For the Love of Lit

Believe me, I feel terrible about this. I mean, I had such high hopes for us in the beginning, given everything I'd heard -- about your beauty, your brilliance, your style and depth --  I was so ready to go the distance, to revel in each treasure you had to offer.   And it's all the more painful to know that I'm the one who's let you down, it's not the other way around.  But you've bored me shitless, Ulysses, and I am out of here.

One of the few great advantages of being single is that you can get a lot of reading done.  I'm a reader by nature -- "voracious" doesn't even begin to do justice to my deep and long-abiding appetite for the written word.  The fact that I've inhaled 48 books so far this year, while reading an average of  9 scripts a week for a living (and that's not counting the weekly New Yorker and the other half a dozen periodicals I go through simultaneously) should give you some idea of just what kind of Reading Jones I've got.  As Dylan once said of another Mr. Jones, I'm very well read, it's well known.

That last bit is what tripped me up at the top of 2005.  Knowing that my friends think I've "read everything," I've always felt secretly embarrassed that there were still some fairly major gaps in my traversal of the Western Canon.  So with no pesky distractions like a new true romance in my life, I decided to deepen my ongoing love affair with literature.  My New Year's resolution was to finally tackle five Big Ones that had gotten away, ones I'd tried to read once but hadn't been able to get into. 

And I've been doing damn well with it, thank you, up until now.  Devoured Don Quixote in its recent Edith Grossman translation (with its great characters and delightfully mean-spirited but insanely repetitious plot), ate up Middlemarch (what a prickly-quirky weirdly modern sensibility), swooned through the first two volumes of the newly translated Proust (the Lydia Davis Swann is a revelation, and I'm down for the next five vols, no prob!).  Then I dove at last into Jimmy Joyce's little tome, spurred on by news that my friend Sharon Creal was starting a small Ulysses reading group and I'd be able to join up.

Already a Joyce fan, I was psyched.  I've enjoyed Portrait of the Artist twice; I bow down as most writers do before the altar of The Dead.  But this 1000+ pages was uphill from the get.  Though I do get it, mind you -- I understand the historical, seminal import of Joyce's ground-breaking stream-of-consciousness technique.  And if only I could have trained my brain to give up on narrative, and enjoy the beauty of the language as though I were reading a thousand page poem... I wouldn't be enduring the sting of this literary defeat.

But life is short and Ulysses is interminable.  I have met my un-match, and it is Bloom.  Look, the length isn't the thing (I really am looking forward to the next 2500 pages of Proust, 'cause he's really That Good), it's how goddamned impenetrable most of the prose is.  Even with the study guides, the annotated audio notes, even with my credibility as Mr. Read-It-All at stake, I just-- can't-- hack it.  Ulysses, I wanted to love you!  But even as I try to say, "It's not you, it's me," I'm remembering how para upon paragraph twisted itself into byzantine, coddled and coded knots of obtuse verbiage that only its author could untangle.  And it may have been good for you, Jim, but I'm still waiting to get off.

About the third time I yelled "Talk English!" at my handsome Everyman's Library hardcover edition and nearly pitched it across the room, I knew I was in trouble.  I'd already been unfaithful, sneaking a quick non-fiction read in after my first 50 pages (Sarah Vowell's mordantly funny Assassination Vacation).  Then it was a book of short stories (the fabulous Evil B.B. Chow by Steve Almond).  It was with these mistresses that I truly took my pleasure, while the one I'd vowed to cherish, languished.  Before long I had to admit that with a mere 13o pages chewed through, Joyce's monocled face on the dustcover was literally (literally!) gathering dust.  News that Sharon's Ulysses group had disbanded (everybody bailed) was the final straw.   

As it is with most break-ups, depression is inevitable.  I feel like a failure.  I've got no problem with abandoning your average novel; if it hasn't hooked me after 40+ pages I can let it go, guilt-free.  But in this case, considering that some rate the cursed thing right up there with Shakespeare, I can't help but feel like I'm the one who's inadequate.  I mean, I'm supposed to be this book's type!  We should be deep into a soul-melding relationship by now, I should be racing into bed to embrace Molly Bloom (yes, I said, yes) every night.  Instead I'd rather read a supermarket-sized wall of cereal boxes than ever crack the binding of that future door-stopper again.

So as lit-misery loves company, here's my appeal: please tell me about your reading Waterloo.  Surely there's some book you were supposed to love, that you ran out on in shame and defeat.  Share the pain -- we'll balefully shake our heads as we survey the wreckage of our respective literary reps, but know that we're not alone. 

This will help the healing, and pave the way for the next storytelling adventure.  For in book love as it is in the love of humans, hope is ever-renewable, and on deck atop my night table awaits a certain tall tale about a cantankerous white whale.  And I know, I know, there's all those chapters on knots and blubber to wade through, but I swear to you: this time -- this time I'm not going to skip a single word.

   

Comments

[kristen]

I've been awake for less than 40 minutes. I haven't read the whole post yet (need coffee first), but I have read the first paragraph, and I think - swear to God - it's the funniest thing I've read in months. Thank you!

[kristen]

ok... hmmm.. Loved "Middlemarch," btw.

Ok... i ran out on "House Made of Dawn," by M. Scott Momaday. i thought it was the worst sort of shit. i felt a little guilty, but then i remembered there are lots of native american writers that i DO like (well, 3, anyway), so i got over it.

i tried to read a doris lessing book once and abandoned it for the same reason you did "ulysses" (stream-of-consciousness).

it took all my effort to finish thomas pynchon's "v," but i managed. practically threw a party when i was done.

let's see...

probably my biggest enemy in the history of literature was "the yearling." it was the first school-assigned book i gave up on completely. this was followed in short order by "johnny tremain" and "the autobiography of ben franklin."

there are still goads of "classics" i haven't attempted to read yet, so who knows how many depressing rejections are in my future.

[Amy F.]

The Confederacy of Dunces. Hated it.

[Bill Sebring]

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, since I spent many years assuming that I couldn't read, and largely because I didn't get the books I was "supposed" to. As a young man, I was supposed to get, say, Hesse, or "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," or Ibsen, or "Gravity's Rainbow," or "Ulysses"--the list could go on and on.

One of the delights of being a grown-up is that one discovers that it's OK *not* to like everything, even "Ulysses," and, in fact, it's OK to skim, or to hop around, or to read a book anyway one desires. Things began to get better in my thirties when, after ten years of staring at Rushdie's "Shame" on my bookshelf, I found--to my surprise--that I could actually read it.

When I was an undergrad, an instructor made me read Pynchon's shortest ("The Crying of Lot 49"), a book that the sixteen-year-old me just barely understood. But, as a thirtysomething, completing "Mason and Dixon" had a profound effect on me, a psychic weight off my shoulders.

A few years back I edited a themed journal on "the book in the electronic age" and asked a friend (who works in the writing seminars at JHU) to write on unread books. His piece is brilliant, and I'll try to dig it up and pass it along.

[mernitman]

Amy, I'm with you on "Dunces"...

Kristen, thanks for steering me clear of Momaday and Yearling...

Bill, I understand your pains with Pynchon, who I struggled with early on but grew to really love. Look forward to the article if you find it...

[Denise]

The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Painful.

[Clair Lamb]

You hated "Confederacy of Dunces"? Ack! How could you?

The secret of Ulysses is that you can't read it, you have to listen to it... see if you can track down an audio version, and then listen to it only in per-chapter chunks (the Cliff's Notes give you the chapter breaks). You'll go back to parts of it, I promise.