books I gave up on in 2006

Here are some of the books I gave up on in 2006:

Michael Cox, "The Meaning of Night"
Lian Hearn, "Across the Nightingale Floor"
Russell Hoban, "Her Name Was Lola"
Russell Hoban, "The Medusa Frequency"
Russell Hoban, "The Mouse and His Child" (young adult novel)
Alexander C. Irvine, "The Narrows"
Etgar Keret, "The Nimrod Flipout" (short stories)
A. Lee Martinez, "Gil’s All Fright Diner"
Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian" (I'll likely give this another shot)
Ian McEwan, "The Daydreamer" (young adult novel)
Peter Raftos, "The Stone Ship"
Patrick Rothfuss, "The Name of the Wind" (or "Circle of Firelight," this fantasy novel is due out in the spring of 2007, & the title seems to have changed)
Frank Schaeffer, "Baby Jack"
Michael Sedgwick, "The Book of Dead Days" (young adult novel)
Janwillem van de Wetering, "The Maine Massacre"
Larry Watson, "Orchard"

I find that there's a relatively short list of reasons that I give up on books (and I generally do give a book a good 50 pages or more before abandoning it):

* an author's prose style, characters, or plot are overly contrived, preventing me from suspending my disbelief and investing in his or her fictional world

* overly conspicuous sexuality or deviant behavior (necessary sexual content is one thing, but generic "adult material" is never a good substitute for strong storytelling)

* an author fails to imbue the episodes of his or her narrative with "weight"--that is, fails to convince me that I'm wading through a bunch of fluff and clutter for a good reason ("Is this going anywhere?")

* an author fails to do anything unusual or otherwise striking in some way for several chapters at the beginning of a book

~Adam
http://www.adamwalter.blogspot.com/

I am way too Teutonic in my reading habits to give up on a book. I would say that I have never stopped reading a book once I start, but that isn't quite true. I stopped A Frolic of his Own about a quarter of the way into it because I couldn't hack it. But that may be the only one.

Oakesspalding: I wanted to like Hoban because I love many modern mythopoeic novelists, but Hoban is just too self-indulgent and uninterested in the fundamentals of storytelling.

Ggchickapee: I read about 70 books last year--pretty good for me. And part of my "growing success" as a reader is knowing when to drop a bad book. I now follow the 50-page rule pretty closely (impress me in 50 pages, or you're toast!).

May I recommend retrying the Gaddis. It's really a rather good book, though it's definitely one that requires a bit of work on the reader's part. The opening line in that is one of my favorites ever... I think it's the opening line, at least.

“Justice? - you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”

I started to try to read Leo Strauss's book on Machievelli. But I didn't make it off the beach.

Recently I read that you have to plan to devote six weeks to it, minimum, but the person who passed that information on (and who did it) did not say whether or not the six weeks was worth it.

I will say that that's the only Gaddis that I've made it through. I handed JR to another friend who's huge on Faulkner, figuring that he might enjoy Gaddis' style. He gave up about forty pages in.

Readerville is reading Ulysses starting yesterday, so I may finally get around to that now.

Seven Years in Tibet. Great movie, terrible book.

There were a couple others, but I've forgotten them already.

Oh. The Triumph of the Therapuetic by Phillip Rieff. Seemed like a lot of fuss over nothing.

Off-thread question, but is there a FAQ for the site? You've got a 94% next to your name Deniro and I was wondering about the feature.

Jesse -- I will probably get back to A Frolic of His Own some day, but with 300 or 400 books on my TBR shelf, it won't be soon. Unfortunately, I think JR is on there now -- we'll see how far I get with that one.

As for your question about the 94% number -- that's an "affinity" number. It somehow shows how much (book-wise) you have in common with the other person. But I don't really understand it (just like I don't really understand the whole "weighted" library comparisons). You can probably find out more from the Site Talk group.

Thanks.