Unread Books?

Er… Shouldn’t a book that people read through have an HI of 50%? An HI of 98.5% indicates people only read (or liked) the last pages (is it perhaps a mystery story?).

Ellenberg says: “If every reader is getting to the end, those highlights could be scattered throughout the length of the book.” That assumes page quality is uniform. That is often not true, in my experience. There are plenty of books which say everything of interest in the first few chapters and the remaining chapters seem there because the book contract called for a minimum length.

Jane, I’d have to add “Good to Great” to that list, a book I was given at no less than four different jobs in my somewhat less than illustrious career.

I must admit that I have a ton of unread books sitting on my shelf at home. I love buying books and I love reading most of them but sometimes what seems like a good idea in the bookshop just doesn’t appeal to me when I go to my collection looking for the next book to read. I always think “oh I don’t feel like that one this time. Lets reread this Terry Pratchett book for the 3rd time.”

Now you all know my secret shame. Oh how grateful I am to be posting this under a pseudonym.

MPAVictoria: I’m not ashamed to say, under my real name, that I would prefer to reread Terry Pratchett books than read almost anything else. If only I *could* go back in time to read them for the third time. Perhaps I would read nothing else in fiction were it not for the fact that Pratchett is no longer a competent (let alone brilliant) writer.

Hi Neil!
Oh it is not the reading of Terry Pratchett that I am ashamed of, it is all the unread books on my shelf. I almost feel like it is lying to anyone who visits. Sure I have read most of them but some of them have been sitting untouched for years….

I have to disagree with your view of Mr. Pratchett’s more recent work. I haven’t read his latest but so far I continue to enjoy pretty much anything he write. Making Money was great and Unseen Academicals and Snuff were both was at least okay.

I dread the day that I read my last new Discworld novel.

I finished Tartt’s The Goldfinch even though I’d figured out that I didn’t like it within 200 pages. I’m more likely to give up on non-fiction than fiction (especially popular fiction). Fiction is just easier, and anyway you want to find out what happened. With non-fiction you generally already know (e.g., the Germans lost).

A lot of non-fiction is just too damned long for the casual lay reader – it would be great if there were specialist versions and then general-interest versions of 100-200 pages. Generally, if something is over 300 pages I don’t even try unless I’m really motivated. The New York Review of Books is a pretty good Cliff’s Notes for most things.

On Picketty, I’m about 45% through on my kindle – maybe I’ll finish. The problem is not that it’s not interesting – it’s that I’m not competent to judge what I’m reading. It’s not clear to me what I’m gaining by reading the book – I’ve already read a dozen reviews and summaries and I understand the outlines of the argument, so what am I gaining by passing my eyes over hundreds of pages that I can’t really evaluate?

I never did finish Tony Judt’s Postwar. It felt like a textbook.

Ten years ago a friendly acquaintance sent me a copy of a true crime book he’d written. I couldn’t get past the first chapter, and I’ve never spoken to him since – I’m too embarrassed.

As for fiction, I did give up on Sue Townsend’s Number 10 after 20 pages. I’d never been interested in Adrian Mole but when she died I thought I would see what the fuss was, but I realized after 20 or 30 pages that she traded in a style of British humor that I’m completely immune to. My fault, I have no doubt.

PS, in response to MPAVictoria – I was 45 or 50 before I realized that there’s no shame in not finishing a book. An author who plunks 600 pages down in front of you is making an extraordinary claim: that he or is she is worth listening to for 8 or 10 hours straight. It’s perfectly reasonable to decide, after you’ve heard the author out for an hour or two, that you’ve got other things to do.

MPAVictoria: Making Money was great, and UU and S might just count as okay. Think of how much Pratchett had to decline to write an okay book. Raising Steam was not the work of a competent writer.

” Raising Steam was not the work of a competent writer.”

That saddens me. :-(

War and Peace. I recall Nixon saying he’d read it. I own it but will never read it.

