Books I’ll Never Finish

The coming of the new year always reminds me of the many resolutions I will never be able to keep. There's even a special shelf in my bathroom for all the books I know I'll never finish. I read a few pages at a time over the course of a few months, then something shiny distracts me and I give up.

One of my first definite failures was Finnegans Wake. The book contains so many strung-together puns, it's incomprehensible to the point where some people think it was written as a joke. I got about two hundred pages in before I realized I didn't know what had happened in the first sentence. Then I found out the first sentence bleeds into the last sentence, and it's about dreams or dying or rising or falling . . . I really don't know.

Gödel, Escher, Bach started off with a little more promise. It began like one of those super-smart public radio documentaries, where I thought I was questioning the basics of consciousness and comprehension. Then I tried to remember what I had read, and it turned out all I could remember was the word recursion, a word I couldn't even define. I conceded defeat.

But this year it'll all be different. Now I'm trying Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. As if the author wasn't complicated enough, this time around he tells his own fantastical version of the creation of the Mason-Dixon line, all the while trying to write in an 18th century style. Right now, I'm a few dozen pages in, and I think there's a talking dog, but I'm not too sure.

Wish me luck.