There’s always someone at the party who never admits he hasn’t read a book. You mention The Romance of the Rose, and he nods knowingly and gazes out the window as though transported. And too often these guys get the girl. Deeply annoying. On the other side of the page, an old friend of mine who still plugs away as a college lit. professor once said that his job is not to read the great books, it’s only to know what’s in some of them. An honest man, and all he got was divorced.

As I age like fine wine, I’m less and less compelled to finish a book. Here are a few I’ve abandoned:

I picked up Paula Fox’s The Widow’s Children last month after being impressed by Desperate Characters. In The Widow’s Children five or six unlikables gather in a hotel room for a going away party. Lots of booze and cigarette smoke. It’s No Exit with room service. After thirty pages I jumped off the balcony. Read Fox’s other novel, but if someone chases you with the one about the widow, run like hell.

Kevin Brockmeier published a great collection of short stories called Things That Fall From the Sky. They’re quirky and delightful inventions about alternate realities. So I bought his new novel, The Brief History of the Dead, in which the dead are in some place where they can stay as long as anyone alive still remembers them. An interesting premise, but the problem is that this place they’ve gone to is just like our reality–restaurants, buses, bad movies, etc. What’s the good of another world that isn’t different? Plus the characters are bores. I read half of it, but it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

After thinking Ian McEwan’s Atonement was pretty darn good, I started On Chesil Beach yesterday. In this one a couple is on their honeymoon in the 1960s, both virgins. It’s not the 1960s I knew and loved. Anyway, the girl has been letting the guy think she’s all eager for that first night, but in reality the idea of sex revolts her. Hey! I’m 67. Do I need to read about a guy whose wife kicks him out of bed? See ya later!

I started Dostoevsky’s The Idoit one dreary day when I was between girlfriends. The character’s name is Mishkin or Munchkin–whatever–and he’s an idiot because he can’t tell a lie (I think). The prose is dull as dirt. Even though I was younger then, I only read thirty pages. . .with about 700 to go. 700! Not in this life. I waited for the Jim Carry movie, which is set in America.

I started The Hobbit once, too. Whoever said Tolkien could write? Ugh!

The Glass Bead Game is about recluses who devote their lives to this game that seems to be a metaphor for graduate school. In the end, I’ve been told, the main character enters the real world. Ho-hum. It’s Magic Mountain all over again. I stuck it out for 80 pages–way too many.

Others I couldn’t get into (no special order): Call It Sleep, Little Dorrit, The Far Side of Paradise, The Life of Pi, Man’s Fate, Tree of Smoke, The Count of Monte Crisco (sp?), and Don Quixote.

Here’s what let’s do: when a nasty book floats up in polite conversation like a corpse in the pond, let’s be proud to say we tossed. Let’s rattle off the good or fun things we did in the time it took the bookworm to munch through Clarrisa–the birdbath we put in the backyard, the kitty we rescued from the tree. I’m talking the important stuff here.

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