Good Substack article by Joel Miller on ditching a book considered "great" when it's not working for you. https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/i-quit-one-of-literatures-greatest-novels-questions-for-when-a-book-just-doesnt-work-for-you?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=564548&post_id=210823622&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2pwl1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email Finishing [a book] is a strange concept to begin with if you pause and think about it. Do we ever finish a book? What does that mean? Think Augustine’s Confessions or Montaigne’s Essays , Middlemarch , and The Brothers Karamazov . Do you finish the Bible? Books are tools for thinking and feeling, sometimes praying and other deeper movements of the soul. Do we complete that just because the pages end? Is reaching the end the end? And to pick up the word’s other meaning, is it even the point? He is talking specifically about Tristam Shandy , which I have ...
This is very long, but I think it will be helpful. I will be recording it (with some ad-libs) for my podcast, Dialogues with Creators, which anyone coming to this page should search out at https://rss.com/podcasts/dialogues-with-creators/?_gl=1*1dnvopu*_gcl_au*MTM4MDA5MTYzMi4xNzg1NDYyOTA1 Several years ago, the daughter of a friend mentioned (she was a late teenager at the time) that she had been reading Pride and Prejudice but that it was so hard to read. I understood what she meant, and I reminded her it was written two hundred years before. Acceptable (for literature and general purposes) sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary have changed a great deal. But I realized that she had been led astray, somewhat, by film adaptations of the novel. The Keira Knightley one is greatly edited down, and the 1995 one, (the Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle one) which pretty much portrays every scene, is so well acted and filmed that it makes the plot and wit clear. I still think ...