Desert Island Room 101 (Top Ten Unreadable/Unfinishable Books)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Top Ten Unreadable/Unfinishable Books
Date:	21/10/01 (344 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Doorstopping, firelighting and arsewiping potential.

Disadvantages: Codswallop.

Help!

I've been abducted by Sue Lawley's evil twin-sister and she's left
me stranded on a desert island. There's an old gramophone here,
but the only records are bagpipe music and Showaddywaddy...

She has left me some books as well, but they're all unreadable!

There's a mountain of books that are just too long to read in one
lifetime, including:- Proust; War and Peace; The Lord of the Rings
and A Suitable Boy. There's a shedload of philosophical texts:-
Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, etc. All as incomprehensible
as one of Alkaliguru's comments. Plus there's a plethora of sports
biographies that sound really interesting, but always turn out to
be duller than the dullest dull thing you can imagine. And, oh no...
the complete works of Jane Austen... aaaarggghhhzzZZZzzz!!!

Worse, she has peered into the dark corners of my mind and left
me with the following ten books which she knows full well I can't
possibly read, even if I'm stuck here for the rest of my natural life!


-10 ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe

Talk about adding insult to injury! I'm surprised she hasn't left me
a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude as well! Even bored out
of my brains on an island I don't think I could bring myself to read
this. It looks so dull, and by all accounts, it is. I find that anything
written before the twentieth century is a bit pedestrian anyway.
Maybe I'm just an impatient child of the television age.


- 9 MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie

Voted the Booker of Bookers in the mid-1980's, I can't say
whether it's unfinishable, because I've found it unpickupable.
Other people may admire him for his descriptions of Indian life,
but his writing often reeks of his English public school education.
It's all: 'Gosh I&
#39;m good. Oh I'm ever so clever-clever, smug smirk.'
I defy you to name one Rushdie character you really CARE about,
or even remember! His books always seem to aim at your brain
rather than your heart. I had to grit my teeth and grind my way
through The Satanic Verses and I thought the characters in The
Ground Beneath Her Feet were vain and tiresome. I did chuckle
at Shame though.


- 8 THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann

A few years ago I spent a whole month reading this 700+ page epic.
Set in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps in the years leading up to
the First World War, it wasn't the most exciting read of my life.
Then, half-way through, when young Hans Castorp finally gets
to talk to the red-headed girl he fancies, they do it in French.
I should say at this point that at my school we learned German.
Scheiße.


- 7 THE SILMARILLION by J.R.R. Hartl...er, I mean, Tolkien

Well, I read The Hobbit, that's okay for the kiddies, but as I said
above, life seems too short for epics like The Lord of the Rings.
However, when the Silmarillion turned up at one of many libraries
I haunt, I thought I ought to give it a try - I mean, I am a Marillion
fan after all. But I was lost well before the end of page two.
I think you have to be young to get into this fantasy stuff.


- 6 THE CASTLE by Franz Kafka

Well this one is certainly unfinishable. Even Kafka himself couldn't
finish it - he died. Reading The Castle is like watching a dog chase
it's own tail while listening to a record that's stuck in a groove.
Even Kafka himself never finished it - he died you know.
The protagonist (K) finds himself stuck in a village which may,
or may not have been the model for The League of Gentlemen.
He wants to get to the castle, but it's not allowed, so he can't.

Kafka die
d before he could write an ending you know.
Maybe he died because he couldn't write an ending, who knows?
Kafka stipulated in his will that all his unpublished manuscripts
be destroyed, but the executor demurred. Maybe he didn't have
a permit. Do you have a permit to read this opinion, by the way?


- 5 WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Brontë

Ugh. How can such a nasty book be called romantic?
It's full of rotten people being spiteful to each other!
OK, I did read and finish it, so maybe it doesn't exactly qualify,
but I hate it so much that I wouldn't read it again if you paid me,
so it has to be listed here. As far as romance is concerned,
I prefer Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
which (rather shamefully I think) no-one has done an op on yet.


