So, I’ve decided to read Infinite Jest. Then Ulysses. Then Fictions (by Borges). Then, if I’m still breathing, I’ll attempt Finnegan’s Wake.
It’s been nice knowing you guys.
Sorry, I thought this was gonna be a reference to a story I saw on the news recently about a headline reading “Book-Worm Squashed”. Some compulsive collector was killed when a number of stacks of magazines, newspapers, and books that were filling his living space fell over on him. Don’t remember for sure, but with a headline like that, it was probably the Post.
I dunno, you might be able to slash your wrists with a book. Those paper cuts can be murder.
why not drown on Melville’s Moby Dick? 5-pages on trimming the sails? Thats enough to kill any good Privateer!
Or you could read the Mahabharata, considered to be the world’s longest epic.
You want depressing? Try Hemingway or Steinbeck.
I’m with you: Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” was a cakewalk compared to reading Moby Dick (which I never finished).
At least Gadfly’s trying to end it all with real literature. I nearly killed myself completing “The DaVinci Code”, only because it was so awful. I mean, why is this book so popular? It reads like a first draft of a novel (the prologue has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 4.9). This sentence struck me as funny while checking the prologue’s readability:
“The man tilted his head, peering down the barrel of his gun.”
Hee hee hee. Really? Why would the assassin turn the gun on himself and peer down the barrel? To see if there was a round chambered? You can of course peer over the sights of the gun, or even lower the gun to look at someone, but since you are already pointing the gun right at them, why is any of that necessary? It’s just a literary device. :smack:
If anyone wants to read a conspiracy novel they can’t finish on a long flight read Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”.
That almost happened to me once. A bookshelf in my bedroom abruptly collapsed under its own weight and dumped about a hundred pounds of books on my pillow… while I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed.
Fifteen minutes later, and I’d have been having a truly embarrassing funeral.
May I third the sentiment?
He wasn’t killed, just trapped for two days.
I started that years ago. Every now and then I read another page.
I’m finding that it makes absolutely no difference in keeping my place in the narrative.
I liked Moby Dick …
And I suffered a flesh wound the other night, when a chunk of the Unread Pile fell on my foot.
Hey, I’ve read it and I’m still here.
Reading it in the original Sanskrit, though - there’s a challenge.
Arr ye landlubbers. I laugh at 5 pages on trimming sails. But Chapter 42 on “whiteness”…hand me the razor boy.
Hey, why not throw Gravity’s Rainbow and Bleak House in there? Welcome to Hell, kid.
I’ve tried to read Heart of Darkness on three occasions - and for some reason can’t get all the way through it. And it’s such a tiny little book, too.
My wife started to read that a few months ago. That book must be meant to be read aloud, it is a surreal experience hearing it.
I also liked Moby, although the chapter on cutting fat from the whale’s body did dull the impact of Ahab’s madness.
And to think I actually held you in high esteem.
Lost a leg, eh?
I’ve 'ad worse. (Specifically, The Ginger Man.)
Meh. For Dickens-assisted suicide, I invite you to try Dombey and Son. You’ll be looking forward to the illustrations just because it means there’s one less page to read.
Another confessor here of not getting through Moby Dick.
I think I came awfully close to passing out from heatstroke when I moved to my current apartment, during the summer of 2001. Lugging my library of about 2000 books (plus all my other crap) really took a toll on me. That the new apartment was stiffling hot didn’t help matters. Finally, I just stepped into the shower and stood under cold water for about twenty minutes.