Campbell Tops List of Dumped Books

Tony Blair's spin doctor Alastair Campbell has just won an unexpected literary accolade. His memoir The Blair Years which sold 55,000 copies and which his publishers describe as:

... the most compelling and revealing account of contemporary politics you will ever read

tops the list of books most frequently found dumped in hotel rooms, according to UK hotel chain Travelodge, the Guardian reports. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows weighs in at number 10.

Last year's winner was Paris Hilton, and celebrity memoirs seem to be by far the most dumped books.

Wonder what would happen if a similar study were carried out in hotel chains here? Some of the larger hotels have a mini-library of left behind books for guests, but these always seem to be novels in German or some Scandinavian language, well-thumbed and liberally anointed with suntan cream.

I applaud the Sucasa Apartments on Jalan Ampang which encourages guests to leave their books behind to be sold for charity in the shop. I got some great bargains there some years back including a very nice paperback edition of Midnight's Children to replace my first one which didn't come back to me.

Great British Dumpees

Yet another survey of the reading habits of the great British public. Just a few days after readers were asked to name the books they couldn't live without, they've been asked about the books they can't finish. Here (from the Guardian blog) is the fiction list:

1. Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire -JK Rowling
3. Ulysses - James Joyce
4. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
5. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
6. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
7. The Alchemist -Paulo Coelho
8. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
9. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
10. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

None of which surprises me. (Or maybe the only surprise is the Harry Potter!)

Confessions: I keep dumping Ulysses and have only ever read it in parts. I've cheerfully dumped The Alchemist. I skipped a lot of pages in the Sloosha's Crossing section of some sections of Cloud Atlas. (Loved the book as a whole though.)

I can understand why Captain Corelli's Mandolin makes the list. It's one of my favourite books of all time (as I keep telling the world - I've never laughed and cried so much when reading a book and took to my bed for a couple of days in a state of total emotional collapse!) but when I've given it as a gift to less convinced readers I've advised them to skip a couple of chapters at the beginning if they get stuck, and come back to them later. One of the criticisms I have of the novel (a teensy one compared to the fact that my beloved Corelli disappears for decades) is that the first part is not terribly well structured.

Another of my favourite books of all time is a dumpee on this list - Crime and Punishment. (The Visitor will be rubbing his hands in glee!)

I guess some people dump Vernon God Little because the language offends or maybe they don't appreciate Mr. Dirty-But-Clean Pierre's pyrotechnics. Again, one I very much enjoyed.

A point I've made before: there is no shame in dumping books you aren't enjoying. Do it guiltlessly.

But some books, it has to be said, do take a bit more effort to get into ...

Snow Drift

Abandoned Snow three-quarters of the way through and then hop skipped to the end to find out what happened to the characters. (Now I understand why it took Starmag reviewer Anu Nathan six months to read it!) No point labouring through something you're not enjoying, hey? I now somewhat reluctantly add it to the venerable list of dumpees whilst trying not to feel too inferior to all those friends who wax lyrical about it.

I only read reviews when I'm done with a book, and very much enjoyed the reviews of Snow on newspaper websites. (Complete Review has a whole list of them.) Despite my own struggle with the book, I have to agree with these words by Laurel Maurey in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Pamuk is a good antidote to the easy answers that so much modern literature offers; if you're a fan of Dostoyevsky, Fowles, Hesse, George Saunders or any other author with the guts to muck with your mind, read Pamuk. ... "Snow" will make you feel the arguments surrounding fundamentalism as a situation of murky grays, where the only thing black is the night, and the only thing white is the snow.

Margaret Atwood's review in the New York Times intrigues when she talks about the Male Labyrinth Novel ... something I'd never considered before:

The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they're approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile -- these are vintage Pamuk, but they're also part of the modern literary landscape. A case could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It's mostly men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.

Or maybe women have more pressure on them just to get on with things because too much depends on them?

Will try some of Pamuk's other novels later on. Promise.

Now it's back to Auster. I'm supposed to be reviewing The Brooklyn Follies and better get on with it!

Snowed Under by Snow

I am halfway through Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Please tell me that it gets better!

I am having to force myself through every page. I have to keep stopping to work out what proportion of the book I've read and how much there is still to go. My eyes skip over whole chunks and then I have to go back and read again.

It isn't so much the plot that's getting to me. I'm fascinated to read about Turkey, and about the clash of extremism and secularism. I like the way different characters are allowed to give their viewpoints.

I like the slightly surreal setting - the impoverished, provincial city of Kar and the relentless snow which has cut it off from the rest of the world. The issues interest me - and I really want to know why the "headscarf girls" are committing suicide. I like the fact that the main character is overcoming his writer's block and getting inspired. And there are some nicely farcical moments (the description of the political theatre is funny).

But the writing is just so terribly terribly DULL.

It feels like a C19th novel. (I feel there are echoes of Dostoevsky.) Just look at the length and complexity of the sentences! This in itself wouldn't be a problem but the dialogue is turgid, and not a single character seems alive. Ka (the poet), is such a wimp, I really don't care what happens to him. Much of this may be due to the translation, of course. In this novel of ideas, Pamuk's prose wears heavy snowboots.

Can I force myself on to the end? I'll try for the next couple of days ...

Dumpees

Books I dumped halfway and don't feel bad about dumping.

(I am wearing bullet-proof underwear so no mortar fire, okay?)