Supposedly Douglas Hofstedter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach is one of the least read widely owned books as well, up there w/ Brief History, at least for a while. Still, like the math professor who had me read parts of it in an independent study as an undergrad, I’m glad that so many people at least bought a book w/ a fair amount of significant logic in it.

When I had to take some very long flights (close to 24 hours total travel time each way) this last December, I made a point of taking some “classics” I had on my shelf with me to read, and nothing else, so that I’d finally read them. I read Madam Bovary (obviously very well crafted, but what unpleasant characters!) and Dead Souls (quite a bit of fun, really). It is, perhaps, a good tactic to force yourself to read something that is otherwise likely to languish on your shelves.

But surely classics like The Nichomachean Ethics, The Critique of Pure Reason, and even Mill’s Utilitarianism are on lots of shelves, and most I’d suspect with pages unyellowed from exposure to air.

In a surprising number of cases I have a sort of opposite phenomena- I’ll have a book, and be sure that I have never read it. (An example that stands out in memory is the Critique of Practical Reason.) But then, I’ll take it from the shelf and find it full of notes in my handwriting. So, I must have read it. The real worry this causes me is that perhaps when I think I’m having an original idea, I’m just dredging up an argument from a book I’ve forgotten that I’ve read. (To combat this to a degree, I keep all my books on my Library Thing page and then mark them as to whether I’ve read all or part of each book.)

Surely Joyce has several titles that qualify – Ullyses & Finnegan’s Wake, both of which lie unfinished on my shelves, haunting me from their dusty graves. Pynchon comes to mind, though for my part I’m a fan of the journey, if not clear where I am when I get to the destination. People say good things about Mason & Dixon though I confess I found it hard going; much preferring Against the Day (the Chums of Chance!) or Gravity’s Rainbow. And Eco takes some work; I’m slogging through Prague Cemetary, hoping for the odd historical joke I actually get.

“18: War and Peace is GOOD. An easy read, even. Just long. Tolstoy is amazing.”

Agreed on War and Peace, though that’s the only Tolstoy I’ve read so far.

However the most well-known quote from the book (“But it’s turtles all the way down!”) is in the first paragraph of Chapter 1; that may skew the results.

I thought the ‘Mind of God’ line came from there.

Tolstoy is amazing.

But also so amazingly didactic at times. Sooooo didactic. It starts to grate after a while.

I would say ‘Hegel’ but someone once told me he loved Hegel; reading Hegel to him was like eating ice cream. So I said, ‘But what does it mean?’ I don’t remember the answer. Maybe Hegel ice cream needn’t mean, but be.

I’ve always found Dostoevsky unreadable. When I was young, used to feel guilty about it, then discovered he was a reactionary in politics, and thought my dislike was justified. Now, I’m less prone to make literary judgements based on politics (at least in that simple way), but I’m old enough that to think: too little time, too many books, to bother overcoming an initial distaste. So like others above, I reread Pratchett or Iain M Banks and mourn the fact that there’s no more to come from either.

I think I got about 1/5 of the way through “The Gulag Archipelago”, at which point I felt that “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” and “The First Circle” had already taught me about Stalin’s prison camps, and a recitation of statistics about camp after camp wasn’t adding anything useful (to me).

The first chapter of “The First Circle” was off-putting because it was hard to understand. In it, a bunch of new prisoners arrive at the science camp and meet other prisoners there whom they knew at other work camps. The chapter is mostly dialogue of several conversations going on at the same time with no indication of who is speaking to whom. I almost put the book down, but it became interesting in the next chapter.

The next time I read it, about a year or less later, I could tell who was speaking to whom in the first chapter (having learned their histories and speech patterns from the rest of the book).

It contains two of my favorite scenes in literature, in which two engineers from the camp have been called to the office of the Minister of State Security separately to explain why the project which Stalin has asked for has not been completed on time. The first tries to explain the difficulties using Fourier series. The second tells him that science is not a magic genie and that threats are useless because he is an old man and has already had his home and family taken from him. As an engineer who has had to deal with bureaucratic bosses, I had some fellow feeling, although my instances were not as dramatic.

