Dud

I don't need to worry about reading as a writer, if I'm not sufficiently interested to read as a reader. I've abandoned, or at least put on hiatus, Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.  I kept thinking "it isn't charming at all," and then thinking, well, Dostoevsky isn't charming, but then I realized all fiction has a duty to be compelling and that duty can be discharged in different ways:  by being intense, or by illuminating of a patch of the human condition, but the way in which "comic" novels are compelling is by being charming. See Nick Hornby, passim. I wasn't laughing and I wasn't quoting anything to E and I wasn't eager for the next sentence.  "Comic" just felt like code for unambitious. Richler's undoubted love for Montreal seemed sentimental, a cliche of the emotions.  The POV choices baffled me, but because I don't care about the book as a reader, I'm not going to study it as a writer. I can be wrong about books, but this is going on the shelf and then to the used book store.    

Comments

[Mandy]

Isn't it great to free yourself from reading as a writer? I've found it so hard to do. Nice defiance, K!

[K]

It is REALLY hard to do. Impossible now that I am reading James Wood. But general, unfollowed rule: if book gives no pleasure, why bother analyzing it?