On Giving Up

There are actually two reasons for my long hiatus from this blog.  The first is that I relocated once again, and for the last few months, my life has been consumed by the logistical and emotional challenges that come with a trans-Atlantic move.  The second is that I spent almost two months tackling Bolaño's 2666.

Now, 2666 takes time:  the English edition is over 900 pages.  But it also took me so long to finish because, simply put, I hated reading it.  One major plotline involves the rapes and murders of three hundred women in Mexico.  Bolaño goes into intimate/excruciating detail about each of the murders and, as Jonathan Lethem succinctly described it in his New York Times review, "[i]f the word 'unflinching' didn’t exist, I’d invent it to describe these nearly 300 pages."

Yet I kept reading the novel, though I hated every page.  And it made me wonder:  at what point is it appropriate to give up on a book?

I stumbled across a Wall Street Journal article discussing "book guilt": the feeling when you stop reading a book midway, heightened when the book "has been widely praised or is considered a classic."  (In this case, 2666 had received such acclaim that I felt that I should like it, or at least give it the courtesy of finishing it.)  The article offers the following rule of thumb:

Nancy Pearl, who writes the excellent "Book Lust" series, recommends that people 50 years old or younger give a book about 50 pages before deciding to give it up. "If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter," she continues, "subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit.

Fifty pages seems a little short to me, especially given that some books - like Cloud Atlas - involve a slow build.  But if not fifty, then how many?  100?  200?  How do you know when - if ever - to quit?

The Best Books of 2011

Apologies for the hiatus!  I've been going through a bit of a life upheaval lately -- another move (!) -- and so I haven't had a chance to sit and properly blog.  I have been reading, though, and more posts will be coming.

But first, though it's now a bit dated, I wanted to recap my favorites from 2011.  It was a year of great reading, but three books stood out: 

1. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell: Hands down, the best book I read last year.  It's nearly impossible to describe the book, other than as a tale of six interconnected stories spanning hundreds of years.  I am slightly nervous about the movie, so I would encourage everyone to read it prior to the movie's release.  As a disclaimer:  It took me about one hundred pages to really get into the book, but when I did, I fell hard.  Have patience.
2. The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins:  Pulp fiction at its finest, I found it difficult to put down the books in this trilogy.  A friend noted that he thought the writing was juvenile - and perhaps it is - but it's also utterly addicting.  I thought that one of the more interesting aspects of the trilogy, though, was how it reflected our own society and values, particularly with the focus on reality television.  Panem et circenses. 
3. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin: Rubin's study into happiness inspired two posts, and lots of self-reflection on what makes people - and me - happy.  Specifically, it provided me with a framework to think about the different factors that influence my happiness (e.g., exercise, relationships), and launched an inner dialogue on how to maximize my happiness within those categories.  Again, a bit late, but I'd suggest it for anyone making New Year's Resolutions. 

And, with that, happy reading in 2012!  xo

A Multitude of Drops

Just finished David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. It's been a while since a book has affected me this deeply: the book is incredible, a tour de force. I know, I know, the phrase is tossed around so casually that it's almost been rendered meaningless, but I can think of no other way to describe the novel. It's like nothing I've read before and written so beautifully that I sunk into it depths, unable to put it down for the past week.

The problem, now, is getting out of it. Passages have wrapped themselves around my brain, permeating my daily thoughts. This wouldn't be a bad thing, per se, except that I found the book to be remarkably depressing. For instance, two separate conversations this weekend - one on Silvio Berlusconi's many scandals and how the Italian media covers them (or, perhaps more accurately, doesn't cover them) and another on whether Osama actually had porn on his computer - had me jumping to this passage:

"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage... But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world's [corporate heads] can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by blinkering education, owning TV stations, paying "guest fees" to leader writers or just buying the media up. The media - and not just the Washington Post - is where democracies conduct their civil wars."

And how to think about the wars we're embroiled in without thinking of the following passage?

"Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be."

I know, though, that not everyone found the book so depressing. J took away the opposite message: one of optimism, citing the final passage. I don't want to spoil it - and I'm not sure if it even makes sense without the context of the story - but the narrator explains how he has made the decision to pledge himself to the Abolitionist cause, though he knows that his father-in-law will call him a fool and jeer that:

"He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

To which the narrator offers the most elegant of replies: "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

What indeed?