My blind spot is Agatha Christie. Her characters seem pure cardboard to me. Bought two, never finished either. Obviously, this is more my problem than hers.

The discovery of Benford’s Law goes back to 1881, when the American astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that in logarithm tables (used at that time to perform calculations) the earlier pages (which contained numbers that started with 1) were much more worn than the other pages.

Of course, if you’ve ever browsed a book of logarithms you won’t be surprised that hardly anyone would finish it. So predictable.

OTOH quite possibly if Tartt had been twenty or thirty years younger her first novel would have been more like Divergent.

If Tartt had been thirty years younger when she wrote The Secret History, she wouldn’t have been alive yet.

Not sure how the length of “War and Peace” is daunting in a world where massive cinder-block like tomes of fantasy fiction are routinely consumed like popcorn by millions of readers.

Actually my Russian language edition of “War and Peace” is a 3 volume set – which does make things a little easier.

War and Peace: read it with relish as an undergrad. Possibly best tackled when young and not yet tired of didactics.

Ulysses: have started reading it three times and counting. Never got far beyond chapter three. Proust also.

And I nominate The Savage Detectives as another that I suspect many never reach the end of. Or skip through the middle at least. It’s remarkable to be able to get bored part way through a narration of a swordfight.

MPAV @38 Did you catch the British ITV adaptation Jeeves and Wooster? The acting was brilliant, as was the music. You might particularly enjoy the scenes involving Wodehouse’s Oswald Moseley caricature, Roderick Spode, brilliantly played by John Turner.

Harry @48 I suppose Jeeves and Wooster was made more than 20 years ago, and intended to be a faithful adaptation of a much loved series. On the other hand, Downton Abbey is a consumer product: a supposedly historical soap opera with anachronistic plot lines aggressively designed to appeal to an international mass market.

I’m betting Atlas Shrugged is right up there.

How many pages can you possibly read at one sitting without feeling the need to take a bath. Then again, most of the people who are likely to have read it probably wouldn’t think that.

i’ve read “atlas shrugged” about once a decade since i first read it at 13 to remind me what sort of immoral claptrap some people in the united states use to inform their political worldview. when i read it the first time i felt there was something slightly evil about the author’s perspective on life but i didn’t have the internal vocabulary to explicate that feeling. i’ve read “finnegans wake” all the way through on two occasions but never been able to get past page 50 or 60 of “ulysses” on four or five attempts. i love reading pynchon and i think “gravity’s rainbow” has some of the most powerful writing he ever did but i couldn’t make it past around page 600. i faded about the same time as slothrop started to.

i read widely and books i’ve completed run the gamut from books for children, y.a. fiction, popular fiction, serious fiction, popular nonfiction, to scholarly nonfiction and philosophical works. i’ve never been able to finish “the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe” or “the critique of pure reason” but i’ve read “the brothers karamazov” three times now. i know when i was growing up that everyone my parents knew had a copy of wouk’s “the winds of war” but after i finished it i found that only about one in ten could discuss it with me. i found “godel, escher, bach” a fun read but then found “the mind’s i” a painful slog and let it go.

doesn’t it really go back to personal taste and readiness. aren’t there some books that might not be readable during one part of a person’s life that can be easily read during another? and still other books that a person is never going to be able to finish because the aesthetic or point of view of the book is too different from that of the reader to ever be readable to them?

Sasha:
I love that TV show! Being Canadian I had to buy it on DVD and have now seen it way too many times. Amazingly entertaining. :-)

@18 and @22

“18: War and Peace is GOOD. An easy read, even. Just long. Tolstoy is amazing.”

War and Peace is OKAY. It is indeed an easy read, really just a glorified soap opera with token Big Ideas very weakly framing it. Tolstoy’s other works are far superior, especially the short stories, followed by Death of Ivan Ilyich, then Anna Karenina.

