reading habits
Whether or not I abandon an author depends on when, in reading his work, I encounter a bad book. I read a lot of Italo Calvino's work and loved all of it until I ran across Difficult Loves, which was a collection of fragments as opposed to real stories. Still haven't finished that one. Oh but I liked his stuff so much I kept reading his other books, then I encountered The Castle Of Crossed Destinies, the idea of which I liked immensely. Except the book, well ... haven't finished that one, either. Turns out it's boring. I've since bought two more of his books and look forward to reading them soon. When that's done, it seems I'll have read all of his stuff, and the majority of it is good enough to erase the two that didn't quite work for me.
Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, a quiet little exercise in literary stuttering, so repelled me that I haven't tried White Noise or Libra, though I have copies of both.
David Foster Wallace's Oblivion interested me briefly when someone told me that his writing was a lot like Thomas Pynchon's. Then I read a couple of stories in the collection and thought, egad, have the bestowers of literary merit all gone mad? I was so turned off by the little stories that I've not ventured into Infinite Jest, the first of his titles, and a very big one at that, that I thought I'd read. Turns out I've lost all interest in that one, too.
Then there are authors whose work I like a lot but who get dumped, for a time, because I get tired of their particular formula (when they have one) or approach (when they don't seem to have one -- a formula, that is). Raymond Chandler and Philip K Dick come to mind. I read a dozen of Dick's books, then quit because I started noticing variations of the same sorts of characters appearing in different sorts of plots. The effect was somewhat like seing your favorite actors in back-to-back-to-back movies, and though their costumes, circumstances, and indeed characters, changed from movie to movie, well, the same people were still behind it all. [If someone knows what I'm talking about, maybe they can explain it to me. That's the explanation I'm stuck with for now.] Raymond Chandler, on the other hand, started boring me for a different kind of sameness in his novels, a more structural kind. I still like what these guys wrote, but find it more refreshing to visit their worlds after vacationing in a few others, first.
So it goes.
