The Bulldozer Has Stalled

I can read just about anything:  cereal boxes, upside-down newspapers, phone books, toothpaste tubes, road signs, books.  When it comes to reading books, I tend to finish what I start.  Sometimes I'm disappointed for one reason or another with something I'm reading, but I still finish.

I'm consistent about the finishing part.  I've probably abandoned less than 10 books in my life, and maybe only half that many.

Much of the time I breeze through my reading.  That's not to say I'm not reading fully or not paying attention, just that the books are absorbing:   Harry Potter, Dante's Inferno, The Hunger Games, War and Peace, Shakespeare, etc.  When things get tough I go into snow-plow mode.  I can plow through just about anything:  The Faerie Queen, Dante's Purgatorio, A Pilgrim's Progress.  [I found out last Spring that even English professors don't read The Faerie Queen by choice, but I didn't think it was that bad.]

There are a few books that I have to be a bulldozer for, because a snow-plow just won't cut it.  While a snow-plow can take to the highway in a storm, a bulldozer never moves that fast.  I went bulldozing for much of William Blake, all of Sigmund Freud after the first week, William James, Dante's Paradiso, parts of Nietzsche, but I finished them.  All.

I've finally  found a book that I cannot finish.  It's been taking forever to read because it's never my first choice.  I've let it fester, half-finished on the top of my dresser for a week now, unsure what to do about it.   I've been coming to the sad conclusion that I'm going to abandon it, but I couldn't quite admit it.  I thought of writing about it here, and this morning I lay in bed thinking about getting some facts from the book for this blog, and that's when it hit me:  I have a physical aversion to opening that book again.  The bulldozer has stalled.

I've finished books I've been bored by, books I wasn't sure if I should bother, some that I wasn't sure if it made sense to finish.  And this is a "classic" international best-seller that I've come to hate and now (finally) refuse to finish.  Yes, the bulldozer has stalled, and not up against some huge and dense boulder-like tome, but against the almost fluffy little book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."

I don't understand what prompted people to buy this book into best-sellerdom.  Did they read it?  I understand it's a philosophical novel, and how it's set in the Prague Spring, and that it's theme is love and sex... and that I can't stand it.  The author comes across as such a mysoginist it makes me want to scream (but it's probably okay because I get the idea that he's a misandrist too).  That, and the way he puts chapter breaks (and there are a lot of them) right in the middle of scenes -- even between two lines of conversation!  Oh, yeah -- and there are what seem like sloppy repetitions of phrases, but that might have been a conscious (though grating) stylistic choice.

This is not a review.  I'm perfectly willing to put the blame on myself for my failure to finish this book.  I simply do not understand what's so wonderful about it.  My son had to read it in High School, and he thought it was awful and unreadable, if I remember correctly.  I smiled when he told me that, and figured he just didn't have the maturity or the background to appreciate a great work of literature.  Now I know where he was coming from.

What am I missing?  I'm not lacking maturity and I'm not lacking background.  I'm not lacking an appreciation for good literature.  I don't know what it is, but...

I was wrong.