September 16th, 2010 / 12:29 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
What’s the maddest you ever got at a book, either for how it resolved, or what it said, or what its author did or said?
I hated the ending of Wise Blood so much I actually threw it across the room when I was done. Only time I can remember doing that. Can’t explain it anymore, just thought it was a shit book.
i’ve never read it but the movie is kind of awesome, apparently john huston didn’t really think of it as a story about a christian in spite of himself, he just thought of it being about these wacky characters and their delusions and this sort of evangelical turf war, but in the end he decided to let jesus win, o’connor seems like kind of a nut, but kind of a cool nut maybe, like my grandma
Like a lot of O’Connor stuff the best-worst-truest thing you can say about it is that yes, it would probably make a pretty bitchin’ movie. Though you’d have to fix the structure to make it actually satisfying for me, I think. Movies, luckily, tend to do that.
Threw ‘Moon Palace’ in a pool. My ex fished it out, all angry, that I ruined her book that was a gift. I told her I’d buy her a replacement, not of ‘Moon Palace,’ but of something of worth. Never wanted to go to NYC more in my life and… well, you get the idea.
Infinite Jest.
What first comes to mind for me is the end of “A Handful of Dust” by Evelyn Waugh. I slammed the book. On a chair or a desk, whichever was closer. I enjoyed the hell out of that book, but for me, the ending cheapened everything. It felt like a joke. Or like it turned the characters into jokes.
I recently read in an interview that that ending was plucked from a separate story and pinned to the novel’s tail. I guess that’s what I felt– that the ending was a booger, not part of the nose.
why mykle?
hahaha
Wise Blood is awesome. What are you talking about. The guy who preaches that we should only believe in what we can see loses his eye sight. It’s beautiful. That shit with monkey suit? Phenomenal.
Chuck Klosterman dissed the Misfits in Fargo Rock City. Man, that pissed me off.
Every other response to this query is going to be better than mine.
Jude the Obscure.
For many reasons.
I felt that, with THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED, Burroughs had so exhausted himself in repetitions that I allowed myself to gradually drift off of whatever page I was reading into the wallpaper or carpet or _____, closed the book as absent-mindedly as possible, and then packed it away at the bottom of a box of other items I had chosen to neglect. (This was several to many years ago.)
Tess of the D’Ubervilles. heart shaped blood pool dripping. nuff said.
I do love the monkey suit, and a lot of the individual pieces of the book. (And it’s been four years now, which is a long time at my age, so who knows.) But I felt like the story’s architecture only made any sense on the level of themes and ideas. I wanted it to make emotional sense, I wanted to feel as if the characters had been more than tools for the author, and I rarely feel that way with her. She’s best when they slip out of her control. She couldn’t make that happen enough, I think, in the context of a novel.
It’s like how “The Artificial Nigger” is one of the best stories ever written up until the second, sucky ending she tacked on, and then it’s just a really good story the writer tried to regain control of just when it was at its best, most horrifying, beautiful.
I once heard Glenn Danzig say in an interview (or did I read it) that he wouldn’t talk about the Misfits because it was a period of his life that he was ashamed of, and I was like what the fuck, that’s the only stuff you can be proud of.
“Mother”–my fucking god.
How Fiction Works…rrraaaaaah!
I ripped off the cover and hammered nails through it. Stupid in retrospect.
Yep.
Black Aria is and always will be lesser than “Halloween.”
How Fiction Works? More like, How James Wood Works…My Last Nerve!
Rimshot.
Would’ve hated that book a lot less if it had been called “Part of How Some of My Favorite Fiction Works (I’m James Wood).”
Wise Blood is fantastic!
maybe the maddest i’ve been (from when i can remember) was with Nadja, which i had in my mind as this great surreal romance, even THE GREAT SURREAL ROMANCE because that’s what everything i read that was written on it lead me to belive, but it’s a self-indulgent realist thing about some surrealists and one of their sex kittens and a bunch of weird coincidences in which they feel that they are maybe gods among men, capable of a sort of primitive telepathy, and the whole time breton is shoving the question that opens the book – WHO AM I? – down your fucking throat. breton drunk on his own power juice is not fun, and it was by far the most disappointed i’ve been in a book in i don’t know how long. i don’t even know if i was mad at it, really. i was sad at it. books are such passive objects to me that i feel like whatever i think of them is just my opinion of what is going on inside and so it doesn’t have a lot of gravity to me. plus i know a lot of people haven’t and won’t read it and i don’t think they should. with books i honestly feel my opinion matters less because they don’t have the cultural weight of movies or the boob toob. that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot more from them than the other two: about aesthetics and points of view and non-linear plot and so on. i get a lot more mad at movies and the tv when i happen to see it flowing the way it does. maybe it’s the fact they’re moving.
I was so sadly disappointed with the end of Chris Adrian’s “Children’s Hospital” because he had done such a good job of suspending my disbelief for so long that when it all finally came crashing down around me, it was a terribly long drop. I think just about when Jemma started to be magic, I gave up, and when I finally did close the book, I closed it permanently.
it’s funny how why+name? is less threatening than why? alone.
maybe it’s just me
why would you get mad over a book?
Gately’s epic hospital room scenes were both bad-ass and really, really sad. Also when Hal switched to 1st person really got me. Trying to mention without ruining stuff.
Think I’m still depressed because of reading The Unnamable, probably cause it made me want to quit writing.
Guess it’s supposed to be mad. I read “sad.” Ah, never mind.
this is going to sound weird, but–
I.J. pissed me off because it was clear to me the author wasn’t interested in solving his characters’ problems, and was content letting them wallow in them.
that said, can’t really knock the grammar/word choice-kinda stuff.
i love when jereme plays the willfully ignorant card
I have this taboo against rendering books unreadable, but Giles Goat Boy put that to the test. I was so irritated with its ham-fisted symbolism that went nowhere. I bit that book like a starving vampire searching for blood. It was a first edition, but that didn’t stop me. The covers gave with a satisfying grinding-hiss as I punctured them w/ my canines. I wasted a couple of weeks reading the book. Every time I put it down to whip through some Calvino or Donlevy, I wondered why I kept reading it. I was warned. John Gardner condemns the book in ‘On Moral Fiction’ pretty severely, but I thought there was promise. Some cleverness that would seep out. Instead, everybody mechanically played out their roles in the hero myth and the painfully obvious, doubleplusunclever symbolism just killed me.
