The Curator: award-winning books I did not finish

knowing when to give up the ghost and why timing is everything.

A few years ago, I read 291 pages of East of Eden and never picked it up again.

I got 49% into the book and just stopped. Who does that?! I blame my mental slash emotional state re: the Camping Trip Disaster of 2018. We’ve all got one. Maybe not a camping trip per se but an experience, avec un ex-partner or some other type of concerning relationship that has dragged us down into the depths, leaving us to swim out alone or perish. For the longest time, I associated East of Eden with that relationship and physically could not return to it until two weeks ago.

I still had the bookmark in where I stopped years ago

In my current “re-read,” I have reached the chapter where I stopped the first time. And I am so, so glad I stopped back then. Because reading it now, I realize I did not appreciate that book for one second. Maybe it was age, more likely my own emotional turmoil, but it was not hitting right. The unfinished business haunted me for years, but I trusted myself (and my moodiness) to know when to try again.

While the occasional hate read may be invigorating, deep down, I want to love everything I read. However. There is something to be said for the initial reactions and complicated feelings of our reading lives. Life is messy! It is ok if our relationship to a book is messy, too.

Alexandra Kelebay

said it best -

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about processes, and the quiet, mundane moments of in-betweenness that actually make up most of our days. When I started thinking about this in relation to my reading life, I realized how much it was holding me back, how much of my actual reading experience—arguably some of the most defining and influential aspects—I had subconsciously deemed somehow unworthy of unpacking in the online book world. 

Writing an essay about a book that changed my life is like taking drugs, I get obsessive and emotionally unstable in a fun way. But maybe it’s also fun to write about the things that didn’t work.

So, let’s get a little messy then eh?? Add some heat…

I’m telling on myself here a little bit, with a list of books that I DNFd but somebody with taste thought worthy enough to make canon. I know intellectually that just because something won an award does not mean A). the book is objectively good or B). the right book for every reader. Still, sometimes a beloved or award-winning book gives me an emperor’s new clothes complex and a compulsion to turn in my library card - maybe something is wrong with me if I “don’t get it.” Part of Substack Therapy is learning to release the weight of unfinished books and curating your own personal taste as

Madeline Mills

eloquently reminded us yesterday. And again, sometimes it is just a pause, not a forever goodbye. Knowing the difference is knowing yourself.

Reasons I didn't finish an award-winning book and if I will ever return to their hallowed pages.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

The Citizen Kane of mystery novels. Perhaps it was seminal in its time, relic at best now? Or is that ungenerous of me? Sometimes, when a piece of art is the first to do a thing, it feels reductive and mechanical years later after much refinement by others. In theory, I would love to return to this book, perhaps armed with a reading companion or guide to highlight the brilliance within. With my centuries-long TBR, though, I can’t promise anything.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

I see this novel as a symbol of my English undergraduate degree conditioning. The only thing that I could possibly have latched onto was “murder mystery” - everything else about the description is exactly opposite of what I search for in a novel: “set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327… [it is] an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory”¹. I think my brain just broke. Not the match for me!

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

This one suffered from form and content. First, it’s a series of “stories that are interrelated but narratively discontinuous and non-chronological²,” which is a format I continually resist. Second, it's about middle-aged people, which was not a great choice for 20-something me. I see myself returning to this after having a few grown kids and a garden rocking chair from which to contemplate the formative moments of my life.

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Another Pulitzer that tried to get me young! At the time, I actively disliked this novel about an overweight Dominican boy “obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love.”³ I remember feeling depressed and uncomfortable. Just not the book for me? Possible. Based on its reception, it was for many people, though, so I am fine being in the minority here.

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

I blame this one all on the dialect. I think I read the opening chapter no less than three times and could not get past sentences like, “We done looked there. They ain’t no more coming right now. Les go down to the branch and find that quarter before them n****** finds it”. And there is a LOT of it. Perhaps, like with James, I would be ok once I get into its rhythm, but that initial shock is like a rickety old gate keeping me from getting any farther.

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

The one that haunts me the very most. It is arguably exactly my taste - old gothic houses, ghost hauntings, occult scholars! I lost momentum halfway through my OG read because I could only picture Lili Taylor in a nightgown. Now, having seen the TV adaptation as well, the image is even more muddled! But there is no doubt I will give this one another go regardless, perhaps this Halloween season.

PHOTO: DREAMWORKS/GETTY IMAGES

Have you read any of these? If you love any, give me your best reasons why I should try again (or just give up the ghost for good).

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READING 📖→

• Clearly, East of Eden. I took it on vacation along with my vacation-y read and couldn’t get more than a few pages into the other one without thinking longingly of Eden. It is so much more dramatic and shocking than I anticipated. If you have any thoughts, respond here in the comments or over at the East of Eden Thread - I have added some thoughts there too!

• The Age of Innocence read-a-long is LIFEGIVING. This book is so much more layered and fun than I ever anticipated. Fun classics are a thing get with it or get lost! 😉

WATCHING 📽️→

• Blackberry - that Netflix movie about the Blackberry phone. While the wigs were hysterically bad, the story was compelling. Dennis was meant to play that role.

• More Evil - this show gets increasingly unhinged in every episode, and I am riveted. This week, we saw a demon crawl out of a man’s torso.

• I Know What You Did Last Summer - a classic summer chiller with the best '90s vibes. It's actually kinda terrible, but I can’t help staring at Love Hewitt’s overkill expressions.

BOOKS IN MY SHOPPING CART 🛒→

• Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay - My most anticipated book of Q2, it’s about a failed horror movie made by a small team in the ‘80s, which somehow resurfaces in pieces as cult myth on the internet, and Hollywood pushes for a reboot. I am hoping it’s everything Mister Magic was not.

• Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe - I have affection for Thorpe’s last novel The Knockout Queen, and this new one is said to be “wildly funny [and] completely unpredictable,” which can be either wonderful or terrorizing so going with benefit of the doubt here.

• True Grit by Charles Portis - needs no introduction, it is almost universally beloved. It feels like a good American read for a time when our future is shady as hell.

BOOK NEWS & RESTACKS 📰→

• WE ARE GETTING A PRACTICAL MAGIC SEQUEL!!! With Nicole and Sandra, hallelujah. Since it's a sequel and not a prequel, it must be The Book of Magic-ish, which features the Owen’s sisters all grown up with witchy children of their own. I wrote about the series here if you want to know more.

• Quiz yourself on these opening lines of classic mystery and crime novels

• Book friend

  Abra McAndrew
  released the fourth installment of her BookStack Directory series and I’m in it! What great company.

AND CATS 🐈‍⬛→

I leave the laundry basket out just for these knuckleheads.

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LET’S CHAT 👻→

• Is there a beloved book you DNFd? Or paused and came back to later? What made you stop or return?

• What are you reading currently and is it any good?

• Coffee in summer - hot or iced?? Strangely, I do both.

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In Case You Missed It 🖤

The Curator: floppy paperback > everything

The Curator: the book of the century

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

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See you around the bookshelf!

Natalie

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Kitteridge

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_Wao