Jamieson Ridenhour

One of the irritating things about people more clever than I (aside from their seeming ubiquity) is that they often say the same thing I said but in a much better way. Back in June I rambled for a while about how I didn’t think books would be replaced by other text media. In this month’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton talks much more eloquently about the same topic in an article called “Yearning After Books.” He writes his article in the helpful form of a survey of the surprising number of recent books that take up the subject in various ways. Among the others things Benton notes is my own point that a love of books has as much to do with materiality as it does with content.

The point that hit home the most for me was a quote from Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night: “The birth of a new technology need not mean the death of an earlier one: The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader’s desk.” That seems to be the case. As Benton notes, the much-heralded “death of the book” has not happened and looks likely not to. The fact that we keep obsessing on the book’s imminent demise doesn’t mean it is actually imminent. That’s a good thing.

Interesting question over at :

What, in your opinion, is the best book that you haven’t liked? Mind you, I don’t mean your most-hated book–oh, no. I mean the most accomplished, skilled, well-written, impressive book that you just simply didn’t like.

Like, for movies–I can acknowledge that Citizen Kane is a tour de force and is all sorts of wonderful, cinematically speaking, but . . . I just don’t like it. I find it impressive and quite an accomplishment, but it’s not my cup of tea.

So . . . what book (or books) is your Citizen Kane?

Having been asked to read lots of books during grad school, you’d think that something would leap out at me as fitting this category. Not much jumps out, though. If a book is well-written, I usually like it. I rarely quit a book unfinished, though I’ve done it twice this summer–once with This is Your Brain on Music and once with Michael Ruhlman’s House: A Memoir. Both of those had to do with the pressures of other books, my writing schedule, and just not being in the space for the sort of things those books were doing. They both sit on the shelf in my bedroom (the “soon-to-be-read” shelf), awaiting their turn.

It’s a different thing to ask what book I have finished but didn’t like, but that was also well-written. I’ve disliked plenty of books because they were badly done–poor characterization, boring, poorly proofread, etc. And I’ve occasionally been irritated by books that I liked–see my previous post on Stephanie Meyers, or take a look at The Good Fairies of New York, by Martin Millar. Millar’s book is a great, fun romp, but it looks like it was proof-read by monkeys. I’ve never seen a book with so many basic grammatical errors or outright typos.

None of which answers the question. My first impulse was to say Moby-Dick, which I recognize as important and in some ways brilliant, but which I really disliked reading. Even listening to it on tape, as I did when I had to read it for a Romanticism class at Western Carolina, I hated it. Melville needed a really good editor; by excising a good half of the novel, we could have had a tightly constructed adventure novel that still had room for philosophical musings and existential crises. Instead, I know each step of butchering a whale, a skill which I can’t see myself needing in North Dakota, where whales are thin on the ground.

I’m going to go with another book, though. I read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse in a 20th century novel course at USC, and I felt like I had been robbed of the time. I’ve never really cottoned to modernist stream-of-consciousness styles, and that may be what prevented me from liking it. I like some other Woolf–Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, though that’s also stream-of-consciousness–but I just hated To the Lighthouse. I appreciate its importance, and I can see why it’s considered a masterpiece. I’m just grateful I don’t have to read it again. Tedious, tedious stuff.