I fully admit that the book put me off mainstream mid-20th century literary fiction for good. What makes Giles Goat Boy even more pathetic is that it was written when Frank Herbert, Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard were peaking. I know they aren’t really comparable, but I suppose that’s my point. Barthes was busy painting by numbers–having prose conform w/ literary theory. It’s so backwards. Dune, Crash and A Man in His Time individually say more about heroism than the whole body of scholarship studying heroism. My fondness for speculative fiction combined with the laziness of mainstream mid 20th c authors touted as innovative have made me dismissive of really any writing that lustily rolls around in ‘postmodern’ (don’t even get me started…) tropes. I mean, that’s not fair, Faulkner is mid 20th century, so is Baldwin; but then again so are Cheever and Pynchon–two guys I can’t stand.
It seems to me that even a book with a million fans could have tens of millions of enemies. The Fountainhead for example; or for a bigger scale, the Bible and Quran. I try to be prepared to doubt my own hatred for anything; an instinct that has served me well over the years, given how irritable I can get. But I wonder, is there merit in hatred? Does the object of our hate serve as a scapegoat for something bigger? I know it does in my particular circumstance, but is that normal?
He has that problem. So do some of my favorite authors; it’s like they get all obsessive compulsive around certain subjects and just keep rambling until they say something new. I haven’t read that book in particular, but Exterminator and Naked Lunch? If he improved his quality to shit ratio of 3:2, maybe he’d be more widely read, instead of being fascinating marginalia.
haha
For a second there, I thought you meant that Klosterman had dissed the Marilyn Monroe-Clark Gable-Monty Clift movie, which also would’ve been a reason to get pissed off.
i kicked my copy of Olds’ The Unswept Room across my bedroom
that’s funny shane, because my ex told me she was reading that in the tub like a week ago and it made me think a little less of her — i liked it better when she was reading erotica by anais nin — we broke up for like the fifth time yesterday, the thought of auster makes my brain grimace
i think everyone should break up with everyone who likes auster (maybe we can save a small little place for the ny trilogy?).
the real question is: what do we do with people who like siri hustvedt?
I threw Atlas Shrugged from seven stories up after completion, then went down because I actually wanted to reread the last page, thinking that I was mistakenly angry, which I wasn’t. I was also so mad at how good Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow was that I threw it away, hoping that it was the only copy out there and that I could conceal its greatness for myself. It was still in the garbage the next day, since it was my own garbage, so I re-shelved it; when people say “what’s this” I say “it’s decent.”
oh jesus shit i forgot all about ayn rand for a hot second, the thing is i was into her stuff when i was young, but then i had no real opinion of things, now i scorn her for political reasons, but i still have no interest in reading her anymore, it’s all very naive i think, but in a terrible way
When I finished A Farewell to Arms I wrote “son of a bitch of a book” on the title page. But I did that because I liked it so much. I was mad that it was so good.
i got very mad at Sphere by michael crichton when my favorite character was killed off. i stopped reading it for weeks. apparently my emotions aren’t as affected by books these days. (i was 12 or 13 at the time.)
Same here with Tess of the D’Ubervilles…
Bullshit.
I get this with Faulkner sometimes.
Awesome.
My favorite Hardy melodramatic moment is in Far From the Madding Crowd, where the pregnant Fanny collapses on the road and is dragged into town by a dog.
Bullshit what? Would have sucked anyhow? Would have been less awesome? Or OCD tics are essential for good writing? Not sure what you mean. Anyhow, Henri Michaux did it better than Burroughs–and before.
I read that when I was 12 or 13 too. I remember I actually got a boner from reading the sex scene. Perhaps the only time that’s happened.
I was the same age! Maybe all 12 year-old boys read Sphere.
really? i read see you next tuesday which blake and chelsea were both in, and it gave me all sorts of boners, you should read that if you’re looking for boners adam
JUDE THE OBSCURE, which I read in high school. About halfway in, I decided all the characters were just puppets who existed to explain the author’s beliefs about society. That’s pretty true of most authors of course, but Hardy did it in such a ham-handed fashion — I couldn’t believe that flesh-and-blood people would behave so stupidly, so consistently.
i probably did too. but the most erotic book i read around that same time was some chrichton-esque book about humans who discover a lost tribe of neanderthals and have sex with them.
not sure austerity is a sexually transmitted disease, they might be okay
hahahahaha
you know how i roll dog.
regardless, i have never been angry over a book. can’t imagine doing so.
I read all of Pynchon’s Vineland, hating almost all of it, got to the last page, refused to read it, and threw the book across the room, picked it up, took it outside, and threw it away. Twenty years later I don’t remember the book at all or what I hated. I just remember the hatred. I also had a deep, deep, unfathomably deep hatred for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which I had to read for my last course in college. My seething hatred began with the dedication, which reads: “TO THE MOST HIGH, MIGHTIE And MAGNIFICENT EMPRESSE RENOVVMED FOR PIETIE, VERTVE, AND ALL GRATIOVS GOVERNMENT ELIZABETH BY THE GRACE OF GOD QVEENE OF ENGLAND FRANCE AND IRELAND AND OF VIRGINIA DEFENDOVR OF THE FAITH, &
And so on.
I loved the way the character’s were left completely fucked up. It was just the most absurd and entertaining realism.
i agree. that book really bummed me out for how lazy it was on imagination.
Me too.
Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead for ripping off Beckett and making a mess of it, although I haven’t seen it performed, so maybe there’s promise.
Mason & Dixon by Pynchon. Wasted a summer on that one a few years ago. No payoff whatsoever. I’m still pissed.
Bummed Queneau into inventing the OuLiPo. The first person to call the surrealists on their bullshit was also the illest at doing so.
I can’t stand the way Hamlet is always played. Why can’t all the major players in a bloody heap and Fortinbras showing up too late be played as comedy?
Haven’t seen it performed but the film version is so good!
That’s an interesting idea & methinks it’s applicable elsewhere as well. If a story or poem isn’t working, reverse the emotional polarity! Hmm. I salute you.
