Tag Archives: Recently Abandoned

Recently Abandoned: August 2010

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These monthly posts are rolling around far too quickly for my liking, but here we are! For the most part, I can’t see the point in wasting my time and energy on a book that isn’t entertaining or enlightening me in some way. Yet, these abandoned books also have a place in my reading history and I feel like it is necessary to document them. Thus, Recently Abandoned, a monthly post where I can write about the books that didn’t work for me.

Try by Dennis Cooper (1994)Try by Dennis Cooper (1994)

Well, I tried. Okay and now that’s out of my system let’s get to what I really want to say. I’d really, really enjoyed the first two novels, Closer and Frisk, of Dennis Cooper‘s George Miles cycle, a conceptual series of stories focused on sex, desire, murder and death. Cooper’s writing is dark and challenging, and yet Try just didn’t grab me. Ziggy is a perpetually stoned teenager, the adopted son of two sexually abusive dads who harbours affections for his drug addicted best friend, all the while being a witness to a seedy world of violent pornography. The stuttering, stoned dialogue and pacing didn’t reel me in. Where the shocks in the previous George Miles books came from the often brutal combination of sex and violence, here it seems to be more self-aware taboo breaking: incest, kiddie porn, hardcore drug use. I might just need a break from Dennis Cooper for a little while. Closer and Frisk were full frontal assaults on perceptions of normality, love and accepted sexual norms and Try didn’t feel as ground breaking for me. I will return to this in the future (actually, writing about it now makes me want to pick it up again, so that’s a good sign.)

Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood (1989)Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood (1989)

I really wanted to like this. Kerry Greenwood’s Phyrne Fisher series features a vivacious, female detective working in Melbourne in the roaring twenties. However, the writing style was just not my thing at all. I got bored of all the descriptions of Phyrne’s outfits, and there were multiple costume changes throughout the day. Historical detail is all well and good in order to show the level of research that was put in to writing the book, but essentially frivolous detail should never take the place of character and story development. It didn’t feel like the story was going anywhere but into Phyrne’s seemingly bottomless clothes trunk. The brief mentions of Melbourne town landmarks and streets were nice, but not nearly enough to keep me reading.

Recently Abandoned: July 2010

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For the most part, I can’t see the point in wasting my time and energy on a book that isn’t entertaining or enlightening me in some way. Yet, these abandoned books also have a place in my reading history and I feel like it is necessary to document them. Thus, Recently Abandoned, a monthly post where I can write about the books that didn’t work for me.

The Vinyl Underground: Volume Two, Pretty Dead Things by Si Spencer, Simon Gane and Ryan Kelly (2008)The Vinyl Underground: Volume Two, Pretty Dead Things by Si Spencer, Simon Gane and Ryan Kelly (2008)

I hated volume one, Watching the Detectives, because of the simplistic reduction of the female characters to the stereotypical roles of pornstars or princesses. I can’t help myself though, and after feeling only mildly about the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the second volume increased my appreciation for the series tenfold. Stupidly, I thought perhaps the same thing would be at work here. Within the opening pages the central crime to be solved by our dashing heroes involves the “pretty dead things” of the title, naked women kept and tortured as slaves, their objectification made literal by the everyday object names scrawled on their foreheads. I don’t need to read this. I flicked through the rest, but it is a series that I will happily forget.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

This really should not be on here. I started reading it while in the middle of my graphic novel binge, hoping that it would free me from my prose reading rut. At first, I found Rabbit’s attitude toward his wife really distasteful, his hatred and dissatisfaction masked by vain superficiality. I put the book aside for a while, and started to think about it more as the expression of a twenty-something malaise in a different generational setting. I couldn’t get Rabbit’s all night drive to nowhere out of my head. I put it aside again, this time for too long, in order to indulge in more Transmetropolitan and just lost all interest in Rabbit, Run. The writing had moments of beauty though, and I’m definitely going to return to Updike in the future, I just picked up Rabbit, Run at the wrong time.

What books did you abandon this month? Anything that you picked up in July and promptly lost interest in? Any books that compelled you to throw it at a wall or small child?

Recently Abandoned: June 2010

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This is a new feature on Start Narrative Here for the books I started reading over the past month but gave up on before finishing. Sometimes I worry that my reviews here are too positive, and that it might seem like I’m not objective enough about the books that I read. The fact is, I’m not a professional reviewer with the goal of objective criticism, I’m a reader. For the most part, I can’t see the point in wasting my time and energy on a book that isn’t entertaining or enlightening me in some way. Yet, these abandoned books also have a place in my reading history and I feel like it is necessary to document them.

Thus, Recently Abandoned, a monthly post where I can write about the books that didn’t work for me.

Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi (2007)Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 by Lisa Appignanesi (2007)

I didn’t seem to take many notes when I was reading this one, so my final thoughts after abandoning it are very brief. It professed to be a history of the relationship between women and mental illness. The first fifty pages seemed to stray from this idea, as though there were no real defining thesis. It wasn’t the straightforward history it appeared it would be, very rambling and perhaps too speculative for what I wanted. I couldn’t imagine pushing myself through another 400 pages so I gave up. May be one to return to in the future, as I think it is a topic I could be very interested in.

Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease by Gary Greenberg (2010)Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease by Gary Greenberg (2010)

So, it would seem that I don’t enjoy reading about depression and mental illness in non-fiction? Or I just keep choosing the wrong books to read about these issues. Manufacturing Depression claimed to be a look at how the pharmaceutical industry has changed the way we look at sadness, pathologizing it as depression and what that means for our society. It wasn’t the author’s scepticism about the pathologization of sadness that put me off, because that is something I tend to agree with it. For a psychotherapist and self proclaimed sufferer of depression he lacked empathy for other sufferers, some of them his own patients, and many who may gain the help they need from the medication he rallies against. Some of his arguments were compelling, such as the idea that if depression is biochemical as we are so fond of claiming these days, then why aren’t the drugs against it more effective? His argument, as far as I got through his book anyway, seemed to be that depression is a necessary form of pessimism and that science and medicine’s intervention into sadness works as a moral judgement of human emotions. His arguments were never quite clear, so it was uncertain where he was going with his mix of scientific history, psychological theory and memoir.

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan (2009)The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan (2009)

Despite most readerly types being avid cat people, I’m cursed with an allergy to cats. I’d resemble a puffer fish if I even got close to one, I’m much happier around dogs and so I expected to really like this one. This book came up a few times in my weekly Carson McCullers alerts as she appears in the novel. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and His Friend Marilyn Monroe is written from the perspective of a philosophically minded dog with an eye for tasteful interior design, who is given as a gift to Marilyn Monroe by Frank Sinatra. Christened Mafia Honey by Marilyn, he accompanies her through the early part of the sixties. I really wanted to like this one, I thought it would be a quirky take on the glamour and illusion of Hollywood – but it just wasn’t. It was tiringly overwritten with too long passages of descriptions of the interiors of rooms Maf finds himself in that reeked of over-research by the author. Rather than giving the reader insight into these celebrities as people, it offers only vague caricatures. Unappealing. I skipped to the sections with Carson, and didn’t find much worthy there either.