The Alchemist Paul Coelho - all that predigested wisdom got right up my nose.

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway. I tried to read this many years ago. Just didn't feel that the writr wanted me in his book. Later though, I did enjoy The Old Man and the Sea.

Thus Spake Zarathustra - Niezsche - A boyfriend insisted I read it. (He thought my brain needed improving.) When I saw how much Niezsche distrusts and dislikes women, I decided that since he was wrong about half the human race, he couldn't be trusted on much else. (Should have dumped the boyfriend too.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I did read it through once, but got totally stuck the second time, despite liking episodes in it very much. I sat back at a reading group meeting and listened to everyone else praising it and wondering what was wrong with me. It's a great book undoubtedly, but not one I connect with.

Soul Mountain- Gao Xingjian - another reading group choice. Only 2 out of 10 of us managed to get past the opening chapters. I did like some episodes, but overall found it incredibly slow, miserable, meandering and plotless. To add insult to injury, towards the end of the book the guy actually has a good laugh about his book being unreadable! If anyone has any doubt that the Nobel is awarded on a political rather than a literary agenda, this clinches it.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I was supposed to read this as a set book at school. I hated the petty living room world of the novel. (I was into adventure, science fiction, historical romance.) I refused to go past the first couple of chapters. My English teacher (wise woman!) just said that if I couldn't get on with it, I should leave it, and gave me another novel to read instead. A couple of years later I came back to the book and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Crash by J.G. Ballard. Stomach turning.

Ulysses - James Joyce. God knows I've tried, and I love parts of it, especially Molly Blooms soliloquy. But can I read it from beginning to end? Nope. Not even after sixteen million attempts.

Books I struggled through but wish I'd dumped:

The Famished Road - Ben Okri - At the time this won the Booker there was a joke that someone had put a prize voucher in selected copies of the book, but no-one claimed them. Although I very much liked the Nigerian setting, the novel seemed to me a rip-off of Amos Tutola's classic The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the bush of Ghosts (well worth reading) from which it borrows its surrealism and cast of ghosts ... but it's another horrid, overlong, plotless meander.

Great Apes - Will Self. This book has one of the most exhilarating first chapters I've ever read - I actually went back to reread it twice before moving on to chapter 2. The basic premise of the book is fascinating: the central character is transformed intio a chimpanzee and so is everyone else around him. The first part of the book was a joy, but the joke wears progressively thinner as the book goes on. It would have made a great novella, but the pressure to make it a book length thing destroyed it.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. Another reading group read. (See how risky the whole business is?) I felt like I'd overdosed on french fries and jelly beans.

Your turn! What are your dumpees?

Postscript

Just thought of one more unreadable to add which will probably have the rest of you screaming. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. I dug up this review I'd written on Amazon:

This was such a disappointing read after all the hype. I'm giving up halfway through, and passing my copy to someone who may appreciate it more. The first part of the book was so hackneyed that I found it laughable - I was not at all convinced by the love story. I got very annoyed by Faulk's omniscient narration, the viewpoint constantly flitting from person to person. As other reviewers here have pointed out, Faulks has a tendency to "tell rather than show", which deprives the reader of much of the pleasure of reading. I also found that I couldn't care less about the characters, particularly Steven, who remains vague and shadowy. That I stuck with the book so long is testimony to the fact that Faulks recreates the scenes in the trenches so well. Both my grandfathers fought in WW1 and I am so hungry to know more about what they experienced. But maybe I'd be beter off reading a good history book.

Smashing Fiction

Has anyone else actually managed to finish Crash? I guiltily admit that I have dumped it after 50 pages because it has made me feel so totally nauseated that I just can't go on. Am just awaiting the visions of legions of J.G.Ballard's fans (all of them male, I betcha) leaping to its defense.

Yes, I can appreciate the book's audacity and it's darkness. And yes, I do feel the author has something important to say about the direction that humanity is headed, becoming increasingly depersonalised in this age of technology. I can take on board the message about how sexuality could become subverted under such circumstances. (The characters become sexually fixated with car smashes, linger lovingly over pictures of the wounds of smash victims, haunt accident sites, get a hard on from seeing twisted wrecks, and believe a head-on collision yields the ultimate orgasm.)

But the descriptions are distressingly graphic and I almost lost my dinner at one point. (Warning: read on an empty stomach.)

Apparently an editor at Ballard's publishing house warned:

This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.

If your curiosity has been stirred (heaven forbid), you can read an extract from it here.

A glance at the reviews on Amazon reveals that it's one of those books you give either one star to, or five, and I can quite see why. I might come back to it at a later dater. I'd love to see David Cronenberg’s controversial film of the book. I'll read the rest of Ballard's oeuvre.

Incidentally, loved this ("irreverent scientific") footnote reader magellan added to his review on amazon.com:

And if humans think their sex has an element of violence in it--they should see how marine flatworms do it. It's called "penis fencing." The flatworms duel it out with their gigantic penises (eat your heart out, John "H." Holmes) and the first one to stab his big sharp dork through the skin of the other implants his sperm, causing the other flatworm to become pregnant and give birth whether he wants to or not. Biologists also think that these flatworms were the first multicellular animals to have sexual reproduction as we know it, which means that sex and violence have been linked ever since its earliest evolutionary origins.

Good think that flatworms never got around to inventing literature, I suppose, or who knows what perverted stuff they would be writing?