I hated the ending of Wise Blood so much I actually threw it across the room when I was done. Only time I can remember doing that. Can’t explain it anymore, just thought it was a shit book.
i’ve never read it but the movie is kind of awesome, apparently john huston didn’t really think of it as a story about a christian in spite of himself, he just thought of it being about these wacky characters and their delusions and this sort of evangelical turf war, but in the end he decided to let jesus win, o’connor seems like kind of a nut, but kind of a cool nut maybe, like my grandma
Like a lot of O’Connor stuff the best-worst-truest thing you can say about it is that yes, it would probably make a pretty bitchin’ movie. Though you’d have to fix the structure to make it actually satisfying for me, I think. Movies, luckily, tend to do that.
The Bible.
Total BS ending.
Threw ‘Moon Palace’ in a pool. My ex fished it out, all angry, that I ruined her book that was a gift. I told her I’d buy her a replacement, not of ‘Moon Palace,’ but of something of worth. Never wanted to go to NYC more in my life and… well, you get the idea.
I’ve got that. The cover almost did it.
Infinite Jest.
What first comes to mind for me is the end of “A Handful of Dust” by Evelyn Waugh. I slammed the book. On a chair or a desk, whichever was closer. I enjoyed the hell out of that book, but for me, the ending cheapened everything. It felt like a joke. Or like it turned the characters into jokes.
I recently read in an interview that that ending was plucked from a separate story and pinned to the novel’s tail. I guess that’s what I felt– that the ending was a booger, not part of the nose.
but have you read her? there isn’t a garbage pail kid bad enough for her and her pretensions.
why mykle?
hahaha
Wise Blood is awesome. What are you talking about. The guy who preaches that we should only believe in what we can see loses his eye sight. It’s beautiful. That shit with monkey suit? Phenomenal.
Chuck Klosterman dissed the Misfits in Fargo Rock City. Man, that pissed me off.
Every other response to this query is going to be better than mine.
Jude the Obscure.
For many reasons.
I felt that, with THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED, Burroughs had so exhausted himself in repetitions that I allowed myself to gradually drift off of whatever page I was reading into the wallpaper or carpet or _____, closed the book as absent-mindedly as possible, and then packed it away at the bottom of a box of other items I had chosen to neglect. (This was several to many years ago.)
Tess of the D’Ubervilles. heart shaped blood pool dripping. nuff said.
maybe FAN’S NOTES. for completely ruining itself…… ( i have a modern libe hardcover, w/ author pic on dj spine, and tho i didn’t throw the book out, i ripped up the dust jacket so i didn’t have to look at Exley’s face)
I do love the monkey suit, and a lot of the individual pieces of the book. (And it’s been four years now, which is a long time at my age, so who knows.) But I felt like the story’s architecture only made any sense on the level of themes and ideas. I wanted it to make emotional sense, I wanted to feel as if the characters had been more than tools for the author, and I rarely feel that way with her. She’s best when they slip out of her control. She couldn’t make that happen enough, I think, in the context of a novel.
It’s like how “The Artificial Nigger” is one of the best stories ever written up until the second, sucky ending she tacked on, and then it’s just a really good story the writer tried to regain control of just when it was at its best, most horrifying, beautiful.
I once heard Glenn Danzig say in an interview (or did I read it) that he wouldn’t talk about the Misfits because it was a period of his life that he was ashamed of, and I was like what the fuck, that’s the only stuff you can be proud of.
“Mother”–my fucking god.
Rand’s political imbecility aside, her novels are terrible because they’re such badly written.soap operas: the gruelingly smug ‘nobility’ of her protagonists; the grim feminine self-abasement of their ‘love’ stories.
But I’m with jereme on getting mad at shitty fiction or at a frustrating or disappointing bad exit to an otherwise good book (except that, whatever’s up with jereme, I’m not being “willfully ignorant”).
When I make the judgement: ‘bad writing’, I don’t burn; I feel cold – and it’s easy to pick up something, usually poetry, that I know will make me somehow passionate.
A botched conclusion – or ‘conclusion’ – to a movie is way more irritating to me, if only temporarily. I think this difference in reaction is because watching a film happens so much more quickly than reading a novel: 1:35, and boom!, the last 10 minutes violate the preceding hour and a half, and, for an evening or a couple of days, you’re sucking your cheeks and detaching your retinas yanking your chin left and right.
But with a doorstopper? You stuck with it – who are you “mad” at??
Not just “more quickly”. With a movie, your focus is locked in for the duration. With a book, you’re in and out of the book’s world, more or less at your leisure. At least for me, watching shoddy filmmaking feels more like I’m being cheated, rather than that, as with a novel, I’m freely – more or less – exposing myself repeatedly to someone else’s artistic sensibilities.
Reading anything by Sedaris.
Getting “mad” at non-fiction is a different topic than getting “mad” at novels, because, in the case of opinion, journalism, philosophy, and so on, getting mad (or feeling technique-generated pleasure) at the literary judgement of the writer can’t easily be extricated from how one feels about the argument/perspective itself.
Unless you’re politically ‘conservative’, you’re going to be abraded by Capitalism: An Unknown Ideal (dangerous sub-title, Ayn), Statecraft as Soooulcraft (eww), and Diplomacy (enraging).
Each of these writers is a poor stylist, but – for me – the fury at these books is a matter of intellectual contest, not aesthetic grief.
How Fiction Works…rrraaaaaah!
I ripped off the cover and hammered nails through it. Stupid in retrospect.
Yep.
Black Aria is and always will be lesser than “Halloween.”
How Fiction Works? More like, How James Wood Works…My Last Nerve!
Rimshot.
henry james’ turn of the screw. i tore it all to shreds after i was done with that class. it’s not that particular book. it’s just henry james in general.
Would’ve hated that book a lot less if it had been called “Part of How Some of My Favorite Fiction Works (I’m James Wood).”