Almost every notable Russian author is better than Tolstoy: Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Lermenotov, Checkov, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Platonov. Tolstoy’s ADEQUATE, but relative to Russia’s insanely great competition, the worst of the bunch.

“I’ve always found Dostoevsky unreadable. When I was young, used to feel guilty about it…”

It was supposed to make you feel guilty, so apparently you got the benefit of it.

A colleague and I used to send each other 2-sentence plot synopses of Great Books. His for Crime and Punishment was, as I recall: “A man kills a woman with an axe. Then he feels bad about it.”

I think we found that second sentence, in some form, is suitable for many of the Greats, e.g. Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, etc.

Layman 07.10.14 at 2:28 pm @ 59 —
That was a game played on Usenet back in the day, although players were restricted to one-liners. For example, ‘Man walks on water, loses popularity contest, has big comeback’ for the New Testament.

Possibly because I cut my teeth on The Lord of the Rings, long books’ length has never intimidated me. War and Peace is long, but it has few longueurs … the comparison to Proust is instructive. Stuff *happens* in Tolstoy. (Not to bash Proust, just that he’s a much more challenging read.)

I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, Ivan Denisovitch several times, GEB once (and began skimming after a while), still working on Anna Karenina, read Brief History of Time several times, hoping to better understand the “for physicists” parts, all of Joyce except never completed Finnegans Wake, read all of Pynchon (except the most recent), much of it twice — I reread The Crying of Lot 49 regularly.

I love big doorstop books in general (has anyone else read Stephenson’s Anathem multiple times, not to mention The Baroque Cycle ditto?). I also love Pratchett, Wodehouse, Banks, and George R. R. Martin’s pickup truck full of doorstops*.

Still, when I reread it’s mostly the Nth time for favorites: Gene Wolfe, Pratchett, George V. Higgins, Bruce Sterling, John Crowley…

*”Dynasty overthrown after losing superweapons; victors squabble while dynasty survivor gets more.”

@64 and others on War and Peace

I agree the book looks daunting on the shelf, but the last 250 or so pages in the hardback and about 400 in the paperback are primarily Tolstoy’s diatribe on wars and men and political systems of governance ….it can be read completely separately (or not read at all) from the main soap opera drama of main story line. The core story reads very easily, its that essay at the end which, while quite good, is much more tedious to get through (and which for many earns it a permanent place as a door stop.)

I’d agree with others above who favor Anna Karenia – its a more compelling story and greatly reduces most of the lecuturing.

I think Nabokov said Chekhov was the only great Russian writer who was translatable. Then he probably apologized for his English again.

@64 “I have War and Peace on my shelf, and its length is somewhat intimidating, at least to me. It’s not just long, it’s very long — the paperback is one of the fattest on my shelf.”

It’s true that the psychological effect of a doorstop book is real, even when the book itself is not difficult. I read Eliot’s Middlemarch with an online reading group, and some people in the group actually cut the book’s binding to make it into a series of small books (apparently how it was originally published). They said it really made it easier to enjoy, just seeing these small reads ahead of them.

I also find that translation can make a big difference with long books. I prefer contemporary ones that don’t convert everything into florid, overly literary Victorian English. Pevear and whoozits for the Russians are always good.

Someone mentioned a “8 hours of my life listening to you” rule, but that seems a bit arbitrary unfair. Most people spend 100s of hours a month attending to things that aren’t either really valuable or even very enertaining: crappy tv shows because they happen to be on, stupid random stuff on the internet, repetitive smart phone games. They’ll read mediocre authors by the caseload: put a genre series, sci-fi, mystery, whatever, into a single book and it would make Tolstoy look miniscule. Or stupid office chitchat, you give a lot more than 8 hours to many an idiot. So, why is it only big, difficult books that you draw the line? They’re more effort, but more rewarding than that daily 10 minute chitchat with the next cubicle or angry birds session or twitter update.

I read Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. I figure that’s good enough.

“That was a game played on Usenet back in the day, although players were restricted to one-liners.”

