It's a frustratingly apt cliche that there’s too much out there for us to consume, and this is no less true with the realm of books. With the kind of books I tend to read – semi-serious non-fiction (history, politics, sociology, philosophy and economics) – the paradoxical evolution is that the more you read the more ignorant you feel. This sounds counter-intuitive because learning what you previously did not know should justifiably eradicate any ignorance you had. But this almost never works out when reading books in the social sciences and history. Books tend to reference other books, which are themselves dependent upon the research of other books, and so on. Never do you feel that you have a complete grasp of any branch of knowledge when you’re constantly being referred to other branches of knowledge that you feel you should know by now.
What most of the books I've given up have in common is that they are very long. Reading long books is exactly the same as reading short books, they simply take longer to complete. I’ve often given up books not because they’re bad, but because they’re eating up too much of my time. Various other reasons to put down a book could easily be rattled off but they revolve around the simple phenomenon of your mind wondering off the page and into another realm. This is when I know the book has ceased to be of interest to me. Another indication of losing interest in a book is when you feel that you’ve absorbed the necessary points the author has made, and you get the sense that you’re not likely to encounter either a new idea or a stimulating revision of an already-made one.
Another factor that I feel important to emphasise is that even though I’m a heavy user of academic libraries, I’m not myself an academic (although it helps if you work in an academic library, wink-wink.) I read the books I read because they are, for whatever inchoate reason, of interest to me. I’m not reading them in order to extract anything of practical importance or useful in the world at large. Because nothing of consequence hinges on me completing books short of my leisurely elucidation, it is easier for me to give up on a book than it would be if I were a teacher, researcher or (worst of all) book reviewer. In other words, having no external compulsion to read books means having less discipline to follow them through to the end.
With these points in mind, please enjoy a select list of my failed reads, a list that no one really asked for but that they're nonetheless getting:
I gave up Tocqueville’s classic text about half-way through on account of being irritated to the point of distraction by the author’s Catholicism. Tocqueville again and again concluded how divinity had designed historical events to turn out the way they did, and again and again I was rhetorically shooting back at the page, “How do you know that?” Upon reflection shortly afterwards I concluded that Tocqueville was a confident generaliser, but that was really all he was. The evidence supporting his conclusions seemed to be pretty weak independent of his own impressions. In subsequent reading I found validation in this suspicion in one of Dwight Macdonald’s letters to historian John Lukacs. In comparing Tocqueville to Alexander Herzen, the 19th century Russian radical, Macdonald observed that Tocqueville was at his best when he was 'summarizing, in lapidary form, his original and profound generalizations.'
I don’t read fiction too much these days, but when I do pick up a novel I try to avoid ones like this. I gave up on page 300 of a 355-page book, which highlights the contempt I had developed for it by that stage. I felt no guilt whatsoever in putting the book down. One or two images linger – a woman pushing a pram down a street, kids running around in a backyard – but to this day I do not have any knowledge of the book's story, character, setting, themes and meaning. In fact I had no knowledge of these things even as I was reading it. I remember around this time setting White unfavourably aside Somerset Maugham, who while he was considered a secondary writer, had the great virtue of keeping everything simple and clean.
This brings up a broader point about why I don’t read fiction all that much anymore. I never give people a satisfactory answer when they ask me why I don’t read novels as often as political economy or the history of ideas. The reason I've come up with has to do with impatience. Non-fiction books get straight to the point. Because the purpose of a non-fiction book is to persuade, inform and clarify, the emphasis is on making everything transparent for the reader. If the author fools around with florid analogies and poetic images, the message gets lost. In fiction the emphasis is on story-telling, and even though it helps if the reader knows what's going on, the author can spend time telling you about the way the trees are being blown by the wind (“the trees were being blown by the wind because it was windy and they’re trees”). As a result I get impatient with descriptions of things such as the creaking of floorboards, and how it relates to the inner psychological state of the protagonist. I have to be in a very relaxed and non-productive mood in order to appreciate such writing, because the end result is that I'm not learning as much about the world than I would if I were reading about the New Deal. I’ll stop there in case I go on to sound like a reductive utilitarian.
