Literary Masterpieces You've Often Attempted, But Never Finished

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.

Re Proust: the narrator is never giddier than when describing invert activity

yeah I can't finish long Dickens.

xp The scene at the beginning of Sodom and Gomorrah where Marcel spies on Charlus and Jupien is one of the most engaging of the first five books.

Proust can bore often but the novel's worth it just to get to the Princesse de Guermantes ball in S&G.

And after that, the "Intermittences of the Heart" section, some of the most purely beautiful Proustian writing (in the exalted mode that everyone loves). And the final part of the volume has a wonderful extended section organized around the local train at Balbec, which serves like the Combray walks as a throughline for pages of lavish description. I don't see it talked about much in critical works, but I just love that image of the evening train on the coast.

btw I recommend Raul Ruiz's Time Regained for limning that 30-years-lived-in-one-second thing.

I jumped from Middlemarch and War and Peace about a 150 pages in, despite enjoying them both. The move away from Dorothea in Middlemarch disoriented me then I couldn't get back into it. And the War seemed a lot less interesting than the Peace. And I've never cracked into Wolf Hall desptite multiple attempts.

But people say that Lydia Davis is great also.

I mean, if somebody didn't get any further into the story, they would be missing a lot, too much--but her version of Swann's Way is amaaazing.

And so far I'm pretty sure it's the most consistently well-written, inspired volume of the whole novel.

great expectations
independent people
gravity’s rainbow
herodotus

I only tried Gravity's Rainbow the one time. It was enough to convince me not to try again.

I tried it but did not inhale.

I inoculated myself from Gravity's Rainbow by reading The Crying of Lot 49.

same except just to be sure I had the lot 49 jab twice, and then had a booster shot of attempting but not finishing vineland.

(I didn't read lot 49 a second time because I enjoyed it, quite the opposite but I wanted to be really sure I couldn't see what others saw in it.)

Lot 49 is a hard read for an author's easiest rwead

I did the Lot 49--V--Gravity's Rainbow pilgrimage. The first time I tried GR I had to return it to the library mostly unread. I picked it up again and found that persistence does pay off.

I read Anna Karenina on a train across Russia (literally nothing else to do) and both Great Expectations & David Copperfield aged 12 on a two-week holiday in France (literally nothing else to do, apart from throwing plums at the gigantic dog on the other side of a sturdy fence)

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

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.