!VAR HAGENDOORN

Books I Didn’t Finish

In general I only write about things I’m enthusiastic about. By way of an exception I thought I’d list some of the books that I’ve started but didn’t finish in the past few years. Out of respect for the book, the author or the artist and because you never know what might be coming, I usually try to finish a book or sit through the entire performance or movie. But on the other hand, life is short and you should cut your losses early and invest your time somewhere else if that’s where you expect to earn a higher return.

I had enjoyed White Teeth by Zadie Smith. My only concern was that it was almost too perfectly crafted, which threatened to suck the life out of the novel’s carefully constructed universe. Towards the end all characters and events turn out to be related, which is too much of a literary construction for me. Anyway some 50 pages into On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s next novel I realized that all four main characters had been endowed with opposing traits and that these would be played out in the rest of the novel, with every move carefully meditated by the author. I’m allergic to romantic comedies and relationship dramas anyway and the neuroses of family life don't interest me, so maybe I should never have started it in the first place.

Having said that I shouldn’t have picked up The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen either, despite the good reviews. I struggled on for maybe 150 pages, I think I had it with me on an international train journey, until I finally decided to put it down. The prose is so dry, the characters and the story of so little interest that putting it away was a big relief.

Margaret Atwood is a highly acclaimed and prolific writer whom I’d never read so I got a copy of The Blind Assassin, which had won the Booker Prize and which according to some endorsements on the back cover is “Margaret Atwood at her remarkable best”. However, it is more dry realism and when after some 120 pages it still left me completely indifferent I put it away.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is an ambitious novel, made up of six resonating stories, written in six different styles. Since I tend to enjoy experimental fiction I should like it and I may have another go at it some time. Perhaps I was reading it at the wrong moment, because I do remember enjoying the first two or three chapters. It’s just that at some point I didn’t feel like reading on and then some months later I didn’t feel like starting where I had left off.

To this I could add a number of books I finished in a rush to get it over with, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the immensely overrated novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander to name but a few.

Another category would contain (non-fiction) books I struggled to finish, The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek (his editor was probably too intimidated to make or demand some corrections and clarifications), Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour (his editor probably couldn't make sense of it and just hoped the reader does).