I had read some Blumenberg before this. Well, to be more exact I read two enormous works of intellectual history by this author (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Genesis of the Copernican Worldview) which constituted some of the most difficult yet oddly rewarding reading of my young life. This book was really no different. It was freakin' long, filled with detailed excavations of ancient literary texts, replete with quotes from arcane thinkers and just generally overwhelming in the breadth of the author’s erudition. I think what drove me to put this book down was the dense theological material that was being unravelled. I had gotten through Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish not long before this and it seems that that book provided enough religious musings for a while. I still copied my notes from the half of the book I read. But the excessive length and seriousness of Blumenberg wore me down after a while.
A certain ideologically-influenced hesitation preceded me even before opening this book. Most of the plaudits on the back cover came from Murdoch-owned newspapers. And indeed Pinker’s book does lend credibility to the conservative conviction that there are certain nature-induced hierarchies in human civilisation that can’t, and shouldn’t, be ameliorated. Combine this with my recent envelopment in Rorty and his anti-foundationalist approach, and we can see that this book was under the pump from the beginning. But ultimately the reason was quite simply that Pinker perfectly states his case at the beginning of this book, and I didn’t see any good reason for continuing. The rest of the book seemed to be simply adding further evidence to the premise, which quite frankly I would’ve forgotten soon after reading.
This raises a larger problem in many books of this nature. Books that advance ideas in the social sciences almost never justify their length. The reason they are so big is because authors feel the need to lend ‘scientific’ gravitas to their thesis by piling on evidence. The result is inevitably a repetitious book that simply finds new ways to explore an idea the reader has already grasped.
I do not regret reading the first two-thirds of this book, for I found many interesting ideas within it. But neither do I regret dropping it. This was to do both with intrusive thoughts of my next read (I think it was Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy) and the fact that I believed I had gotten the best bits from Znaniecki’s summation of sociology, and didn’t feel that going on with the book was going to do much more for me. The very word ‘sociology’ appears deadly-dry to many potential readers. I don’t wish to convert anyone to the contrary thesis. But the sociological mode of thought is I believe an indispensable guide to studying the world. Znaniecki’s book, along with C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination and Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery, was to me fascinating. Znaniecki’s prose was less muscular than these other writers, but what an under-valued mind! The book definitely committed me to finding more from than this author.
I was very excited to get my hands on this book, which I ordered from across the Tasman. The title was intriguing, the concepts to be explored sounded enticing, and I found Znaniecki fascinating in part because he was virtually unheard of. I stuck with it for a while before I admitted to myself something I had only subconsciously grasped, which was that even though I had come to Znaniecki as a sociologist, this particular work was a full-on philosophical treatise. ‘Full-on’ is here meant as ‘incomprehensible’, ‘baffling’ and ‘seriously what is this guy on about?’ I have little memory now of what the book was about, and therefore can't really go into my reasons for giving it up.
The maddening difficulty of this work is well known. I was encouraged by the fact that I managed to get through Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: both long, intricate and written in the 18th century, replete with long sentences and sub-clauses up the ying-yang. But whilst these books were written by Scotsmen with (occasional) flair and lucidity, Kant was, well, German. I doubt seriously that the number of people who have gotten through to the end of this book is high. It's one of those works where the expository/secondary literature, published in the centuries since, is more keenly read and analysed.
I could see this one coming a mile away. The conventional wisdom I’d gotten from other writers who referenced Rawls’ classic book is that it was a) the single most important work of political philosophy in the 20th century, and b) a tough slog. This was not due to Rawls being a bad writer as such, but more the fact that he was an impeccable and rigorous theorist, who never made claims that exceeded his reasoning and who endlessly qualified and repeated his ideas for the sake of presenting them in the clearest light. On page 40 of a nearly 600 page book I started to feel its weight. Rawls had already made multiple distinctions, enumerated rival theories, and began referring to earlier statements with the full expectation that the reader remembered them. I thought that the book's importance would be enough to carry me through to the end, but it wasn't to be. Perhaps one day when I own a copy of the book, rather than loaning it out, I might get through it. But even though a lot of subsequent theorising is dependent on A Theory of Justice, the brief expositions of Rawls' theory that I've read over the years should be sufficient for me to grasp it. (Right?)
