This week’s cover considers the historical influence of books and literature. But with so many books, there’s never enough time. In 1984, the Book Review asked a handful of writers, including Jean Strouse and Eudora Welty, about some of the “great books” they never finished. Read an excerpt below.
Jean Strouse, author of “Alice James: A Biography.” The book I’ve often hauled along to beaches and mountains and have never managed to make much headway in is James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” I can’t even say something clever about it now because I haven’t ever got past page 20. I do remember the first time I heard its name. I was 15. My family lived in West Los Angeles, and I spent a lot of time that year browsing in local bookstores with a friend who seemed very sophisticated. In those bookstores I was drawn as if by pheromone to New Directions paperbacks — they had about them irresistible intimations of New York coffeehouses, French cigarettes, bare mattresses on cold floors and major depression. One day my learned friend pulled a volume called “Finnegans Wake” off the shelf and asked if I’d read it. I tried to look knowing as I shook my head and temporized — “Not yet” — wondering why he of all people would be interested in a fat book about sailing.
Eudora Welty, author of “One Writer’s Beginnings.” It doesn’t enter my mind not to finish reading a book I’ve once started, whether it’s a classic or any other kind. I persist and might do so out of habit alone, but the act of reading is itself vital to me and carries me along — it sparks its own hope and curiosity. Certainly disappointment comes along in the course of reading many a book, but this isn’t fatal — if I may limit this to the reading of fiction. And then I should add that contemporary fiction keeps its hold on me till the end because of my sympathy as a writer for another writer’s welfare. I once literally threw away a new novel I’d brought along to read on a voyage to Europe, but not without finishing it first. Had I chucked that novel into the Atlantic without having read the whole of it through, I could have thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
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