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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| This Stylist piece is a few years old, though that probably doesn't matter. Nah, see, if I want a challenge, I'll play my video games on a higher difficulty level. No-one likes to think of themselves as a flaky reader – and yet most bookshelves are home to at least a handful of reads that their owners have never finished. "Flaky," my ass. (Don't worry; my ass isn't actually flaky.) We're here for maybe 30,000 days, more likely less, so why waste one of them forcing yourself to read something you neither have to (for school, e.g.) or want to? Peer pressure? Lit-snobs insisting it's essential reading? I get that there are different levels of "want," but at some point, it's perfectly okay to say, "this isn't working out for me" and moving on to something more productive, like polishing the dolphin. Either these titles are there for intellectual window-dressing (aka, your untouched uni texts from 10 years prior), or more likely, you’ve waded through 50 pages before throwing in the towel. Fortunately, my uni texts (that's just textbooks for my fellow Americans; Stylist is a British rag) were 90% engineering tomes, and certainly not untouched. Well, untouched for 40 years now. But not unopened. You know what fiction book I did have to read, for a class in engineering ethics? Frankenstein. No regrets there. Stylist is also a site aimed at chicks, but that's not going to stop me. There’s a peculiar guilt associated with these unfinished books. Yeah, that sounds like a "you" problem. I don't feel guilt about it unless I've promised someone I'd read something, and then didn't. They remain lurking on the shelf like an unwanted guest, picking up dust; a reminder of our weak-willed preference for cheap domestic noir over weighty, improving tomes. That particular sentiment is almost American in its self-flagellation. I don't feel like it improves me to force myself to read something I'm just not into. One such example is already on this list; I'll get to it. The books we struggle to digest may be famously difficult reads; but they also tend to include hugely popular authors and titles, whose hype not everyone is convinced by. I've mentioned before my refusal to read James Joyce. It's led to my reading mantra: "Incomprehensibility is not depth." Well, it's not an absolute refusal; I gave it a shot. Lots of people are impressed by it. I am not. And some of the world’s most revered writers count in their mix; showing talent is not always matched by reader enthusiasm. This is something we need to remember as writers: no matter how good you are at your craft, there will always be people for whom your writing just doesn't click. Conversely, you can suck at it and still inexplicably become popular *cough*stephaniemeyer*cough* Below are the top 10 in all their unfinished glory, as revealed on the website For Reading Addicts. Disclosure: I didn't visit the link provided to that website. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller Joseph Heller’s satirical novel is based around a group of airmen in WWII Italy grappling with red tape, and is deliberately absurd and nonsensical in style. I tried. I really gave this one a shot. It's one of the few books whose title has actually become an idiom. And I can't explain it: I love absurdity and nonsense. Perhaps it's because it's American absurdity and not the British or French or Russian versions; I don't know. But I just couldn't get into that book at all, and abandoned it after I don't know how few pages. Guilt? Nah. I understand quite well what a catch-22 is, and I'm more familiar than I'd like to be with the bureaucratic labyrinth. The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling J.K. Rowling’s first foray into adult fiction sold over two million copies before it was even released. I don't know about over there, but on this side of the pond, we need to use the term "adult fiction" very carefully; it can be a synonym for porn. I believe the implication here is that it's a book about adults written for adults, but even there, I've always resisted the idea that one needs to be in the same demographic as the protagonist in order to enjoy a work of fiction. Given Rowling’s peerless skills as a writer, a high drop-off rate is likely the result of readers who brought it on the author alone – in fruitless search of some Harry Potter magic. Okay, well, first of all, "peerless" is overstating the case. She got better over time, sure. She got filthy stinking rich over it, sure (I think that was mostly from movie royalties). But I have my doubts that that's the reason people abandoned the work. I wouldn't know. The Lord Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic ranks among the top bestselling fiction of all time, having shifted over 150 million copies worldwide. But coming in at 576,459 words, devouring it is not a feat for the faint-hearted. It's not always about length. Sometimes, it just doesn't work for a reader, like I said above. I had no issue finishing LoTR (and certainly not the much shorter (pun intended, of course) The Hobbit). Other people have different tastes. Shocking, I know. You know what I couldn't get into? The Silmarillion. Protip for fantasy writers (well, it would be a protip if I were a pro): don't publish your worldbuilding notes. They're boring. Lest you think, "Well, of course, Waltz, you're well-known as a Fantasy reader, what with the newsletter editorials and all," I should note, for full disclosure, that I gave up on Wheel of Time before finishing the first novel in the series; and that it took me longer, but I got tired of Game of Thrones during the... third? Maybe fourth? book. I don't remember exactly. It's not the genre; it's that nothing was really happening. I feel no guilt about either of those abandonments (though I keep thinking I should give WoT another chance because one of my favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson, took over to wrap it up after the original author, Robert Jordan, kicked the bucket). Fifty Shades Of Grey by EL James The bondage bonkbuster is the fastest selling paperback of all time... I'm absolutely stealing "bonkbuster." Despite being a pervert, I have absolutely no interest in even starting this one. Unfinished business here has the telltale signs of those who want to know what the excitement is about but then don’t last the 514 page count. I'm sorry, if you're a regular reader and you can't make it through a measly 514 pages (it can vary, but maybe 150K-175K words), it may well be because the writing sucks. No matter how titillating (I don't know if that's a pun or not) the writing is. Ulysses by James Joyce James Joyce’s most famous work is notoriously difficult to read. Surely no other book has quite so many articles dedicated to how to make your way through it – and yet is still considered a masterpiece. If you need a study guide, it's not a book; it's a text. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville This classic 1851 novel is based around a doomed whaling mission, interweaved with rich symbolism and existential questions on the meaning of life. In an effort to get me reading more highbrow literature when I was a kid, my dad urged me to read that one. Perhaps because he related to it, as a sailor. Maybe he genuinely liked it. And it's not the "classic" status that stops me. Hell, I enjoy reading Shakespeare from time to time, and there are plenty of other books from the 19th century that I found compelling. Only reasons to read it, though, are a) if you're really very quite interested in the techniques and technologies of 19th century whalers, or b) you want to fully understand Wrath of Khan. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir about her quest for identity in the wake of a messy divorce inspired millions of women to hit the road solo on similar pilgrimages of self-discovery. Look, I'm not trying to minimize peoples' personal experiences here. But EPL was hardly the first story in the genre that I call "divorce porn," where some lady, and it's always a woman, gets divorced and then goes to some exotic-to-her location, fucks a native, and decides she's found meaning in life. I've thought about writing the male-protagonist version, but I can't figure out how to do it without it being a satire. But for effective satire, I'd have to read the source material. And I don't wanna. Okay, maybe it's because my ex ran off to Switzerland. Shut up. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Even the hardiest reader might quake in the face of Ayn Rand’s 1,200-page dystopian novel based around a crippling economic crisis faced by millionaire tycoons and their “looter” foes. Perhaps the best example of literary analysis I've seen from this century was a short passage from a blog post made in 2009 by someone named John Rogers (whom I know absolutely nothing else about): “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." Okay, I'm going to cut it off here for time; there are two others on the list, neither of which I really have an opinion about one way or the other. If you gave up on my commentary here, the tldr version is this: Don't be ashamed at giving up on a book, and don't let other people, including me, tell you what you should consider "good" or not. |
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