Giving Up

Last week I was browsing through the shelves of the Library when my eyes alighted on an Agatha Christie that I’d never heard of, never mind read. I was so excited.

That night I left aside the book I had been reading and started on 'The Big 4'. I lasted two chapters before realising that it was not very good, not a Christie type at all. I looked it up and found that it was written in 1927 and described by Christie in 1942 as "that rotten book". I gave up on it.

In the UK alone it’s reckoned there are 200,000 books published every year. It would be impossible to read all of them, so everyone must have a filter that works for them be it genre, recommendation, prize winners, fiction or non-fiction etc.

I’m guessing that most people who read these Dead Good Blogs have a background of reading and from an early age, in my case from 'The Famous Five’ to this year’s ‘Orbital’ that I loved. This builds up experience and a feel for what I consider will be a good read and so given that and the point about the number of books being published, I feel justified in giving up on books that don’t feel right, from sometimes the first sentence. Not everyone agrees with that and sees it as a sort of moral duty to finish all books they start.

As the topic is Giving Up, it seems appropriate to follow on from the above and give some examples of what books I gave given up on. Before I do that I would like to air a bugbear of mine. I don’t even start books with a Prologue. There, I’ve said it, so on with the fiction books in some sort of my own chronological order.

One of the first such books is Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. I vaguely remember getting through some of the first volume but ground to a halt in total boredom. Then, of course, I needed to be seen with a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ casually resting on the table in that sort of cafe. I did slightly better with Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ and got through the first two volumes before realising I wasn’t that bothered.

Another sort of book that disappointed is the follow on novel from books that have a special place in my heart. Top of that list would be A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Children’s Book’ which although not the immediate book after ‘Possession’ was the first I saw after reading that totally wonderful novel which had/has everything I want in a story and is in my all time top 10 of books whereas ‘The Children’s Book’ I thought was going to be too long, dull and pretentious to get beyond the first few chapters.

A more recent book in a similar vein of being disappointed to the point of giving up on it, which is not the same as not really enjoying it, is the fifth book in Kate Atkinson’s series featuring Jackson Brodie. The first four are quite brilliant and the sixth is fine but ‘Big Sky’ has a start which is baffling and irritating and more than enough for me.

Moving on to non-fiction and I put my hand up to say that I have never been able to finish Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. And heaven know I’ve tried enough times and I’ll probably have another go.

Another author who also writes about physics and I really admire is Carlo Rovelli whose ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ was published in 2014 and has sold well over a million copies. I haven’t actually given up on reading this book as he is such an entertaining writer, more that the book has given up on me. Because he is so good in explaining the Lessons I think I have understood them until later I realise I haven’t and start again.

I’m going to stop there with those few examples as I have just realised that there are many more areas of Bookland that I could cover, such as Travel, History, Biographies etc that I could be here all week.

So onto the poem. I have a sort of Given Up file of poems and this is in it. It is based on Larkin's poem which in itself is a Giving Up sort of poem and so is this:

Is this the Year
(along the lines of Philip Larkin)

What have they done your Mom and Dad
They didn’t mean to but they did
They’ve filled your head with what they had
And what they got for just a quid.

But what they’ve got’s about to turn
And what you’ll get’s a tipping year
You know from Gore you know from Stern
Yet still you screw the atmosphere.

The child is parent to your age
Your parent is the child you’ll stay
So stuff the rest and take your wage
Your kids will hate you anyway.

Terry Q.