- 4 NAKED LUNCH by William S[eward] Burroughs

I once read about 90% of this and the gave up. You might
find it hard to believe that I would give up so close to the end,
but since 100% of that 90% had made no sense whatsoever
it didn't really matter. You could probably start reading this book
on any page and it wouldn't make any difference.


- 3 TRANSLATED ACCOUNTS by James Kelman

When I saw this in the long-list for the Booker Prize I thought
I should investigate. But, oh dearie me. I didn't get very far...

It's meant to be read as a series of first-hand accounts of events
from a country under martial law, or possibly it's been invaded.
The accounts read like they have been machine-translated,
and in one case apparently recovered from a corrupted hard drive.
It is not sarcastic. Pumpkins are everywhere. That was a quote.

Examples are to us but we do not require examples, so beloved
of foreign sources. That was another. See? Thus that it was false.
But it became only false. were
- could by w I wasI thought that i.
It was a fantasy while waking and no dream. could could,
can feel it nowwe tightly yetwaslingd. There you go, those were
three random passages from the book. Shades of Finnegan's Wake?
James Joyce has a lot to answer for, which brings me to...


- 2 ULYSSES by James Joyce

Not only do I find it hard to get around to reading long novels,
I also suspect that many long novels become known as classics
BECAUSE they are long. Why would you read seven, eight, nine
hundred pages of something you didn't like? You wouldn't. It is
inevitable that everyone who has read a very long book loves it.
You aren't going to spend, say, fifteen hours of your time reading
something and then say: "what a load of ****, I've just wasted
a huge chunk of my life!" [I suspect a mathematical proof could
be constructed to prove this.]

I've made two attempts at Ulysses, I got a hundred pages into
it at my second attempt, but it turns to gibberish for fecks sake!
James Joyce made a bastardmockery of the English language -
no wonder the Irish revere him! Revenge as sweet as snotdrivel
in a winedark sea perhaps? Intellectual tosspottery methinks.

"Oh, but the ending is brilliant" you may say. I believe you, yes.
Yes, but are you sure the poor man hadn't had a stroke when he
wrote the stuff in the middle? (Not to mention Finnegan's Wake!)
Yes, I'm an English Philistine, yes, yes-bloody-yes I know - call me
Phil for short if you like, yes. Play a Rick Wakeman keyboard solo
if you like - Yes, yes? See how the word 'yes' looks funny if you
stare at it too long? Yes? No. I said. NO.

(By the way, I've not chosen Finnegan's Wake because it goes
without saying that that is the most unreadable book ever.)

And last and by all means least
, the worst novel ever published...


- 1 THE BRAINWAVE by Evon Schuller [ ISBN 0863326358 ]

I borrowed this book from my local library a couple of years ago
because it looked interesting, and because it was short. I have
an aversion to long books. (Sorry, I know you knew that already,
but I wrote this bit first, ok?) I'm impatient, I don't want to spend
a month reading one book, especially if the characters start chatting
each other up in French half-way through. Grrrr.

When I read it I was mortified. For a while I felt too ashamed
to return it, in case anyone I knew saw me with it! As I remember it
(and I have tried to exterminate it from my memory, so bear with me
here) some impending disaster is about to extinguish the human race,
blah, blah, blah, and then some bright young spark realizes that
the key to interstellar travel is... frequency, and that by generating
exactly the right note on an instrument people will be able to travel
across the galaxy on the sound waves. Seriously - that's the brainwave.
Except, of course, it's not a brainwave, it's the most pitifully stupid thing
I've ever heard.

Not only does the author show a breathtaking lack of even the most basic scientific knowledge, she isn't even ashamed about it. She merrily glosses over the details -
presumably in the belief that no-one else understands eggy-head science anyway,
so she can make it up as she goes along, as long as it sounds vaguely techy.
The blurb about the author said that she lives with her young son and their pet cat.
Well, now... I did wonder. But, to be fair to him, I'm sure the lad couldn't possibly
have been that ignorant, and the cat would have been a better writer.




P.S.
If anyone else mentions Graham Greene in this category
I won't be responsible for my actions...
<
br>
P.P.S
HELP!!!

______________________________________________ _____________________________ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

Summary: