I didn’t go see the movie, because I was reading the book.

But I had been reading  the book for a couple of weeks, and I got to page 33 or so. I’d read a page, half a page, two pages. I could not get into it. I found it was well written. I liked the dialog and the slang. It reminded me of the slave-talk in Gone with the Wind.

Somehow I cannot read this book. Many people can’t put it down. I am sure it is well done. It’s just that I can’t make myself care about a lot of women in the 1960ies talking about woman stuff.

The end.

I’ll rent the movie on Netflix when it’s out.

I am starting to realize that I don’t like to read 19th century authors. Dickens is a giant in English literature. Oliver Twist is the first Dickens book I tried to read. I got about 40% into it and it just fizzled out. I found myself turning pages unread, just to get on with it more and more as I worked my way into the book. I realized I wasn’t reading, I was pretending to be reading.

Occasionally, when there was actually something happening, I got pulled into the story. But then Dickens would start another chapter, change the view-point, and promptly lose me.

His flowery language bothered me. I am more direct, I like the modern prose and I find myself annoyed when I see a simple thought expressed in a whole paragraph when Hemingway would have put it into eight words.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the filth of old London, the insight into the corrupt system of the haves and have-nots, where the haves brutally exploit the weaker and, of course, the children.

I don’t know how Oliver will fare in the hands of Sikes, and at this point, I don’t give a damn.

I followed the Kindle rule: Always download the free sample first before actually buying a book.  I read the first chapter and really enjoyed it. But I didn’t read the second one. Since I was going on a trip, I wanted the Kindle loaded with good reading material, so I bought The Sun Also Rises and started reading on at Chapter 2. I made it to Chapter 4 when I couldn’t do it anymore.  I wasn’t interested in the characters, droning on about how clever they were, off in Paris. There was no suspense. I could not find any reason to keep reading other than knowing that it’s Hemingway!

I have not read any Hemingway other than The Old Man and the Sea (which I think I read three times at different periods of my life). It seems that every aspiring writer, which is what I was for many of my younger and middle-age years, must read The Old Man and the Sea.

Alas, today, I need suspense, perhaps some history, fascinating and thought-provoking ideas and concepts, something to keep me reading. Bland characters spewing out drivel on and on does not do it for me.

I am sure there is a literary professor out there that can argue that I am wrong, that I am missing the big point. That’s ok. I think it’s time to stay away from Hemingway for a while.

Walter Mosley is a writer that places his stories in the black communities in Los Angeles in the 1940ies. I found Mosley as a writer in blogs of Orson Scott Card who considers Mosley one of his favorite writers. Mosley is also supposedly one of Bill Clinton’s favorite authors.

I picked up Devil in a Blue Dress as one of the more well-known titles of Mosley and started reading. The writing, of course, is excellent. The plot work meticulous. The descriptions and expositions are clear and the dialog is vivid. Mosley creates excellent suspense and drives the story along.

Yet I got lost and I abandoned the book about 15% into it. I found myself just not interested enough in the “fiction” of the whole thing. It was like I was in a college course studying fiction and the professor had assigned “Devil” as a reading assignment for the weekend. If I were in college, and it were an assignment, I am sure I could enjoy this book.

Alas, there is so much more to read and so little time, I decided that there are other choices of reading materials. If I read fiction, there must be something more about it than a great name and a good story. I need the thought-provocation of a good science fiction concept or the immersion in another culture that historical fiction provides to be able to justify reading fiction.

Thanks, Orson Scott Card and Bill Clinton, for a great recommendation, but I pass.

Entangled might just be the worst book I have ever almost read.

I persevered. I got two-thirds through the book, desperately trying to find something worthwhile and interesting. There were enough intriguing concepts to keep me going, hoping for better content and more of a plot. After the first quarter, reading Entangled turned into drudgery and work. As I progressed, the tome fizzled. Eventually all the crap just overshadowed my curiosity and I finally gave it up, relieved.

This is Graham Hancock’s first fiction book. Hancock is a British writer and journalist. His areas of interest are ancient mysteries, stone monuments, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past. One of the main themes running through many of his books is the possible global connection with a “mother culture” from which he believes all ancient historical civilizations sprang.

The book has two main protagonists, both teenage girls, one a 17-year-old spoiled brat daughter of a billionaire named Leoni in Los Angeles in 2010, the other a 16-year-old Cro-Magnon hunter named Ria that lived 24,000 B.C. in northern Spain. Through twists in the universe timeline, the two girls’ paths intertwine in “the spirit world.” An intriguing concept that piqued my interest and got me to buy the book and start reading.