Of course that must be right. We were on Usenet back in the day.

“war and peace” is good but for my time and effort the full “dark tower” collection by stephen king represents some of the best american writing of the past 3 decades. it is amazing, almost deceptively amazing.

Interesting how different we all are. I preferred the Peace parts of War and Peace to the war parts, because of the descriptions of the psyches, interests and obsessions of the Russian ruling class – and how they evolved over the course of the novel. I read through Anna Karenina, but I found Anna and Vronsky unbelievable – or very stupid, and suspected that Levin was a tedious self-portrait by Tolstoy: I wouldn’t recommend the book at all.

The 1972 BBC adaptation of War and Peace was masterful, with some wonderful actors, including a young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre. My Russian mum was very impressed, even though she disliked much of Tolstoy because of his preachiness.

Sorry, “anecdotal” should be ” anecdata” – autocorrect error.

Sasha Clarkson:
The 1972 BBC adaptation of War and Peace was masterful, with some wonderful actors, including a young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre.

Didn’t realize it was quite that long ago. It might not have reached the US till a bit later (73? 74?), and then it was prob. re-broadcast after the initial showing. Still, a long time ago.

I don’t read genre fiction exclusively but I read a lot of it. I’m not ashamed to admit that.

Popular series are often popular for good reason! I enjoyed Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. I was prepared to enjoy Dan Brown too, setting aside all learned criticism to the contrary, but I bounced hard off of The Da Vinci Code. It really was terrible. And speaking of authors that are popular at least in their subgenres, I find Stephen Baxter and Peter F. Hamilton unbearable even though both write about big sweeping space opera stuff that I enjoy thematically. I enjoy reading the Wikipedia summaries of Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence more than the books themselves.

I have read more than half of Stephen King’s published output. Somehow The Tommyknockers didn’t work for me. I read about 80%, to the point where everything was coming to a head, and just lost interest in finishing it.

On doorstops: I ordered Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy online after loving The Golden Gate. That’s what prompted me to get a Kindle. I couldn’t imagine lugging that cinderblock of paper around.

I actually enjoy Pynchon and, even more, Umberto Eco. I think I’ve read The Name of the Rose a half dozen times. Both write a lot of weird, fantastic stuff that would be awkwardly-shelved genre fiction if they hadn’t somehow escaped the genre fiction ghetto.

When I still believed I made an effort one summer to read the Bible cover to cover. I’m pretty sure I bogged down less than halfway through the Old Testament. When there’s nothing violent, bizarre, or poetic it’s like reading a telephone book.

Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren has sold over a million copies and even though I love the book immensely I find it hard to believe that the majority of those million people made it all the way through (especially when he reaches for the unconventional text layout in the back half of the book).

Maybe I’m wrong though. I’d love to be wrong. It’s such a fantastic book.

#80, yeah, I belatedly realized on my own that “the Germans lost” has a different meaning this summer.

#88 – The Road is one of those books that, when you finish it, you think that those other books the author wrote that you thought were great were maybe not so good after all. If you like Cormac McCarthy, don’t read The Road.

On one of my trips to the Wittliff Collections to look at early McCarthy drafts of Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree, one of the staff members there told me they wouldn’t read Blood Meridian because they knew it had a scene in which dead babies were hanging from a tree.

Anybody read In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile?

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Universally famous and influential yet largely unread?

“Popular series are often popular for good reason! I enjoyed Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. I was prepared to enjoy Dan Brown too, setting aside all learned criticism to the contrary, but I bounced hard off of The Da Vinci Code. It really was terrible.”

I agree with everything in this paragraph. I also enjoyed all of those series and hated the Da Vinci Code. Though the Da Vinci Code is brilliant when compared to its prequel, Angels and Demons, which may be the most predictable book I have ever read. The “surprise” bad guy is obvious from like page 2.

/I am still angry I wasted time on that piece of crap.

