Thursday 5 September 2013

The unreadable book club

I woke in a cold sweat. The night oozed black, like warm molasses and somebody was beating down my door. The door wasn’t alarmed, but I was. Sleeping in the office had become a habit but this was way out of office hours. In the dark I pulled on my pants, reached for my trusty forty-five and went to see who it was. It was a broad, the kind of a broad you went overseas for. For this much of a broad you'd need a passport. My jaw dropped, but she helped put it back in place. With her fist. "Shouldn’t we have the introductions first?" I asked. She hit me again. I thought I better invite her in.

Ah, happy days. Who hasn’t whiled away an afternoon, an evening, a flight maybe, with a good old potboiler? Thriller, mystery, crime, romance. Chandler, Sayers, Rankin, Cartland. And many, many more. The airport bookshop is stuffed full of accessible literature and when it comes to the novel, popular doesn’t have to mean poor. There are books and authors for all tastes, but as in all things there are also books and authors for a more rarified palate.

Struggling through Sartre as a teen and later getting to grips with Borges, then failing to do the same with Pynchon and Durrell the elder, I wondered why the most lauded writers had so often to be such hard work. Steinbeck won prizes with books that can be read and enjoyed by anybody; why is it so many awards are handed out to books written only to be examined? And what, you’re wondering, brought this on?

The news that a number of books by J D Salinger are to be published posthumously, that’s what. I have read Catcher in the Rye several times now, most recently just a handful of years ago. Maybe I should have first read it at fifteen but I came to it somewhat later and not by happy accident but prompted by the hype. I didn’t get it, or in the current parlance, I wasn’t feeling it. I felt nothing for the protagonist and struggled to find merit in the prose. So, I read it again and again until I discovered that I was right and everybody else was wrong.

The product of that other great recluse of the era, To Kill a Mockingbird, is still a favourite of mine and I came to that standard late, too. Scout Finch keeps me turning the page when Holden Caulfield makes me want to give up after the first few. Harper Lee is Steinbeck to Salinger’s Rushdie. Yes, I said Rushdie; in my world The Satanic Verses is an unreadable mess, accessible only to Man Booker Prize judges and the publicly pretentious. All those adults reading Harry Potter? At least they’re not pretending to understand something they don’t.

I grew up in a poorly read household and had to grope my way blindly around. I’ve read way more crap than I have high literature and while there are matters of taste and time, I have deduced, like any other form of art, there is also much trash posing as treasure and a lot of it is simply execrable rubbish sold to the elite on the grounds of pure snobbery.  So, look, it is perfectly okay to find some ‘great’ works impenetrable junk. There, I said it.


2987 pages... On your marks, discuss.

With all this in mind, I invite you to form your own Unreadable Book Club. It has a simple format. You pick a book from a literature prize list and set a date for discussion. Then you meet up, spend ten minutes discussing how far you got and scratching your heads as to its message before adjourning to the pub and consigning the tome to the dustbin of your consciousness. Life’s too short, so put down that 'improving' volume and read something for pleasure instead.

Feel free to add your contender for most unreadable pile of crap in the comments box below! 

18 comments:

  1. Moby Dick. I must have tried eight times to read it and I rarely get to them getting in the sodding boat.

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    1. Haha! Yes. I did finish it, but it was one hell of a struggle. Don-sodding-Quixote was another one - why does nobody admit the only bit anybody has heard of occurs in the first fifty pages and nobody reads any further?

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  2. I've got a bit of a thing for reading soft porn at the moment. I tried that 50 Shades but there was too much faff. If you're going to give them a warning crack, a pre-emptive strike, or a pacifier, you don't need to waffle through all those pages.

    I've just read one that gets straight to the action. This young lassie in Hollywood gives her Step-Father one on the lawn whilst the Mother is away. She knows this is wrong. He happens to be a surgeon and he makes her boobs bigger for free. She then goes on to marry a really big star, but not until some scintillating blackmail scenarios have passed.

    I have read one similarly titled to Moby's Dick, but I don't think it is written by the same author.