But soon I realized that the writing is inept and the characters are as shallow as shadows. Take, for example Ria, the Cro-Magnon girl in the stone age. I understand  that she would not speak English. The author, in order to convey stone-age thought and sentiment, would need to come up with a way to allow us to understand the character while having them speak English, without it becoming disturbingly obvious. Jean Auel did a good job with that.

As an example of this, let me show you how Chapter Eighteen starts. Ria has  just  been convinced by her Neanderthal friend Brindle that she should be taking hallucinogenic mushrooms, against the rules of her upbringing and powerful superstitious taboos:

Despite her worries, it wasn’t too long before Ria was having a good time. On Brindle’s further encouragement she had feasted on the mushrooms – she had forgotten how hungry she was – and now she was  just hanging out, tuning in to the strange rhythms that the Uglies were producing. Her thoughts flew and soared on the bone song’s sad notes, swirled and dived amongst rivers of flowing colors…

Then:

Meanwhile Brindle was out of it. Not communicating. Silent. It wasn’t like he was asleep…

Next:

And had eating the mushrooms made any difference to her? Ria did a quick inventory. She hadn’t been turned into a tiger-toothed demon. She hadn’t been driven insane. Clan lore on these matters were obviously full of shit…

It is difficult for me to read that a Cro-Magnon huntress, after eating mushrooms, was “having a good time.” Teenagers in California “have a good time” when doing drugs. There must be a better way to describe stone-age adventures. Also, she was “just hanging out,  tuning in…”

Brindle is a Neanderthal youth. I can’t deal with a Neanderthal being “out of it.”  Or the girl thinking that her clan lore about poisonous mushrooms  was “full of shit.” 

The book is full of such trite phrases. The plot is boring and pointless. The writing is atrociously bad and juvenile. The structure of alternating and often very short chapters from the view-point of Ria, then Leoni, each with a cliffhanger ending, before switching back to the other line, is almost as disorienting as the content itself.

Now about the content. This is a book that Hancock obviously wanted as a tool to convey his musings and opinions. He is interested in the supernatural. Good writers have taken such concepts and developed them into powerful books. Examples are Stephen King’s Under the Dome. A believable and plausible story is built around the concept of what would happen if all of a sudden there was an impenetrable invisible dome put over a town. Another example is Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Talisman. What would happen if there were another reality, an underworld, parallel to ours, called The Territories, that some people could cross over into? A more recent example is Orson Scott Card’s Pathfinder, where the main characters have the ability to distort time in peculiar ways. The protagonist in Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata has the ability to stop time for everyone in the universe while he walks around. In his case, he uses the skill to satisfy his urge to undress women without their consent.

In each case, the author picked a very strange or impossible power or capability, led the reader to believe that it was possible, and  built a great and entertaining story around it. The reader accepts the basic premise and is never jarred out of the story.

Hancock, however, crams so much of his pseudo-philosophy into the plot that I could not help but roll my eyes.

• Time twists in convoluted ways so there are places were various timelines cross and bunch up, making it possible for beings to cross over and travel through time.
• Out-of-body experiences are real and not hallucinations. People can interact with others during such experiences.
• There is a universal good – here the Blue Lady, an angel-like being with blue skin who acts like a god but can’t get rid of her own demons.
• There is a universal evil – here called Sulpa in the stone age and Jack (go figure) in the 21st century who drinks the blood of children and commits atrocities of unimaginable proportions.
• Drugs, like mushrooms, potions and chemicals can simulate out-of-body experiences.
• Neanderthals [the Uglies] communicate telepathically with each other and with Cro-Magnons of their liking without requiring spoken language.
• Neanderthals have healing powers when they link arms and chant. Bright blue light comes out of their hands and seeps into wounds and heals them in hours.

The author piles so many of these concepts into the story that it starts looking like a puzzling mess of weirdness that just does not make sense anymore. The flat characters just seem to bob around in this Castanedan tie-died world making little sense, but telling each other banalities and obscenities.

The book is written as the first book of a trilogy. The critics say there is no ending. I didn’t get far enough to notice, so when I stopped at 69%, my ending  was probably as good as that of any other readers. I will not read the next books.

Rating: zero stars.

I was on the fence about this book, so I read a number of the Amazon reviews and most of them were favorable. I made the mistake of not reading the first few pages, a must when you’re on the fence about an author you have never read before, and I downloaded the book to my Kindle. I started reading it on a plane ride from Chicago to San Diego. When I got to 12%, I finally gave up.