What most of the books I've given up have in common is that they are very long. Reading long books is exactly the same as reading short books, they simply take longer to complete. I’ve often given up books not because they’re bad, but because they’re eating up too much of my time. Various other reasons to put down a book could easily be rattled off but they revolve around the simple phenomenon of your mind wondering off the page and into another realm. This is when I know the book has ceased to be of interest to me. Another indication of losing interest in a book is when you feel that you’ve absorbed the necessary points the author has made, and you get the sense that you’re not likely to encounter either a new idea or a stimulating revision of an already-made one.
Another factor that I feel important to emphasise is that even though I’m a heavy user of academic libraries, I’m not myself an academic (although it helps if you work in an academic library, wink-wink.) I read the books I read because they are, for whatever inchoate reason, of interest to me. I’m not reading them in order to extract anything of practical importance or useful in the world at large. Because nothing of consequence hinges on me completing books short of my leisurely elucidation, it is easier for me to give up on a book than it would be if I were a teacher, researcher or (worst of all) book reviewer. In other words, having no external compulsion to read books means having less discipline to follow them through to the end.
With these points in mind, please enjoy a select list of my failed reads, a list that no one really asked for but that they're nonetheless getting:
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
I gave up Tocqueville’s classic text about half-way through on account of being irritated to the point of distraction by the author’s Catholicism. Tocqueville again and again concluded how divinity had designed historical events to turn out the way they did, and again and again I was rhetorically shooting back at the page, “How do you know that?” Upon reflection shortly afterwards I concluded that Tocqueville was a confident generaliser, but that was really all he was. The evidence supporting his conclusions seemed to be pretty weak independent of his own impressions. In subsequent reading I found validation in this suspicion in one of Dwight Macdonald’s letters to historian John Lukacs. In comparing Tocqueville to Alexander Herzen, the 19th century Russian radical, Macdonald observed that Tocqueville was at his best when he was 'summarizing, in lapidary form, his original and profound generalizations.'
- The Living and the Dead by Patrick White
I don’t read fiction too much these days, but when I do pick up a novel I try to avoid ones like this. I gave up on page 300 of a 355-page book, which highlights the contempt I had developed for it by that stage. I felt no guilt whatsoever in putting the book down. One or two images linger – a woman pushing a pram down a street, kids running around in a backyard – but to this day I do not have any knowledge of the book's story, character, setting, themes and meaning. In fact I had no knowledge of these things even as I was reading it. I remember around this time setting White unfavourably aside Somerset Maugham, who while he was considered a secondary writer, had the great virtue of keeping everything simple and clean.
This brings up a broader point about why I don’t read fiction all that much anymore. I never give people a satisfactory answer when they ask me why I don’t read novels as often as political economy or the history of ideas. The reason I've come up with has to do with impatience. Non-fiction books get straight to the point. Because the purpose of a non-fiction book is to persuade, inform and clarify, the emphasis is on making everything transparent for the reader. If the author fools around with florid analogies and poetic images, the message gets lost. In fiction the emphasis is on story-telling, and even though it helps if the reader knows what's going on, the author can spend time telling you about the way the trees are being blown by the wind (“the trees were being blown by the wind because it was windy and they’re trees”). As a result I get impatient with descriptions of things such as the creaking of floorboards, and how it relates to the inner psychological state of the protagonist. I have to be in a very relaxed and non-productive mood in order to appreciate such writing, because the end result is that I'm not learning as much about the world than I would if I were reading about the New Deal. I’ll stop there in case I go on to sound like a reductive utilitarian.
