How does one read a difficult book? Any hints?

How about Classics Illustrated, or Cliff's Notes? CI got me an A on the paper on Moby Dick, junior year in high school.

If it is truly a Teutonic thing, then I suggest you work on your Teutonic-ness rather than forcing an unwanted book down your, um, throat.

Reminds me of a teacher who once advised her students, studying Van Gogh in an art class, "...just remember the swirls, so you can fake it at a cocktail party..."

I picked up "Lonesome Dove" in a second-hand book store in Missouri many years ago. Couldn't stand the thing after almost 200 hundred pages so I put it away. (It's about a thousand page book).

A few weeks later, killing time, I started to read it from the last page, just trying to see how it ended. I really didn't care. I must have read a hundred pages backwards and couldn't put it down.

I went back to where I had left off, and proceeded to have one of the best reading experiences of my entire life. Larry McMurtry wrote what is arguably the best-ever novel about the American West.

It became one of those (rare) books where I didn't want it to end. Won the Pulitzer and became one of the three or four best pieces of television ever.

So maybe read what you are having trouble with from the end? Not sure if that will work, my experience was probably unusual, but what the hey, won't hurt to try.

The book happens to be Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It had been on my reading lists both in high school and in college (yeah, I was an English Lit. major), but I successfully avoided it. My two sons also managed to avoid reading it in high school.

I'm going to read online summaries of it on Amazon and alibris and in Wikipedia. Then I will read online and print reviews and critiques of it. After that, I will take up Bradd's suggestion and read the last chapter or so, or maybe small sections throughout the novel to whet my interest.

After I finish the two books I am reading, I will begin this Heart of Darkness project. I will persevere and I will succeed.

I am sure you think of yourself as a good reader, just as I do, so it is not easy (even without the Puritan cheering and jeering squad inside one's head) to admit defeat on a book that's classed as literature.

Be sure of one thing: if a book has attained that status, there's somebody somewhere who loves it and somebody who comprehends it. And I don't just mean folks who've written their dissertation on it.

I think what's wanting is some guidance and some enthusiasm. It would be nice to think that those things could come in a class, but unfortunately many literature courses seem designed to kill off any trace of enthusiasm and replace guidance with browbeating. You need to find a person who loves Heart of Darkness and can help orient you to the book just by telling you what he or she loves about it and what you need to know going in.

Don't look at me, though. That's one of the ones I gave myself permission not to finish. Even though I have as a rule been interested in Doppelganger stories from Poe's "William Wilson" and Dostoevsky's The Double to Nabokov's Despair, Conrad did me in.

If I were going to tackle it now, I would use resources that didn't exist when I was in school and look for the equivalent of a Joseph Conrad fan club online to find out something about the payoff for the work of reading this novel.

At least it isn't very long....

SapphireMoon

(I don't know how to put an umlaut over the a in Doppelganger.)

It works!

For letters with accents, type an ampersand, the letter, the name or abbreviation of the accent (acute, grave, uml), and a semicolon. It's an HTML thing.

Last Edited on 27-Dec-2007 12:25 PM

Note: Janet Evanovich turned me off in three pages; I have never picked up another of her books. I have not read any James Michener since near the end of Space; before that, I had read everything he'd written, but my major reaction to that book (and I Want To Go!) was, "Has this man ever even set foot in Texas?" I spent a couple weeks getting about halfway through Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, and stopped. Tolkein is just awful; I spent a week trying to get to a point where something, anything, happened in the first book of The Trilogy, and then I returned all three books to the fanatic who had lent them to me. So it's not just books that are supposed to be so fabulous and perfect. There are, and have been, a lot of bad writers.

If I feel that this book must be read, and it is too awful to enjoy, sometimes I can finish it by deciding to find just how bad it can get.

It's interesting to hear that some of my favorite authors are someone else's worst nightmares. I adore Evanovich, although I really wish she would make Stephanie decide on Ranger or Morelli. Stephanie's frequent use of Ranger's shower soap is beginning to annoy me. Pogo, sometime in 2008 read Anita Shreve's Fortune's Rocks and let me know what you thought of it (if you get past page two). Did you ever mention that you've read Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse?

Last Edited on 27-Dec-2007 12:53 PM

Doppelgänger