I haven’t read the most recent one (I’ve been told it’s hard to plow through), but Dan Brown’s books are readable if you realize they’re a kind of stylized movie script, where each chapter has to have a certain form that allows a certain kind of event and a certain kind of interaction between the characters to happen, not a regular novel where you can comfortably read from page to page until the end. Also if you take a kind of clinical approach to wondering how he’s going to take his ultra-over-educated female character, describe her weird relationship to her unusual father-figure, and make the story her subordination to our hero, the “symbologist” (and you ignore the fact that Harvard does not have a professor of symbology), and how he will then tell her that she should accept herself and be proud. I do remember Angels and Demons as being better than The Da Vinci Code but it’s also more irreligious.

Even though I haven’t read it, I confess to vaguely resenting The Road for SciFi geek reasons. It annoys me when a main stream author gets praised as a genius for doing what genre authors have been doing for years. It’s not as though there isn’t a whole subgenre of post-apocalypse science fiction.

And I agree with folks up thread, War and Peace is a brisk read until near the end when Tolstoy abandons the idea of actually telling a story and starts simply giving his opinions on politics, religion, marriage & etc.

The final philosophical chapter of War and Peace is an addendum. You probably need background in political philosophy and history of ideas in order to make sense of it. (There is something similar in the final chapter of Henry Adams’s “Education of ..” — ” “The Dynamo and the Virgin”, which I vaguely recall has a lot of theorizing about now-obsolete physics.)

I found when reading a book for a college class, I needed to read it three times (at least) in order to grasp it — or even remember it. But it is probably good training.

Books like the Bible (or, say, The Journey to the West) are compilations of earlier stories and are not really meant to be read, much less absorbed, in a sustained reading. People traditionally focused on select passages, I believe. Nevertheless, as a teenager I got caught up in listening to the entire Old Testament on the radio, on a show that used to come on in 20 minute segments before the Jean Shepherd and Long John Nebel shows on WOR in NY, to which I was devoted, much to the detriment of my senior year high school grades. Later I studied the historical books in a comparative near eastern literature course in a college course — with attention to all the inconsistencies, contradictions, and parallels to other near eastern lit, which I would never have done otherwise.

“That was a game played on Usenet back in the day, although players were restricted to one-liners.”

It’s fun to do this with plays too, e.g. Snakes on a barge ?

@96
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Universally famous and influential yet largely unread?

They treat it like some opposing religion’s bible.

I’m reading, right now, Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope . This is a 1348 page (Count ’em!) building-block of a book–by a liberal—whose contents right-wing conspiracy theorists have clumsily interpolated. The effect is like traversing some unfamiliar city where pranksters have switched signposts round–so the map you brought with you appears to be lying. Being more than a little dumb myself, it has taken me until page 4959 (of the 7841 ibook edition) to twig that when Quigley appears to arbitrarily switch from parenthesis –to the use of square brackets– interpolators, and Menardists, are at work, e.g.

…Darwin, whose writings came to stand for [alleged] proof of the animal nature of man, and of Sigmund Freud, whose writings were taken to [allegedly] show that sex was the dominant, if not the sole human motivation…

Despite its length, Tragedy and Hope is a fascinating and easy read.

What about Infinite Jest? I haven’t read it, but I have heard it praised by many people, many of whom also say they hadn’t … yet … finished it.

Counting the long list of footnotes at the end as part of the book is just not fair to capital 21. The book itsself is neither hard to read nor very long.

> I am pretty sure my first book has been cited much more often than it has read,
> and I have pretty compelling evidence that two of the reviewers didn’t read it.
Entire careers have been destroyed or significantly affected negatively because reviewers didn’t read the article/the paper/the book. This s**t has to end.

The whole idea of “blind peer review” must be revisited, imho. I don’t think there were any peers for one particular paper of mine and that was a big deal. I don’t think there are any peers for many papers out there, not because they are so awesome but because there seems to be a lot of very smart people who have acquired in depth knowledge in all sorts of areas that it is hard these days to even know who can qualify as a peer for paper X of scholar Y.