Wise Blood is fantastic!
maybe the maddest i’ve been (from when i can remember) was with Nadja, which i had in my mind as this great surreal romance, even THE GREAT SURREAL ROMANCE because that’s what everything i read that was written on it lead me to belive, but it’s a self-indulgent realist thing about some surrealists and one of their sex kittens and a bunch of weird coincidences in which they feel that they are maybe gods among men, capable of a sort of primitive telepathy, and the whole time breton is shoving the question that opens the book – WHO AM I? – down your fucking throat. breton drunk on his own power juice is not fun, and it was by far the most disappointed i’ve been in a book in i don’t know how long. i don’t even know if i was mad at it, really. i was sad at it. books are such passive objects to me that i feel like whatever i think of them is just my opinion of what is going on inside and so it doesn’t have a lot of gravity to me. plus i know a lot of people haven’t and won’t read it and i don’t think they should. with books i honestly feel my opinion matters less because they don’t have the cultural weight of movies or the boob toob. that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot more from them than the other two: about aesthetics and points of view and non-linear plot and so on. i get a lot more mad at movies and the tv when i happen to see it flowing the way it does. maybe it’s the fact they’re moving.
I should add that I still admire Burroughs and will read him occasionally. Just not like I used to. Or: (cue the retrospection filter) I think I had had it with THE TICKET AT EXPLODED because that was the book during the reading of which I learned that I would inevitably have to consider Burroughs a former enthusiasm, i.e., just another writer to read. Not a seer. So, really — and maybe this is true in many of the cases reported in these comments — my anger at the book was really just deflected self-loathing. ?
YMMV.
I was so sadly disappointed with the end of Chris Adrian’s “Children’s Hospital” because he had done such a good job of suspending my disbelief for so long that when it all finally came crashing down around me, it was a terribly long drop. I think just about when Jemma started to be magic, I gave up, and when I finally did close the book, I closed it permanently.
You should check out the “real” ending available as an appendix in some editions.
it’s funny how why+name? is less threatening than why? alone.
maybe it’s just me
why would you get mad over a book?
Gately’s epic hospital room scenes were both bad-ass and really, really sad. Also when Hal switched to 1st person really got me. Trying to mention without ruining stuff.
Think I’m still depressed because of reading The Unnamable, probably cause it made me want to quit writing.
Guess it’s supposed to be mad. I read “sad.” Ah, never mind.
i love when jereme plays the willfully ignorant card
I have this taboo against rendering books unreadable, but Giles Goat Boy put that to the test. I was so irritated with its ham-fisted symbolism that went nowhere. I bit that book like a starving vampire searching for blood. It was a first edition, but that didn’t stop me. The covers gave with a satisfying grinding-hiss as I punctured them w/ my canines. I wasted a couple of weeks reading the book. Every time I put it down to whip through some Calvino or Donlevy, I wondered why I kept reading it. I was warned. John Gardner condemns the book in ‘On Moral Fiction’ pretty severely, but I thought there was promise. Some cleverness that would seep out. Instead, everybody mechanically played out their roles in the hero myth and the painfully obvious, doubleplusunclever symbolism just killed me.
I fully admit that the book put me off mainstream mid-20th century literary fiction for good. What makes Giles Goat Boy even more pathetic is that it was written when Frank Herbert, Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard were peaking. I know they aren’t really comparable, but I suppose that’s my point. Barthes was busy painting by numbers–having prose conform w/ literary theory. It’s so backwards. Dune, Crash and A Man in His Time individually say more about heroism than the whole body of scholarship studying heroism. My fondness for speculative fiction combined with the laziness of mainstream mid 20th c authors touted as innovative have made me dismissive of really any writing that lustily rolls around in ‘postmodern’ (don’t even get me started…) tropes. I mean, that’s not fair, Faulkner is mid 20th century, so is Baldwin; but then again so are Cheever and Pynchon–two guys I can’t stand.
It seems to me that even a book with a million fans could have tens of millions of enemies. The Fountainhead for example; or for a bigger scale, the Bible and Quran. I try to be prepared to doubt my own hatred for anything; an instinct that has served me well over the years, given how irritable I can get. But I wonder, is there merit in hatred? Does the object of our hate serve as a scapegoat for something bigger? I know it does in my particular circumstance, but is that normal?
I second Tess. They handed it over to us in HS. One of the few books I have ever stopped reading half-way. Just all, ‘No – enough. There is no payoff that will make this worth it’.
He has that problem. So do some of my favorite authors; it’s like they get all obsessive compulsive around certain subjects and just keep rambling until they say something new. I haven’t read that book in particular, but Exterminator and Naked Lunch? If he improved his quality to shit ratio of 3:2, maybe he’d be more widely read, instead of being fascinating marginalia.
I loved Tess.
haha
For a second there, I thought you meant that Klosterman had dissed the Marilyn Monroe-Clark Gable-Monty Clift movie, which also would’ve been a reason to get pissed off.
Agreed.
Inherent Vice. I fucking hate the Cheech-and-Chong-y, pulp-mystery-y voice. If it wasn’t a (trumpets!) THOMAS PYNCHON novel no one would have even reviewed this piece of shit.
Didn’t finish the thing, put it in the library night drop.
i kicked my copy of Olds’ The Unswept Room across my bedroom
Mike has better joke writers than I do. I humbly concede that point.
that’s funny shane, because my ex told me she was reading that in the tub like a week ago and it made me think a little less of her — i liked it better when she was reading erotica by anais nin — we broke up for like the fifth time yesterday, the thought of auster makes my brain grimace
Bummer, man. I really enjoyed M&D, but I’ve heard some decent arguments against it.
i think everyone should break up with everyone who likes auster (maybe we can save a small little place for the ny trilogy?).
the real question is: what do we do with people who like siri hustvedt?
yeah that book sucks hard
I threw Atlas Shrugged from seven stories up after completion, then went down because I actually wanted to reread the last page, thinking that I was mistakenly angry, which I wasn’t. I was also so mad at how good Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow was that I threw it away, hoping that it was the only copy out there and that I could conceal its greatness for myself. It was still in the garbage the next day, since it was my own garbage, so I re-shelved it; when people say “what’s this” I say “it’s decent.”
wow, totally did not know that
oh jesus shit i forgot all about ayn rand for a hot second, the thing is i was into her stuff when i was young, but then i had no real opinion of things, now i scorn her for political reasons, but i still have no interest in reading her anymore, it’s all very naive i think, but in a terrible way
Thanks, man. Will do.
When I finished A Farewell to Arms I wrote “son of a bitch of a book” on the title page. But I did that because I liked it so much. I was mad that it was so good.
i got very mad at Sphere by michael crichton when my favorite character was killed off. i stopped reading it for weeks. apparently my emotions aren’t as affected by books these days. (i was 12 or 13 at the time.)