In the first chapter, Susan Jaymes, the protagonist, who does not know her name or remembers anything else about her past, finds herself on an auction block somewhere in England in the 16th century, being sold by her “pig of a husband.” Another mysterious man, a gentleman, apparently, buys her as a wife.

I found the writing corny, almost puerile. The Susan character was so unbelievable and inconsistent, it seemed like I was watching a cartoon cardboard pop out figure that somebody walked across a stage with a tape recorder for a voice behind it.

He leaned farther forward then, skimmed his lips across hers, before he suddenly stopped to consider something. She could see the longing in his eyes, a longing that she could not quite understand. It was not lust – it was something else, something which was beyond her comprehension. He wanted  something other than her body alone, but she had no idea what it might be. She felt her face flush furiously, followed by a sudden, unexpected heat between her legs. He smiled faintly, knowingly, and then he ran the tip of his finger across the side of her face where the scars were so prevalent. Her heart skipped a beat at his touch.  He smiled again, a little smugly this time, and leaned back in his seat, not embarrassed or self-conscious when she could not stop her eyes from lingering for a moment on the comfortable bulge between his legs, just beneath his trousers.

• It was not lust – it was something else
• She felt her face flush furiously
• Unexpected heat
• Her heart skipped a beat
• Comfortable bulge

Hmmm. So this woman has no idea who she is, why she is there, who the mysterious stranger with the bulge is, and where she is going. Heat between her legs notwithstanding, she sneaks a knife between her robe that she eventually takes to bed with her. Somebody that feels the things she describes above simply does not take a knife to bed so this guy can’t come close. Then, not much later in the evening, she lets the stranger “take her” completely and she has the best sex of her life. I thought she can’t remember her life? Inconsistencies abound and rather than getting pulled into the story, I found myself getting thrown out of it constantly by the juvenile language and the cardboard personalities.

This book is a romance novel disguised as something else, and I have finally concluded that I am not capable of reading romance novels. Going forward, if any description of any book or any review just contains the word “romance” I need to stay away.

I made it 27% into the book. Funny, in the age of the Kindle, I can’t tell you the page number, I can’t earmark the page where I stopped, but I can tell you I made it 27% into the book. And now I stopped.

The Idiot is known as one of  Dostoyevski’s most brilliant book and an exposition of Russian society in the 19th century. Dostoyevski crafts his novels carefully and he describes his characters meticulously. If I were 19 years old and had all the time in the world in front of me, I would continue reading the remaining 73%.

But there is so much more to read, and so little time left, that I have to make choices. Dostoyevski does not get any more of my time – for now.

This novel by Jane Austen was first published in 1813. It was Austen’s second novel and her first effort for publication. The book shows up on every list of best books of all time, and in that effort it was that I picked it up and started reading.

The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennett as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, moral rightness, education and marriage in her aristocratic society of early 19th century England.

I got about 20% into the book and I was bored to death. The literary critics love this book, readers seem to enjoy it, and I usually enjoy novels that place me in periods in the past so I can learn what life was like, not only in other cultures, but also in other times. But I could  simply not get into the characters, care about them, empathize with their problems and issues, and find interest in their societal norms.

It was not hard (or impossible) to follow, like Ulysses, but it was just very, very boring. I don’t think I’ll read any other Jane Austin books going forward.

No matter what list you pick, whether it’s the greatest books in the English language, the greatest novels of all times, Ulysses is within the top ten of all lists, and at the very top of many.

I bought the book when I was a young man and never could get into it. I tried to read it again now. I cannot.

In my estimation, it is not readable. How can a book be the greatest book of all time, if the only people that have ever read it did  so as a class assignment, and claim that it was utterly hard work? Quite frankly, I do not know anyone, with the possible exception of  Eric P – see comments here, who has actually read this thing.

I had put aside The Count of Monte Cristo to tackle Ulysses, and after many days of trying, I went back to The Count. Sorry, James Joyce. The professors of literature may love you, but I take Dumas before you any time.

Here is a fairly recent bestseller that I was excited about reading when I first started, enough that I have recommended it to a number of other people, including my son, only to close the book for good on page 171, when I lost interest of the phony and contrived ideas that the author portrays.

There is also a web site the author publishes you may want to check out.

Yes, there may be people that can get away with doing very well producing very little, exploiting the system of business we have, the fabric of our society and the rules by which it plays. It can work for some people, but just like a Ponzi scheme, it does not hold up for the masses and has to collapse. For me, it collapsed on page 171.

