Books come in all shapes and sizes, they come in different forms and complexities. You might run into a string of reads that you can finish three books in a week and that would be a good week for you. Other times, you might run into books that will take you years to finish, if you finish at all. Thankfully, in my years reading I’ve only ran into a handful of books that I truly despised, and only one that I could think about that I really cannot finish.
This is not to say that the books in this list are crap. In fact, three of these books are some of my favourites. For one reason or another, it took me years before I attempted to read them again after a massive hiatus. But the gratification is delayed: sometimes good things take time.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What I rated: 5/5
Maybe it was too ambitious for me to read when I was just finishing high school. The Russians are grim in their tone and they often address the irrationality of man — and The Brothers Karamazov is a rich hoagie sandwich of the flawed human condition. It also discusses a fair bit of life and death. It’s definitely not light reading when you’re riding in a plane in constant turbulence. All that thought of death really made me nervous while the plane was shaking in the sunny skies.
I made it out alive, but I didn’t pick up the book again for a decade. Maybe the thoughts of religion mixed with death really put me off for a while. And thick books with heavy themes are scary to pick up. But I read it again while I was living in Cambodia, when I was more sanitised with serious themes, and I fell in love with the book.
The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky’s best work (everybody has their favourite) because of the volatile character arcs which we are too familiar with — we love the Karamazovs for their character flaws, because we are flawed ourselves. Each Karamazov brother had their own journeys, Alyosha who spurned religion despite his glowing potential in the clergy, we somehow sympathise with Dimitri regardless of his giant fuck-ups.
No doubt, I will read The Brothers Karamazov again, as I would other works by Dostoyevsky. He’s not a once and done sort of guy.
Ulysses by James Joyce
What I rated: 5/5
This fell into the same timeline as The Brothers Karamazov: I picked it up in university, read a chapter and did not touch it again until I was well into my mid-thirties. Ulysses is an intimidating book. It’s like when you’re cleaning your entire house spotless when all you wanted to do that day is to pay your bills. The bills matter, whilst everything else is nice to do, but you’re just actively procrastinating.
I made excuses for it: I haven’t read The Odyssey, or Hamlet. I’m not mature enough, or a skilled enough reader. But you just need to pick it up and start reading, just as you need to go to the post office and pay your bills. Sure enough, Ulysses is polarising and I thought I would hate it, but it is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Read it for Joyce’s attempt to break the form of the novel. It is simultaneously a lovesong and a fuck you to the English language, and it’s bloody magnificent. Read it for every single minute thought of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish outsider in Dublin whose wife is cuckolding him. Read it for the glorious final chapter.
You will not grasp all of this book. And you don’t need to. Read it with a guide, or not. But pick it up and start reading.
Read my rant about Ulysses here.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
What I rated: 1/5
What the fuck is this book? I followed the first five pages just fine, and the rest was a blur. I’d have more grasp watching a Swahili movie in LSD than I do reading this garbage. Too wanky for its own good, like the next schmuck on my list.
I will read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow one day, but I can’t say I’m bloody keen for it.
The Ambassadors by Henry James
What I rated: 1/5
Here’s my review for The Ambassadors. Not my words, but another reviewer stated that there was no book which demanded so much effort for so little reward. With double entendres abound, characters that you’d avoid with a forty foot pole and language that demands that you’d read every sentence forty times, it’s not everybody’s cuppa tea.
The History of Mathematics
What I rated: Did not finish
There are only a handful of books in my life that I have not finished. Actually, I think this might be the only one. But I would rather be reading this than Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The gist of it is that mathematics get more and more complex as you go along. Therefore, each chapter is more difficult than the last, and you’re probably already lost when you hit chapter 4.
Unless you have a deep appreciation of numbers, then you would probably be as lost as if you were going to Afghanistan without a map. Who knows, I might pick this up again if I come across a copy (which I can’t even find in Goodreads). Gotta finish what y’start y’know.
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
What I rated: 5/5
I was 23 when I read The Magic Mountain, as was Hans Castorp — the youth whose mind become a battleground between opposing intellectual ideas in a Swiss sanatorium between two intellectuals, Settembrini and Naphta. These two forces are also the ideological battleground which has much maligned Europe in the early 20th Century. The Magic Mountain is a prewar novel, a tribute to a time when ideas are ideas, intangible but meaningful. Hans Castorp was the battleground between progress and tradition, as Europe was.
The course of these debates take place over the duration of Hans’ sojourn in the Swiss alps, when time is dilated and slowed and yes, the effect is magical. There are abrupt choices that Mann made in the course of the book which throw the reader off-balance yet contribute so much more to the book, like a whole conversation in French, or a dream sequence, or the arrival of a third character which negated all debate between Settembrini and Naphta.
Why do I have trouble finishing this book? Because Thomas Mann recommended the reader to read it twice. I have only finished it once. I suppose you can say therefore that this is the book that I have yet to finish.