- Work on Myth by Hans Blumenberg
I had read some Blumenberg before this. Well, to be more exact I read two enormous works of intellectual history by this author (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Genesis of the Copernican Worldview) which constituted some of the most difficult yet oddly rewarding reading of my young life. This book was really no different. It was freakin' long, filled with detailed excavations of ancient literary texts, replete with quotes from arcane thinkers and just generally overwhelming in the breadth of the author’s erudition. I think what drove me to put this book down was the dense theological material that was being unravelled. I had gotten through Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish not long before this and it seems that that book provided enough religious musings for a while. I still copied my notes from the half of the book I read. But the excessive length and seriousness of Blumenberg wore me down after a while.
- The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
A certain ideologically-influenced hesitation preceded me even before opening this book. Most of the plaudits on the back cover came from Murdoch-owned newspapers. And indeed Pinker’s book does lend credibility to the conservative conviction that there are certain nature-induced hierarchies in human civilisation that can’t, and shouldn’t, be ameliorated. Combine this with my recent envelopment in Rorty and his anti-foundationalist approach, and we can see that this book was under the pump from the beginning. But ultimately the reason was quite simply that Pinker perfectly states his case at the beginning of this book, and I didn’t see any good reason for continuing. The rest of the book seemed to be simply adding further evidence to the premise, which quite frankly I would’ve forgotten soon after reading.
This raises a larger problem in many books of this nature. Books that advance ideas in the social sciences almost never justify their length. The reason they are so big is because authors feel the need to lend ‘scientific’ gravitas to their thesis by piling on evidence. The result is inevitably a repetitious book that simply finds new ways to explore an idea the reader has already grasped.
- The Method of Sociology by Florian Znaniecki
I do not regret reading the first two-thirds of this book, for I found many interesting ideas within it. But neither do I regret dropping it. This was to do both with intrusive thoughts of my next read (I think it was Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy) and the fact that I believed I had gotten the best bits from Znaniecki’s summation of sociology, and didn’t feel that going on with the book was going to do much more for me. The very word ‘sociology’ appears deadly-dry to many potential readers. I don’t wish to convert anyone to the contrary thesis. But the sociological mode of thought is I believe an indispensable guide to studying the world. Znaniecki’s book, along with C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination and Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery, was to me fascinating. Znaniecki’s prose was less muscular than these other writers, but what an under-valued mind! The book definitely committed me to finding more from than this author.
- Cultural Reality by Florian Znaniecki
I was very excited to get my hands on this book, which I ordered from across the Tasman. The title was intriguing, the concepts to be explored sounded enticing, and I found Znaniecki fascinating in part because he was virtually unheard of. I stuck with it for a while before I admitted to myself something I had only subconsciously grasped, which was that even though I had come to Znaniecki as a sociologist, this particular work was a full-on philosophical treatise. ‘Full-on’ is here meant as ‘incomprehensible’, ‘baffling’ and ‘seriously what is this guy on about?’ I have little memory now of what the book was about, and therefore can't really go into my reasons for giving it up.
- Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
The maddening difficulty of this work is well known. I was encouraged by the fact that I managed to get through Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: both long, intricate and written in the 18th century, replete with long sentences and sub-clauses up the ying-yang. But whilst these books were written by Scotsmen with (occasional) flair and lucidity, Kant was, well, German. I doubt seriously that the number of people who have gotten through to the end of this book is high. It's one of those works where the expository/secondary literature, published in the centuries since, is more keenly read and analysed.
- A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
I could see this one coming a mile away. The conventional wisdom I’d gotten from other writers who referenced Rawls’ classic book is that it was a) the single most important work of political philosophy in the 20th century, and b) a tough slog. This was not due to Rawls being a bad writer as such, but more the fact that he was an impeccable and rigorous theorist, who never made claims that exceeded his reasoning and who endlessly qualified and repeated his ideas for the sake of presenting them in the clearest light. On page 40 of a nearly 600 page book I started to feel its weight. Rawls had already made multiple distinctions, enumerated rival theories, and began referring to earlier statements with the full expectation that the reader remembered them. I thought that the book's importance would be enough to carry me through to the end, but it wasn't to be. Perhaps one day when I own a copy of the book, rather than loaning it out, I might get through it. But even though a lot of subsequent theorising is dependent on A Theory of Justice, the brief expositions of Rawls' theory that I've read over the years should be sufficient for me to grasp it. (Right?)
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