Make no mistake, the book is chock full of good ideas about time management, the entrepreneurial spirit, how to get things done, how to be successful, how to make money, all with minimal effort. So from that point of view it’s worth reading.

But I asked myself if I would be interested in meeting the author, and I decided I wasn’t. I think he is a person  that cuts corners and takes shortcuts. I would have a hard time respecting a marathon runner who, when nobody is looking, cuts across the brush in a hairpin curve to make the route just a bit shorter. In the same vein, I have trouble with Ferriss and some of the advice he gives.

What bothers me is that he really does not produce any value. He shows you how to move around value to make it larger. There are many people like that, but if everyone in the world were to move around value, there would be no goods to buy or sell, and no food to eat. Somebody has to build, invent,  invest, lead and – yes – work hard.

I am a worker, not a mover-arounder.

Go read The 4-Hour Workweek and decide what you are.

It seems like most of the books I read now I do not finish.

Cryptonomicon showed up on my desk one morning in my inbasket. I had to walk around the office and ask detective-type questions to figure out who put the book there. One of my colleagues thought I’d love it. But she was reluctant. You don’t put a book with 1152 pages of small print on your boss’ desk and then expect him to spend all those hours reading it.

We talked about it later, when I was at about page 100, and I told her I couldn’t get into it. She assured me I should stick with it. I’d get hooked.

Today, at page 187 I folded a dog-ear and put it on the shelf. I can’t do it.

Stephenson is a great writer. He does excellent description, and obviously he weaves a great story. How else could he get away with paperbacks two and a half inches thick that people buy and read?

Here is a section from page 120. They are in Manila in the Philippines:

Randy is already satisfied of this, and just stands there with arms crossed, looking at the river. It is choked, bank to bank, with floating debris: some plant material but mostly old mattresses, cushions, pieces of plastic litter, hunks of foam, and, most of all, plastic shopping bags in various bright colors. The river has the consistency of vomit.

Avi wrinkles his nose. “What’s that?”

Randy sniffs the air and smells, among everything else, burnt plastic. He gestures downstream. “Squatter camp on the other side of Fort Santiago,” he explains. “They sieve plastic out of the river and burn it for fuel.”

“I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago,” Avi says. “They have plastic forests there!”

“What does that mean?”

“Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can’t get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.”

Descriptive, interesting, foreign, but somehow not capturing my motivation to keep turning the pages by page 187. On to the next book on the reading shelf.

After reading The Road, I felt like I should read Blood Meridian. It’s a rough book, full of brutality, depravity and nightmarish grotesqueness. Some sections captured me, but many passages simply weren’t interesting.

Based on historical events on the border between Texas and Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, the book follows The Kid, a fourteen-year-old boy from Tennessee, who haplessly stumbles into a horrible world of murder and abuse.

I put it down on page 96.

For a proper review that does the work justice, try biblioklept.org.

This was another experience with a book unfinished, delightful in some ways, educational in others. But unfortunately, I have too little time to re-read a book unless I am extremely excited by it. So far, most of my endeavors of reading books I read once in my youth have been disappointing. The memories seem to be far more flattering than the actual works. Why destroy those?

I read Henry Miller’s Maroussi in a German translation a long time ago, perhaps thirty years or longer, during the phase in my life when I really devoured Henry Miller books. I remembered little about it, except that it was the most amazing, delightful, inspiring travel description I had ever read about any country. I remember telling people about it over the years. But since my paperback of the time was in German, and I kept very few German books around me and with me, I could not just pick it up and thumb through it and confirm to myself that those feelings I remembered were real. And as it often goes, a story vividly told over and over again grows, small details get added and next thing you know you are telling a tall tale and you can’t quite remember what is real and what is imagined.

So I went on Amazon.com spent a dollar plus shipping and handling, and received an English copy, Miller’s original language, of The Colossus of Maroussi. I also bought a copy of The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch for good measure, which will be the next “old book” I will try to re-read, but that has to wait for another entry.

Here I should note that I read Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, and Colossus of Maroussi (and probably a few others I am forgetting here) all in German. I have never read a Miller book in English.

