Apparently, Teletext (for some reason) ran a survey recently about books that people don’t finish. Top of the fiction list cam DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Joyce’s Ulysses.
Ulysses I can well understand. I’ve never, ever met anyone who has actually read the whole thing thorugh (certainly no one who understood it). I started once, got about two chapters in (so, a good couple of hundred pages…) then gave up. I couldn’t cope.
But Vernon God Little and Harry Potter 4? Pierre’s book is not even 300 pages long. It is, admittedly, not a terribly readable style, but it’s a fairly engrossing story, pretty much an updated Catcher in the Rye. And Goblet of Fire is one of the more readable instalments in the series. Surely people weren’t put off by the length? It is true, though, that a book ostensibly set at a school doesn’t necessarily need to spend the first 150 pages describing the summer holidays…
I’ve just finished (yes, finished – apart from Ulysses, I tend to struggle through books) Nick Hornby’s Complete Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from the Believer magazine. Now, I’m not a fan of Hornby’s writing in general – I vaguely enjoyed About a Boy, but High Fidelity and Fever Pitch didn’t really do much for me. But it turns out that he reads the same sort of things I do. So, unfortunately, having read 400 pages of (basically) book reviews, I now have a long list of books he enjoyed that I want to try. Meh.
He makes some very good points about “popular” fiction as opposed to “literary” fiction. What’s the point, after all, of a critically successful novel if no one wants to read it? Reading should be about enjoyment – you should be able to sit back and relax for as long as you want with a book, without it feeling like a chore.