Stuck on reading:
Sometimes, you end up with a movie or book or story that you just get stuck on - as in, you’re at page 138, and the early part of the book is good, but the author has just gone off on a tear with some weird artsy material that passes all rational understanding, and you just put the darn thing down and you don’t pick it up again for a while.
Other people may say - oh, it’s really good, keep reading - but you’re just stuck. You can’t summon the presence of mind to pick it up again and slog onwards.
Right now, I’m stuck on Oscar Wao - on my Kindle. I’ve got a ton of Sidewise (Alternate History awards) reading to do, and just like every other thing in the literary world, the stuff for the awards could be seen as another application of Sturgeon’s Law. But they take priority, and some of it’s really good. And the best is far more understandable than this…
Wikipedia says:
Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, various Spanish dialects and hip-hop inflected urban English, the novel is also a meditation on story-telling, Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, the contours of authoritarian power and the long horrifying history of slavery in the New World.
No kidding. Luckily, there is a glossary at the end of the thing, and I’m forever going back and forth to make sense of the damn book. Spanish is not my best language, and colloquial Spanish interlaced with Dominican Republic slang and historical references is really really hard to follow if you’re not familiar with it.
(About all I knew before this about the DR was a tiny bit about Trujillo, about the same about a US intervention there when I was a kid, Sammy Sosa [and that only because you couldn't live in Chicago for a while without hearing all about him - you think I care about beisbol?] and some stuff from a Canadian documentary about Haitians in the DR working as near-slaves in a sugar plantation.)
Yes, it’s something that I will get back to, but not anytime soon. (If you’re curious as to where I got hung up, it’s when the story flips back to the youth of Oscar’s harridan of a mother in the rural Dominican Republic; I got to thoroughly hate the witch so much that I found reading about her as a smouldering young woman just too annoying to deal with.)
Anything like this for you guys? Something that you wanted to like but just got stuck in the middle? Maybe you eventually dug yourself out (I can’t tell you how many times I stopped and started on Dhalgren) and maybe you eventually got rid of the book.