Reading it again, I find some passages that are great and clever story-telling, others Millerian monologues of nonsense, meandering on for pages, like this:

Mycenae, like Epidaurus, swims in light. But Epidaurus is all open, exposed, irrevocably devoted to the spirit. Mycenae folds in on itself, like a fresh-cut navel, dragging its glory down into the bowels of the earth where the bats and lizards feed upon it gloatingly. Epidaurus is a bowl from which to drink the pure spirit: the blue of the sky is in it and the stars and the winged creatures who fly between, scattering song and melody. Mycenae, after one turns the last bend, suddenly folds up into a menacing crouch, grim, defiant, impenetrable. Mycenae is closed in, huddled up, writhing with muscular contortions like a wrestler. Even the light, which falls on it with merciless clarity, gets sucked in, shunted off, grayed, beribboned. There were never two worlds so closely juxtaposed and yet so antagonistic.

Huh?

Sorry, I can’t read this stuff anymore nowadays. I just don’t have the time. So I turn the pages after just looking at them, picking out words like hydra, vomit, beast, breast, phantasmal hue, demarcation, metaphysics as my clues that he’s still babbling, moving on.

There are some curiosities that I enjoyed. For instance, the book is copyrighted 1941 (and my paperback is about that old, cool, huh?) and he talks about “the World War.” World War II is just starting to happen and some events in the book are woven into the story, but at that time nobody, including Miller, knew that this was going to turn into World War II, so there was only one World War.

Here is another curious passage, which has particular significance to me typing these very words while sitting in an airliner traveling from Chicago to San Diego:

In Greece you have only to announce to someone that you intend to visit a certain place and presto! in a few moments there is a carriage waiting for you at the door. This time it turned out to be an aeroplane. Seferiades had decided that I should ride in pomp. It was a poetic gesture and I accepted it like a poet.

I had never been in a plane before and I probably will never go up again. I felt foolish sitting in the sky with hands folded; the man beside me was reading a newspaper, apparently oblivious to the clouds that brushed the window-panes. We were probably making a hundred miles an hour, but since we passed nothing but clouds I had the impression of not moving. In short, it was unrelievedly dull and pointless. I was sorry that I had not booked the passage on the good ship Acropolis which was to touch at Crete shortly. Man is made to walk the earth and sail the seas; the conquest of the air is reserved for a later stage of his evolution, when he will have sprouted real wings and assumed the form of the angel which he is in essence.

Another passage for the road warrior in me:

At Patras we decided to go ashore and take the train to Athens. The Hotel Cecil, which we stopped at, is the best hotel I have ever been in, and I have been in a good many. It cost about 23 cents a day for a room the likes of which could not be duplicated in America for less than five dollars.

Ouch. I just spent 4 nights on the road, $167 plus tax on night one and two, $155 plus tax for night three, and $125 – I got a great deal – for night four.

Here is a crackup:

Now and then I would get excited and, using a melange of English, Greek, German, French, Choctaw, Eskimo, Swahili or any other tongue I felt would serve the purpose, using the chair, the table, the spoon, the lamp, the bread knife, I would enact for him a fragment of my life in New York, Paris, London, Chula Vista, Canarsie, Hackensack or in some place I had never been or some place I had been in a dream or when lying asleep on the operating table.

So: New York, Paris, London, Chula Vista? Chula Vista is a southern suburb of San Diego, close to the Mexican border, and in 1940 it must have been a very small rural cowboy town indeed. Miller naming Chula Vista long with Paris and New York made me crack up and laugh out loud.

Of course, further study reveals that Miller went to San Diego in his youth from Brooklyn, New York, around 1913 or so, I can’t tell exactly what year. He tried to attend lectures by Emma Goldman. But mostly, he worked “like a slave” in Orange Groves in Chula Vista for a while, and wrote about some of those episodes decades later in Tropic of Capricorn. So it makes sense for him to pull out a colorful name of a locale of his youth in his writings from time to time.

Delightful as some of the reading was, I tired of it, and so, halfway through, I folded a dog ear on page 134, and put it on the shelf of books done reading. Perhaps long after I am gone, somebody will buy this book which has the name A. Schwartz penciled inside the front cover, from a descendant company of Amazon, and wonder who it was that stopped reading on page 134. By then it will be a true antique, a very old book, which had a short midlife awakening, an airplane trip to New York and back to San Diego, before sinking back to a long sleep.

In my quest to read the 100 best novels (as listed in a number of different places), I came across Catch-22. Highly acclaimed by everyone. I got to page 75 and decided that I simply wasn’t interested enough to complete it.  Just because everyone says that this is a great book does not mean it captivates me enough to want to spend countless more hours on it. So I let it go. I’ll have to come up with an “unfinished” category in my tracking spreadsheet.

It tells the stories of a group of soldiers in a flying squadron in Italy during WW-II. The author is funny and descriptive. The story is entertaining.

Maybe I’ll try again some other time.