July 2023: What are you reading?

Happy holiday weekend to our Canadian and American members! What 1001 books are you reading to start off the second half of the year?

I am (still) reading Clarissa and have gotten stuck on All About H. Hatterr, so will probably start The Passion of New Eve soon.

On audio I'm listening to the second book in Dos Passos' USA trilogy. If I'd known this was going to involve reading three whole books, I might never have started. I'll have to do a lot of walking (which is when I listen) in the coming month.

On paper I'm reading the group read, The Sorrow of Belgium.

>2 ELiz_M: I have to warn you that I found Passion of the New Eve unbearable, and I quite liked other things by her.

I am 65 letters in to Clarissa, which is a very small dent. I also started Slow Man.

I have to say that it was a mistake to read two extremely long and largely plotless books at the same time.

I've finished Eclipse of the Crescent Moon. Who knew I'd mostly enjoy a 500 page novel about the Turks attempt to conquer Hungary, with over half the book set during a siege?

And then there is Stone Junction which read like a less amorphous Pynchon book.

I made an earnest attempt to read Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony but I cannot do it. It's too much like my work. The intro is by Michel Foucault, Freud loved this book, and I have examined way too many paintings of this subject. The first 30 pages of the book reminded me of the paintings. After that, it became too theological, which again was like work. I enjoy reading challenging books but they should be different from my work!

Has anybody read this with pleasure? It gets great reviews on this site and Goodreads, but I suspect that nobody reads it who is not already very inclined to like it.

How much of a book do you have to get through to count it as read? I rarely stop reading so I don't have a rule.

>7 annamorphic: If you've read enough to know you are never going to finish it, I think that counts as read.

I'm still reading Clarissa, but I'm not really enjoying it. So repetitive!

>9 japaul22: Same here.

>7 annamorphic: I don’t have a hard and fast rule about how much of a book I have to read to cross it off the list. I would count it read if you tried it and read enough to know it’s not for you.

I'm doing a reread of Catcher in the Rye because someone gifted it to me. It had been a long time since I read it originally; I was maybe about the same age as Holden so I thought he was pretty sophisticated since he drank cocktails and called everyone phonies. This time around I am mostly feeling sorry for him. It's interesting what a difference time can make to a reading experience.

>8 ELiz_M: That feels so liberating! I usually love Gabriel Garcia Marquez but I just can't read his novella Autumn of the Patriarch: repetitive, with no punctuation, line spaces or chapters and about a detestable character, ugh! it's terrible! I appreciate the aesthetics of it but that's about it :(