Ray in Exile

I used to always finish a book, no matter how much I hated it while I was reading it. Then my friend Jeff managed to convince me that life is too short…and he was talking about Gravity’s Rainbow(!), which at the time I was assaulting for the third and final time (my high water mark is page 100). Jeff’s take is that in the time you spend punishing yourself with a book that you’re not enjoying, you could have gone out and read three other equally rewarding classics that you did like.
So I don’t flog myself with a book that just isn’t doing it for me. And sometimes this might be a mistake; I think I mentioned that I almost abandoned Choke but stuck with it and I’m glad I did. But here are four that I’m not going back to:
Annie Proulx, The Shipping News. I wanted to see the movie when it came out, since my grandparents were Newfies and I’m a big Kevin Spacey fan, but a friend convinced me to read the book first. God, what punishment. Her writing style is fractured and torturous. I felt nothing for the characters. It had fuck all to do with Newfoundland. I hated it from page one, read about a third, and finally chucked it.
Still haven’t seen the movie yet either.
Joseph Heller, Closing Time. OK, first let me say that Catch-22 is probably my favorite novel of all time. I have read it at least twenty times. I even organized a prank on Orkut revolving around a character of the book, as a means of easily dividing up the women on Orkut into “worthy” (got the joke) and “unworthy” groups. Worked like a charm.
So this book is ostensibly a “sequel” to the first, following Yossarian, Milo, and the other characters as they reach retirement age. I read about a third of it and dang if I could find a point to it all. It was still satire, but lacking in wit…or a plot. I love those characters, but wanting to see what happened to them next was not enough reason to keep reading. They got boring. They got bitter. Tossed it.
Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man. Hugo Award winner. Psychic crime novel. Not bad, just boring. I might actually go back to it one of these days, but I have very particular fetishes when it comes to sci-fi and this one didn’t tickle any of them.
Jim Marrs, Rule By Secrecy. This one and another of his were Christmas gifts from a relative. I love this woman, and often she gets me great gifts, but there are two things she should never buy me: music and books. Marrs is one of those conspiracy theorists who believes that the Trilateral Commission, the Knights of Templar, Skull and Bones, and the Illuminati are all part of a grand conspiracy bent on world domination. I love history books, but I like ones where the author has checked at least one or two primary sources in his lifetime and not just based all of his “research” on what OTHER conspiracy authors has written. Crap crap crap crap crap.