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  3. In the opposite theme (and I know a lot of people would say these are a struggle so it is kind of relevant) I absolutely LOVE Dostoyevsky.

    If there was one author you may feel nervous of reading because you hear people saying "oh it's heavy going" pick up "The Idiot" and give it a go; his is poetry in prose. Seriously excellent.

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    1. Yep. I enjoyed that but not all of his. I also read all of Solzhenitsyn with no difficulty.

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  4. Couldn't agree more. Literature is all too prone to the "Emperor's new clothes" syndrome, and it cuts both ways: great writers like Chandler and Patrick O'Brian are snobbishly dismissed as producers of "genre fiction". My nomination would be On The Road by Jack Kerouac -- self-indulgent crap!

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    1. Yup. Many have made a life's living off the back of one piece of average work that has received patronage in some form. That's been my plan all along!

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  5. This book was awful, I barely got past the first page. http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-King-year-blog-ebook/dp/B009OOW77C/ref=la_B005O9V9KM_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1366010165&sr=1-2

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  6. Great expectations. Forced to read it for O Level. What had we ever done to be punished so harshly?
    Oh and I find that anything that is 'critically acclaimed' should be left well alone. Brick Lane - pile of shite.

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    1. Oh, I absolutely LOVE Dickens! Sorry Rachel, you're on your own there, but your Brick lane nomination is definitely on the shelf!

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  7. I like the other Dickens. I just struggled to read G.E. every page was like dragging nails down a blackboard. I read the first paragraph a zillion times. Good job my o level question was based on chapter 1!!! I got a B!!!

    I was also forced to study Sartre in French A Level. *shudders at the memory*

    I LOVED Camus though!!

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  8. The Octopus, by Frank Norris; the ground covered in this novel was done in a film, Blood Red, which was based on another book about the issue the novel dealt with, and didn't have all the kinds of mystical woo-woo nonsense Norris included by the device of having a poet as the narrator of his novel. It was a fairly naff film, but at least I stayed awake.

    Oh-- and pretty much Tolkien. Never finished The Hobbit, never wanted to, never wanted to even crack the book on the LOTR trilogy.

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  9. I thought Paradise Lost lived up to its name.

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    1. I shall steal that and quote it one day!

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  10. Jospeh Conrad, Heart of Dark hearty Dark hearted darkness , or summat like that :) pure impenetrable crap.
    Novels are subjective - either a reader will like a book, or they won't. It doesn't matter what genre it is, a "good" book is one that you, the reader, enjoyed. A bad book is one that the reader didn't enjoy. It really is that simple, and works as much for Herbert as for Hardy ; for Aldiss as for Austen; and for Dickens as for Duns. All readers want is a good tale well told, and the Curtains are blue because that was the randon colour that went through the authors head, not some damn metaphysical crap that a critic/ "literary reviewer" full of pretension and self-importance thought of.
    Ahem
    Just enjoy a story without ripping it apart.

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    1. Yup. Wise words. I especially loathe the way literary critics will try and imbue a book with hidden depths as a way of telling you how superior to you they are.

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    2. Sometimes, as with Late Vic-Early 20th C. writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton, the subject-matter may be intriguing, and in the end, the story will pay off, but the turn-of-phrase ("The Turn Of The Phrase"?) is dauntingly dense and complex. One REALLY has to WANT to read some of those stories, to find out if Marcher ever "finds himself," or whether Lily Bart will ever learn who her real friends are.

      On the other hand, I find Steinbeck, a more accessible writer in terms of the prose style, to be heavy-handed and stupefyingly "messagey"-- OK, we get it, the Joads are the poor and the meek of the Earth and Tom is the rebellious nail that gets hammered; Lenny is the idealistic brainless wonder who mucks up everything everywhere he goes but is thought somehow "saintly" for his apparent naivety. Fine-- can I read the rest of the story now, John?

      For as bad as his writing per se can be, Theodore Dreiser's characters are people I've met far more often than John Steinbeck's. Carrie Meeber, Clyde Griffiths-- I know a lot more people who are potentially those amoral sorts, than I do the shambolic = sham-symbolic sorts of Steinbeck.

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