Giving Up

This is in response to a family member's blog post: six books I couldn't put down; six books that I have put down or on hold or just haven't gotten back to; six I made myself finish no matter how agonizing.

First, six books I couldn't put down:

1-Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

2-Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (I'm embarrassed to admit) by J. K. Rowling.

3-Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

4-The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

5-The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

6-Man vs. Machine: Kasparov vs. Deep Blue by Raymond Keene and Tony Buzan

7-The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata (I know I was only supposed to do six, but I had to throw this one in.)

six books that I have put down or on hold or just haven't gotten back to

1-The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (too hippy-dippy-trippy. "The air hung as shiny as candy"? Is this guy just trying to give us a taste of an acid trip or what? This may have been one book that I actually physically threw across the room. I can't remember now.)

2-To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist's History of Lunar Exploration by Don E. Wilhelms (Great book, but it is a tome. Not exactly light reading. I started to get lost in some of the technical geology. But, man! good book. I hope to get back to it someday.)

3-The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved & Why Numbers Are Like Gossip by Keith Devlin.

4-Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (picked it up in High School having heard that it is an important book. My biggest mistake was reading the *lengthy* preface by some Ph.D. discussing minutiae such as what the actual streets may have been that Dostoevsky refers to. I was so exhausted by the time I got through the preface that I put it down and haven't been back to it. Maybe someday.)

5-Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (never again will I pick up a Dan Brown book.)

6-The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis (It is my impression that everything worth saying that Lewis says in his Christian apology, he says better in his fiction. I don't plan to come back to it.)

six I made myself finish no matter how agonizing.

1-Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov (Actually it's a stretch to say I finished this. I skimmed the final chapters. Isacc Asimov in his twenties was brilliant. This book has two major flaws: 1) all of Asimov's books from this era (including this one) have the theme of beautiful female androids whose only goal in life is to bring pleasure to an aging academic and 2) this book attempts to tie together (perhaps this is slight hyperbole) *all* of Asimov's previous fictional works.)

2-Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling (did anything happen in this book? I don't remember anything happening.)

3-Bambi: A Life in the Woods by Felix Salten (very Freudian)

4-Dune by Frank Herbert (Did anything happen in this book? I must have missed the point entirely.)

5-The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning by David Chilton

6-The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown (I could write children's books better than this.)