Same here with Tess of the D’Ubervilles…
Bullshit.
I wouldn’t have been bitter about the lack of any kind of ending (and I don’t think the contents of the first chapter would be enough, even if it had been placed at the end) if I hadn’t had to slog through so much drawn-out middle thickness to arrive at that non-place. That book needed to be about 400 pages shorter. There was no need for a cheap, two-dimensional caricature of German tennis coaches. No point to an excruciatingly dull and endless dialogue at sunset. The whole wheelchair-bound terrorists subplot wasn’t funny and went noplace, slowly. The more highly technical footnotes DFW added, the clearer it was he was making it all up. And the one character who dominates and animates the second half of the book is left, I seem to recall, lying unconscious somewhere? While meanwhile I recall Hal’s brother is maybe being tortured to death someplace, awaiting death or rescue? Forgive me, it’s been a while and I threw that book really far …
It’s really easy to come up with clever beginnings for themes, stories, subplots, etc. if you don’t have to finish them. Finishing them is part of the job. Otherwise you might as well watch Lost. Some people think not finishing what you start is some kind of deep statement. To me it looks like he just couldn’t finish it — Lord knows he struggled, had problems, suffered. — and his publishers decided to sell it anyway.
I know somebody’s shouting “too soon! too soon!” We all miss DFW a lot ’cause he was great, but Infinite Jest was not his best work at all. However, the whole sales-pitch of the publisher, the book cover, the many blurbs, the ad campaign and all the buzz was that this was IT, this was THE GREAT BOOK that comes ONCE IN A GENERATION and is GENIUS and WILL BE WORTH THE TIME, EXPENSE AND EFFORT, WE PROMISE. That’s a perfect set-up for disappointment.
I get this with Faulkner sometimes.
Awesome.
My favorite Hardy melodramatic moment is in Far From the Madding Crowd, where the pregnant Fanny collapses on the road and is dragged into town by a dog.
Bullshit what? Would have sucked anyhow? Would have been less awesome? Or OCD tics are essential for good writing? Not sure what you mean. Anyhow, Henri Michaux did it better than Burroughs–and before.
I read that when I was 12 or 13 too. I remember I actually got a boner from reading the sex scene. Perhaps the only time that’s happened.
You should check out the “real” ending available as an appendix in some editions.
my 18 yr old sister threw bsg’s DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT at my obese cat, and said: “why is this published,” “this, like, isn’t funny,” and “fucking aliens”.
(sorry b.)
How do you mean it ruins itself? Don’t like his verbose, parenthetical style? I can see that. The triumph of the book over the human? I can see that too. But I’d like clarification, because I liked it.
I was the same age! Maybe all 12 year-old boys read Sphere.
my grandpa got through half of WATERSHIP DOWN before he realized it was about rabbits, railed off a bunch of expletives, and threw it at the TV. personallly, i love WATERSHIP DOWN.
ouch
that cat must have been pissed
“repetitions” = repeated phrases?
Time wasted, for example. Pretension for another. At least you can understand the latter; another person’s pretensions can piss us off.
I think of the reader-writer relationship as a transaction. The reader promises to stick it out w/ the writer and in exchange, the writer does his/her best to give the reader something worth reading. When a writer wastes my time, it irritates me. There are other things I could read. I feel cheated the same way I feel cheated by the phone company or PG&E; except it’s more personal. And then there’s some self-anger too, because why did I stick it out with a book that was failing so badly? So I could have more credibility when I said I didn’t like an author? Maybe.
I think if you’re passionate about something, it means you express preference; which in turn means that things which do not satisfy one’s preferences can irritate.
Not that you give a shit what I think.
really? i read see you next tuesday which blake and chelsea were both in, and it gave me all sorts of boners, you should read that if you’re looking for boners adam
JUDE THE OBSCURE, which I read in high school. About halfway in, I decided all the characters were just puppets who existed to explain the author’s beliefs about society. That’s pretty true of most authors of course, but Hardy did it in such a ham-handed fashion — I couldn’t believe that flesh-and-blood people would behave so stupidly, so consistently.
i probably did too. but the most erotic book i read around that same time was some chrichton-esque book about humans who discover a lost tribe of neanderthals and have sex with them.
not sure austerity is a sexually transmitted disease, they might be okay
hahahahaha
you know how i roll dog.
regardless, i have never been angry over a book. can’t imagine doing so.
I read all of Pynchon’s Vineland, hating almost all of it, got to the last page, refused to read it, and threw the book across the room, picked it up, took it outside, and threw it away. Twenty years later I don’t remember the book at all or what I hated. I just remember the hatred. I also had a deep, deep, unfathomably deep hatred for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which I had to read for my last course in college. My seething hatred began with the dedication, which reads: “TO THE MOST HIGH, MIGHTIE And MAGNIFICENT EMPRESSE RENOVVMED FOR PIETIE, VERTVE, AND ALL GRATIOVS GOVERNMENT ELIZABETH BY THE GRACE OF GOD QVEENE OF ENGLAND FRANCE AND IRELAND AND OF VIRGINIA DEFENDOVR OF THE FAITH, &
And so on.
It’s less threatening but more condescending, patronizing. Like a teacher to a student.
even if you gave her a good rectal probing with a tongue depressor formed from jalapenos and fish teeth you could not force this cat to move from anything but indifference. she is a glacial tomb of porcine sloth and emotional frigidity.
I loved the way the character’s were left completely fucked up. It was just the most absurd and entertaining realism.
i agree. that book really bummed me out for how lazy it was on imagination.
I hated Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Unrestrained narcissism and gimmickry, plus it’s poorly written. I felt manipulated and used while I read it, but I live in San Francisco and Eggers is a big cheese ’round here, and I wanted to finish the book, so I did. It was a library copy, so I didn’t do anything to it afterward but return it.
ha ha
Me too.
But you’ve been elated over a book, right? Or any of the other zillion emotions/feelings? Or, maybe not. So, books are nothing to get emotional over. I’ve got to take in this wisdom slowly. Or maybe you mean the book itself, like the physical paper and cardboard and ink? Which is different than the words, eh? Eh? Clever, clever. Especially considering the whole question is a joke/play toward fun.
Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead for ripping off Beckett and making a mess of it, although I haven’t seen it performed, so maybe there’s promise.
