring up the which translation question again?

try reading it in welsh

The only upside to having covid recently was that I was stuck somewhere with no reading material whatsoever except for a a copy of Paradise Lost that I'd recently purchased, originally assuming I would just feel guilty about it for the next 20 years and maybe get around to it in retirement. But having no other choice I went through it cover to cover, probably the only circumstance where I could have stuck it out, so thank you covid for helping me check that one off the list. All the Satan and hell stuff in the first half was extra fun bc that was when I was most feverish and spaced out.

try reading it in welsh

Agree that xxxpost Proust is worth sticking with, despite the sloggiest areas---think I might do a remix when I get back to it, red-pencilling/Sharpie-ing the parts I can't digest----

I feel like Beckett’s novels are not essential (they’re early work and still kind of Joyce prolix) and that his plays are the thing.

Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable? Don't think so! Molloy isn't that difficult to read btw.

I still haven’t read any of it. Dare I bring up the which translation question again?

I've read parts of the Scott Moncrieff, and parts of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin revision, and I'd go with the first. I don't think either of them is exactly true to the... idk, high spirits? joy in writing?... that you get in the French, but Scott Moncrieff's Swann's Way is what got me started. And it's sometimes talked about as a masterpiece of English in its own right. But people say that Lydia Davis is great also.

Thanks. Ugh at all the Krappy Kindle Knockoffs.

The Silmarillion, which embarrassingly enough my kid had read at age 8 and apparently memorized. I find it really easy to admire, it’s just real tough going. I should try again.

I got bogged down in Bleak House a couple of times. Think there was a long carriage ride conversation somewhere in there which felt like it went on for fifty pages.

Weirdly I find myself tapping out more with TV shows these days. Book are easier for me to finish. It’s not my patience, I think the format gets wearying and the feel-bad aspects of a lot of shows feel designed to stress viewers out more than enlighten them in any particular way. I’m no snob though, I’m watching all Bosch and Bosch-related shows.

Have tried Gravity's Rainbow 3 times; Ulysses twice. Have given up The Tale of Two Cities twice as well. I have a bookmark in Life and Fate. Glad to be in good company.

Got through Dante through sheer cussedness (on a beach in Bali - how's that for aptness/incongruity?).

Latest struggle was with Invisible Man, which I've stopped but quite don't consider abandoned just yet.

You could have dropped the stones from Nelson's Pillar.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, September 28, 2022 5:30 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

2023 will be the year i get more than a chapter into middlemarch at the third attempt (both previous times I've been unsure what to read next, both times i chose the other option)

Odd - I find that book very readable.

Quite glad to see people above not liking GR. Unusual.

I usually love James' patient accumulation of nuances and filigrees but I get the sensew/TTOTS he was trying to do with prose what film can do better.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, September 28, 2022

At the time he wrote it, film hadn't shown itself able to do much. Understandable if he thought he'd stick to prose for the time being.

happen to be halfway thru gibbon rn (again)-- maybe this is it

narrator:

I read War & Peace this year and was utterly delighted by it -- I was howling with laughter at the last 80 or so pages, in which, spoiler alert, Tolstoy explains his philosophy of life and history quite apart from any of the action about which you've spent the last however-long reading. I assume there's a wealth of scholarly apparati on this long afterword which seemed touching to me -- he was not ready to be done. The book was done, but he wasn't done with it.

I've never even attempted Proust but the past few years I've been getting into big reading projects and this thread is severely tempting me.

Proust is so worth it. One nice thing about him is that you don't have to wait to get to the good stuff. The first ~180 pages ("Combray") are utterly classic, and give you everything amazing about Proust right from the go.

iirc Proust was meant to be just a couple of volumes and then as he got into the project he kept writing further and more. I want to re-read the first and last book (with maybe 'The Prisoner' in between).

Anyway, it is a big book, but it isn't that either.

Ulysses started life as a short story allegedly

The textual history is super complicated, and I'm a bit fuzzy on it right now, but yeah, iirc, it was originally meant to be a three-volume work. I think that the earliest material completed was the basics of Swann's Way, In the Shadows..., and the second half of Time Regained. Then, as time went on, and the publications were delayed by the war and Proust's own obsessive revisions, the middle sections sprawled, and the Albertine story grew like a blight. And I think that there's controversy too over how much of that should be in the final book, since the last draft before Proust's death seems to show him crossing out an enormous amount of La Fugitive.

I remember one critic (Shattuck, I think) characterizing it as if the novel had to keep growing until it had totally spent itself, in order to justify the transformative effect of the ending.

I found the first, third, and fourth books the funniest and sharpest.

My answer is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

ooh that one's on my list too and I have a really lovely ancient hardback of it

I have a fear that I'm done with big books: I just don't have the, I don't know, gumption, wherewithal, desire to tackle them. Even something like *A Place of Greater Safety* glares at me from the shelf. Hoping it's a phase.

I need a separate thread for 'Literary masterpieces you have lying about the place that you're sure you're beyond attempting'.

I've just bought the mirror and the light, all 900 pages of it, and I want to re-read the first two first but idk man it's a lot.

Nowadays I try to read a literary classic every few months, and spend the rest of my time on fantasy/horror/sci-fi.

Basically my exact reading habits at age 15.

The Golden Age of ILB iirc

My answer is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

― glumdalclitch, Sunday, 27 November 2022 bookmarkflaglink

ooh that one's on my list too and I have a really lovely ancient hardback of it

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, 27 November 2022 bookmarkflaglink

I read it all the way two years ago after thinking I would just dip in and out of it as its not a narrative. It's probably best as a dipping in book.

Penguin are reissuing it as a paperback next year.

Was wondering last night about difference between "sadness" and "melancholy" (also between sadness and melancholy, re words/actual experience). And thinking that Burton's book drew from connotations of his time, like with humours---what say yall about any of that, book incl. or aside===?

I'd meant to maybe look it up today, but this thread appeared first.