I had a paper on how to -rapidly- improve literacy rates in developing countries (specifically, India), but I got a negative blind review. I was never even told who the reviewers were. If this paper were seriously debated within the norms of academic discourse, I am pretty sure it would have gotten much further (and we are talking about rapidly improving literacy rates in a matter of years, not decades). I say this because my own career was significantly affected because of this bulls**t “blind peer review” process. Richard Sproat, IIRC, has also said that one of his papers (it was on the Indus Script hypothesis) was wrongly rejected, and he still seems bitter about it. He doesn’t believe the reviewers even knew what they were exactly reviewing. I had the same problem. I don’t think any of the reviewers had any clue what they were doing.

If anyone is interested in knowing more about how to rapidly improve literacy rates in the developing world, please get my email address from Corey Robin and feel free to contact me.

@109 — What’s a Menardist, other than Miss France?

117,

Pierre Menard is the French Author who wrote Don Quixote. No, not a retelling of the work by Cervantes, but the same book, line for line, word for word. But Menard’s work is far superior because it was written three centuries later than Cervantes’, and thus, according to Menard’s reviewer, Borges, it has a much richer allusional structure.

Now, you can be assured that I’m not making this up, because Borges mentions it in a printed book, and now we have Jim Buck mentioning Menard — on the internet — so you know it has to be true.

If you still don’t believe me, look it up in the Encyclopedia of Uqbar.

Unread and want to read:

Brodkey: The Runaway Soul
Gass: The Tunnel
Nadas: A Book of Memories
Gray: Lanark
Joyce: Ulysses

In honour of Borges–who greatly preferred to read Don Quixote in English–you should Menard Marx in our mutual mother tongue.

You and Nabokov, and even Dostoevsky, need to go back and read the Menard version. It’s knowing and ironic in all the places that Cervantes is naïve and unthinking.

I had heard about Menard’s project but had forgotten the name. The story about Žižek is really more interesting; just the thought of a ‘International Journal of Žižek Studies’ cheers me up. But Menard is not a plagiarist.

Meredith 07.12.14 at 11:42 pm @ 126 —
Even when you have read a book you have not read it. As Heraclitus noted, you cannot step in the same river twice. Thus Stevie Smith, when a publisher wanted her to write another book of poems, told him to read the first one again. If only our friend Menard had been there to assist!

@124 godoggo 07.12.14 at 9:55 pm

“For what it’s worth Nabokov said Cervantes was a hack or something to that effect. Dostoevsky too.”

When I read Lolita, I thought it was inordinately silly, both in concept and in style. What a hack, I thought. I decided I should reread it to be sure, but then I later ran into that quote about Dostoevsky. That made me seriously reconsider my plans to give Nabokov a second chance.

Now I’ve recently learned Nabokov “improved” his personal copy (English translation) of Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/vladimir_nabokov_makes_editorial_tweaks_to_franz_kafkas_novella_ithe_metamorphosisi.html

For example, he changed the first line from awoke “from uneasy dreams” to “a troubled dream.” That’s just awful. He’s on my permanent shitlist/no-read list now.

My mother and I were (I still am) wrapping-paper-and-ribbons nuts. We expended (I still expend) inordinate amounts of time, energy, and imagination in wrapping the most trivial present. (Some others in family share in this, including a a couple who don’t share so easily my fond memories of my mother — she wasn’t an easy person.) What’s this to do with reading? A lot. Start with, re-use. A serious wrapper saves and re-uses everything: paper, ribbons and bows, and the myriad other baubles of wrapping. (My mother and I would use this principle to justify buying some gorgeous paper or ribbon we couldn’t really afford: we’ll re-use it!)

This a happy response to Anarcissie re re-reading. And also a larger observation about books and writers. All that re-wrapping! (which is why Nabokov’s Ovid is actually interesting — what story may lurk there?). A present we give one another over and over again.

The Japanese have a word for it: tsundoku.