Mason & Dixon by Pynchon. Wasted a summer on that one a few years ago. No payoff whatsoever. I’m still pissed.
Bummed Queneau into inventing the OuLiPo. The first person to call the surrealists on their bullshit was also the illest at doing so.
I can’t stand the way Hamlet is always played. Why can’t all the major players in a bloody heap and Fortinbras showing up too late be played as comedy?
Haven’t seen it performed but the film version is so good!
what do you mean by emotional?
have i laughed? rarely.
have i remembered a book? yep. quite a bit.
have i been emotional over a book? no. not at all.
what is there to get emotional over?
no, it’s okay. mykle is my name.
That’s an interesting idea & methinks it’s applicable elsewhere as well. If a story or poem isn’t working, reverse the emotional polarity! Hmm. I salute you.
Ha, that didn’t take long. Nothing to get emotional over, jeremy, nothing at all. I mean, I’m not going to explain it to you. You’re either a psychopath, or you’re lying because you think getting emotional, or admitting emotion at all, is a sign of weakness. It’s ok. Some guys think using their turn signal is a sign of homosexuality.
Reynard, I think that naivete was a part of it, you’re right. Being an easy to digest read I think I realized, and all too late, that I was being duped, that it was good to start thinking on my own about the things that she sort of embosses, and with a point at enclosing things philosophically she just becomes irksome, using fiction to spread her theories. All that aside, I still remember her characters very well and that means something, although I’d agree with deadgod that the meaning in this might be the same meaning one takes in the simple remembrance of a soap opera character. However, If we don’t stick with the stuff that seems bad our judgments cannot be formed enough to argue from, so I was mad about the session because I put up with the whole thing, which is maybe the same thing as being mad at myself for putting up with it, who knows. And yes, bad films are bigger disappointments but more people see bad films than claim to have finished bad books.
a box-jumping sloth
why would it take long? i’m sitting at work in front of a computer.
obviously you are a very emotional person. your passive aggression is palpable.
funny and i have never even talked to you but yet i’m under your skin.
sounds like you just be a bitch, son.
str8 up bitch.
A lot of books at my local library look like they’ve been thrown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha
How the fuck am I supposed to know you’re sitting at work in front of a computer? Is that common knowledge?
Yes, I am a very emotional person. When aggression is obvious and palpable, it is not passive, you sperm burping John Dorsey lookalike. But I know you have 3 or 4 pat insults you just lay on everybody who comes at you. Like “bitch” and “son”. What’s the other one?
uh i dunno.
shit squish?
you are a shit squish? better?
No, no…that isn’t it. It’s on the tip of your tongue. Or is that a drop of your own cum?
hahaha good one. keep failing bro.
here’s my theme song.
enjoy being miserable!
The Bible.
Total BS ending.
I don’t have speakers. I have this problem with ripping them out. But, it appears to be rap. Or is that racist? I guess if I enjoy my misery then it is not really misery. I’m just thinking aloud here. You keep succeeding, you little piece of cockskin. It’s kind of ironically beautiful when a junkie-dwarf is so eternally condescending.
I’ve got that. The cover almost did it.
but have you read her? there isn’t a garbage pail kid bad enough for her and her pretensions.
are our periods in sync, mts? you seem very emotional.
you can have some of my midol if you like. i don’t mind sharing.
Oh, I was just going to ask when gena was going to show up. Jereme’s white trash imaginary girlfriend. Fuck you you stinky cunt.
I flung Salman Rushie’s _Midnight’s Children_ from the balcony of my apartment.
After ripping it up.
yeah, you’re definitely on your period. lol.
Definitely! You nailed it, babe.
i agree dead god. movies are way different for me too.
the term “lol” refers to laughing, and you can’t laugh at anything written down, be it a book or a blog. That would be a show of emotion. Shame, shame…
maybe FAN’S NOTES. for completely ruining itself…… ( i have a modern libe hardcover, w/ author pic on dj spine, and tho i didn’t throw the book out, i ripped up the dust jacket so i didn’t have to look at Exley’s face)
You’re acting as if you’re locked to the seat. I have walked out of or pushed “stop” on dozens of movies. There is no difference at all.
I liked it too, despite the style.
Rand’s political imbecility aside, her novels are terrible because they’re such badly written.soap operas: the gruelingly smug ‘nobility’ of her protagonists; the grim feminine self-abasement of their ‘love’ stories.
But I’m with jereme on getting mad at shitty fiction or at a frustrating or disappointing bad exit to an otherwise good book (except that, whatever’s up with jereme, I’m not being “willfully ignorant”).
When I make the judgement: ‘bad writing’, I don’t burn; I feel cold – and it’s easy to pick up something, usually poetry, that I know will make me somehow passionate.
A botched conclusion – or ‘conclusion’ – to a movie is way more irritating to me, if only temporarily. I think this difference in reaction is because watching a film happens so much more quickly than reading a novel: 1:35, and boom!, the last 10 minutes violate the preceding hour and a half, and, for an evening or a couple of days, you’re sucking your cheeks and detaching your retinas yanking your chin left and right.
But with a doorstopper? You stuck with it – who are you “mad” at??
Not just “more quickly”. With a movie, your focus is locked in for the duration. With a book, you’re in and out of the book’s world, more or less at your leisure. At least for me, watching shoddy filmmaking feels more like I’m being cheated, rather than that, as with a novel, I’m freely – more or less – exposing myself repeatedly to someone else’s artistic sensibilities.
Reading anything by Sedaris.
Getting “mad” at non-fiction is a different topic than getting “mad” at novels, because, in the case of opinion, journalism, philosophy, and so on, getting mad (or feeling technique-generated pleasure) at the literary judgement of the writer can’t easily be extricated from how one feels about the argument/perspective itself.
Unless you’re politically ‘conservative’, you’re going to be abraded by Capitalism: An Unknown Ideal (dangerous sub-title, Ayn), Statecraft as Soooulcraft (eww), and Diplomacy (enraging).
Each of these writers is a poor stylist, but – for me – the fury at these books is a matter of intellectual contest, not aesthetic grief.
henry james’ turn of the screw. i tore it all to shreds after i was done with that class. it’s not that particular book. it’s just henry james in general.
