mary ellis bunim mother of american literature
2005-05-29

On a super-double-dog-dare from P., here are the Five Books and/or Authors I Have Never Finished/Read. Memes are hard to define, aren't they?

1. Lolita. I took a class on Nabokov (pronounced nah-BO-kof) and managed to get through, nay, enjoyed all the assigned books until we came to Lolita. Then I just couldn't get through it. Tried again on my own time a summer or two ago, and the same thing happened. It's probably because I'm a terrible prude who loves the chillrun, but it's also probably because Humbert Humbert is just so incessantly long-winded that I can't bring myself to care anymore. I don't have a very good memory of what turned me off, though, so I'll have to try again just to remember why I don't like it.

2. Like everybody else on God's green earth, Anna Karenina. Possibly a problem in what the book is supposed to be about as opposed to what it's actually about. Nobody ever tells you about the Levin parts when you go in, so all his angst, while an essential part of the book as a counterpoint to Anna's story and as an exposition of Tolstoy's own values, is also really fucking boring when you are expecting a straight-on hot tale of Adultery!

3. Foucault. Any of Foucault. I have no idea what the man was originally talking about, only that his name is an adjective and is used in articles about "the gaze."

4. Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Does anybody really read the part after his parents die, though? The part that contains the full transcript of his cast interview for The Real World?

5. The Bible. What's actually in there?