I should add that I still admire Burroughs and will read him occasionally. Just not like I used to. Or: (cue the retrospection filter) I think I had had it with THE TICKET AT EXPLODED because that was the book during the reading of which I learned that I would inevitably have to consider Burroughs a former enthusiasm, i.e., just another writer to read. Not a seer. So, really — and maybe this is true in many of the cases reported in these comments — my anger at the book was really just deflected self-loathing. ?
YMMV.
You should check out the “real” ending available as an appendix in some editions.
I second Tess. They handed it over to us in HS. One of the few books I have ever stopped reading half-way. Just all, ‘No – enough. There is no payoff that will make this worth it’.
I loved Tess.
Agreed.
Inherent Vice. I fucking hate the Cheech-and-Chong-y, pulp-mystery-y voice. If it wasn’t a (trumpets!) THOMAS PYNCHON novel no one would have even reviewed this piece of shit.
Didn’t finish the thing, put it in the library night drop.
Mike has better joke writers than I do. I humbly concede that point.
Bummer, man. I really enjoyed M&D, but I’ve heard some decent arguments against it.
yeah that book sucks hard
wow, totally did not know that
Thanks, man. Will do.
I wouldn’t have been bitter about the lack of any kind of ending (and I don’t think the contents of the first chapter would be enough, even if it had been placed at the end) if I hadn’t had to slog through so much drawn-out middle thickness to arrive at that non-place. That book needed to be about 400 pages shorter. There was no need for a cheap, two-dimensional caricature of German tennis coaches. No point to an excruciatingly dull and endless dialogue at sunset. The whole wheelchair-bound terrorists subplot wasn’t funny and went noplace, slowly. The more highly technical footnotes DFW added, the clearer it was he was making it all up. And the one character who dominates and animates the second half of the book is left, I seem to recall, lying unconscious somewhere? While meanwhile I recall Hal’s brother is maybe being tortured to death someplace, awaiting death or rescue? Forgive me, it’s been a while and I threw that book really far …
It’s really easy to come up with clever beginnings for themes, stories, subplots, etc. if you don’t have to finish them. Finishing them is part of the job. Otherwise you might as well watch Lost. Some people think not finishing what you start is some kind of deep statement. To me it looks like he just couldn’t finish it — Lord knows he struggled, had problems, suffered. — and his publishers decided to sell it anyway.
I know somebody’s shouting “too soon! too soon!” We all miss DFW a lot ’cause he was great, but Infinite Jest was not his best work at all. However, the whole sales-pitch of the publisher, the book cover, the many blurbs, the ad campaign and all the buzz was that this was IT, this was THE GREAT BOOK that comes ONCE IN A GENERATION and is GENIUS and WILL BE WORTH THE TIME, EXPENSE AND EFFORT, WE PROMISE. That’s a perfect set-up for disappointment.
You should check out the “real” ending available as an appendix in some editions.
my 18 yr old sister threw bsg’s DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT at my obese cat, and said: “why is this published,” “this, like, isn’t funny,” and “fucking aliens”.
(sorry b.)
How do you mean it ruins itself? Don’t like his verbose, parenthetical style? I can see that. The triumph of the book over the human? I can see that too. But I’d like clarification, because I liked it.
my grandpa got through half of WATERSHIP DOWN before he realized it was about rabbits, railed off a bunch of expletives, and threw it at the TV. personallly, i love WATERSHIP DOWN.
ouch
that cat must have been pissed
“repetitions” = repeated phrases?
Time wasted, for example. Pretension for another. At least you can understand the latter; another person’s pretensions can piss us off.
I think of the reader-writer relationship as a transaction. The reader promises to stick it out w/ the writer and in exchange, the writer does his/her best to give the reader something worth reading. When a writer wastes my time, it irritates me. There are other things I could read. I feel cheated the same way I feel cheated by the phone company or PG&E; except it’s more personal. And then there’s some self-anger too, because why did I stick it out with a book that was failing so badly? So I could have more credibility when I said I didn’t like an author? Maybe.
I think if you’re passionate about something, it means you express preference; which in turn means that things which do not satisfy one’s preferences can irritate.
Not that you give a shit what I think.
It’s less threatening but more condescending, patronizing. Like a teacher to a student.
even if you gave her a good rectal probing with a tongue depressor formed from jalapenos and fish teeth you could not force this cat to move from anything but indifference. she is a glacial tomb of porcine sloth and emotional frigidity.
I hated Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Unrestrained narcissism and gimmickry, plus it’s poorly written. I felt manipulated and used while I read it, but I live in San Francisco and Eggers is a big cheese ’round here, and I wanted to finish the book, so I did. It was a library copy, so I didn’t do anything to it afterward but return it.
ha ha
But you’ve been elated over a book, right? Or any of the other zillion emotions/feelings? Or, maybe not. So, books are nothing to get emotional over. I’ve got to take in this wisdom slowly. Or maybe you mean the book itself, like the physical paper and cardboard and ink? Which is different than the words, eh? Eh? Clever, clever. Especially considering the whole question is a joke/play toward fun.
what do you mean by emotional?
have i laughed? rarely.
have i remembered a book? yep. quite a bit.
have i been emotional over a book? no. not at all.
what is there to get emotional over?
no, it’s okay. mykle is my name.
Ha, that didn’t take long. Nothing to get emotional over, jeremy, nothing at all. I mean, I’m not going to explain it to you. You’re either a psychopath, or you’re lying because you think getting emotional, or admitting emotion at all, is a sign of weakness. It’s ok. Some guys think using their turn signal is a sign of homosexuality.
Reynard, I think that naivete was a part of it, you’re right. Being an easy to digest read I think I realized, and all too late, that I was being duped, that it was good to start thinking on my own about the things that she sort of embosses, and with a point at enclosing things philosophically she just becomes irksome, using fiction to spread her theories. All that aside, I still remember her characters very well and that means something, although I’d agree with deadgod that the meaning in this might be the same meaning one takes in the simple remembrance of a soap opera character. However, If we don’t stick with the stuff that seems bad our judgments cannot be formed enough to argue from, so I was mad about the session because I put up with the whole thing, which is maybe the same thing as being mad at myself for putting up with it, who knows. And yes, bad films are bigger disappointments but more people see bad films than claim to have finished bad books.
a box-jumping sloth
why would it take long? i’m sitting at work in front of a computer.
obviously you are a very emotional person. your passive aggression is palpable.
funny and i have never even talked to you but yet i’m under your skin.
sounds like you just be a bitch, son.
str8 up bitch.
A lot of books at my local library look like they’ve been thrown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha
How the fuck am I supposed to know you’re sitting at work in front of a computer? Is that common knowledge?
Yes, I am a very emotional person. When aggression is obvious and palpable, it is not passive, you sperm burping John Dorsey lookalike. But I know you have 3 or 4 pat insults you just lay on everybody who comes at you. Like “bitch” and “son”. What’s the other one?
uh i dunno.
shit squish?
you are a shit squish? better?
No, no…that isn’t it. It’s on the tip of your tongue. Or is that a drop of your own cum?
hahaha good one. keep failing bro.
here’s my theme song.
enjoy being miserable!
I don’t have speakers. I have this problem with ripping them out. But, it appears to be rap. Or is that racist? I guess if I enjoy my misery then it is not really misery. I’m just thinking aloud here. You keep succeeding, you little piece of cockskin. It’s kind of ironically beautiful when a junkie-dwarf is so eternally condescending.
are our periods in sync, mts? you seem very emotional.
you can have some of my midol if you like. i don’t mind sharing.
Oh, I was just going to ask when gena was going to show up. Jereme’s white trash imaginary girlfriend. Fuck you you stinky cunt.
I flung Salman Rushie’s _Midnight’s Children_ from the balcony of my apartment.
After ripping it up.
yeah, you’re definitely on your period. lol.
Definitely! You nailed it, babe.
i agree dead god. movies are way different for me too.
the term “lol” refers to laughing, and you can’t laugh at anything written down, be it a book or a blog. That would be a show of emotion. Shame, shame…
You’re acting as if you’re locked to the seat. I have walked out of or pushed “stop” on dozens of movies. There is no difference at all.
I liked it too, despite the style.
As long as we all know.
Neat new site.
Although there’s no way of making Hamlet comedic in the traditional sense, the emotional polarity needn’t be reversed entirely for much of it to be funny – what about Mel Gibson in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet? The zany potential of his endless, inturned word on words on words is really emphasized, he talks superfast and the others don’t have a clue what he’s going on about most of the time, and there is more than a hint that the actors think the ending is silly, over-the-top, tacked on – which it is. Hamlet’s predicament can’t be resolved – but because it can only be two hrs traffic etc, it has to be resolved, provisionally, unsatisfactorily, absurdly.
Faerie Queene is amazing. Sorry.
An earlier post said it hated everything about Henry James; for me this kind of goes hand in hand with being excited by writers like Barthes. I think the thing with Barthes was that he kept at the same thing for too long. But then some writers who try and change their thing, like Ian McEwan in his recent stuff, or Salman Rushdie, or Martin Amis, when they try and change up their steez (bloody brits) it can be truly awful. Like Woody Allen’s late period – people stop responding to what is in some way matters to them, or they’ve become so self -regarding that they write about ‘important’ subjects, or so famous and out of touch that it amounts to the same thing. Work that doesn’t matter. I think a lot of the stuff on this thread is to do with readers feeling the work doesn’t matter, might as well not have been written, when it comes with acclaim emblazoned on the jacket.
Alan — not so much that, or his persistent recycling of the same notebook(s), as a kind of existential repetition: the misanthropy, paranoia, etc. Micro and macro repetitions being “part of the point” and integral to Burroughs’ methods, granted. But, at the time, it wearied me to the point of disgruntlement.
This whole discussion, of course, has just made me want to go back and read the so-called Nova Trilogy again, and differently.
is it littering if the object tossed onto the street below is a respected novel?
Probably the maddest I got at a book was a travel guide that lead me places that didn’t exist any more. I remember that happened many times when I was in Bolivia and I had a quite out of date Lonely Planet guide. They also kept recommending the use of spanish slang that was actually culturally-insensitive and almost got me into trouble with the locals (like “cholo”).
Forgive me, here:
Holy smokes! Steev Hise reads HTML Giant?!?!
I want to hate that book, but I can’t even get past the first page. Does that qualify as hate? I have a friend who insists that I have no right to hate a book until I’ve finished it–but he’s a novelist, so of course he’s biased!
McSweeney’s gave me my favorite rejection letter ever. To paraphrase, “We don’t publish poetry…” [Not mentioned in their guides at the time] “… I mean, I like poetry; for example, I like Ted Kooser, but we don’t publish poetry.”
I hated the first sentence. Really, I just hate the way Rushdie writes. I hate the worldview his sentences belie and I hate the flippant way he makes words do his bidding. Purple prose.
I don’t really even know what HTML Giant is. I just clicked over here from Mykle Hansen’s Goodreads review of Infinite Jest. Do I know you, Matthew?
Not personally. I used to be on the Snuggles list, many, many years ago. I spent a lot of time combing through the Detritus site.
The end of the seven book Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Won’t spoil it for others.
Feel free to spoil it for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll never tolerate a Steven King book long enough to get to the end . . . much less past seven dark towers’ worth.
Your second paragraph: Do you use that line when you try to pick up girls?
Hell… Watership Down might have been channeled through rabbits, but it was not “about” rabbits. I’m curious whether or not you tried explaining that to him?
And… why did it take him half the book to realize that all the characters were rabbits?
¿???
Anyway, I’m with you: I loved Watership Down.
All this talk of throwing books . . . I think you’re all taking Dorothy Parker too literally.
I suspect that a lot of you — if not most — are joking, but I have to say I don’t think any book deserves to be thrown.
The only book that ever made me angry was Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. I’ve mentioned this before. I liked the book until the ending, at which point the guy set forth to disassemble all the beauty he’d created by explaining what every little thing symbolized. It was a horrific act of self-immolation. And since I had become involved in the book until that point: I ended up suffering 1st degree burns.
But I sure as hell did not throw it.
Other than that: no book I’ve read has ever made me angry. Even The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy) or McTeague (Frank Norris).
Nor any film, for that matter. I’ve never, ever left a theater complaining “So&so owes me my two hours back!”
i don’t know why it took him so long to realize that the characters were rabbits. i was very young. i think he thought the book was going to be about submarines. and men. sometimes we keep reading a book because we are waiting for it to become something else?