books it took me more than one attempt to get through...
Submitted by kbuxton on Tue, 02/20/2001 - 09:58
Tags:
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea
- Gerald's Game by Stephen King
Author Comments:
Gerald's Game would be the exception in that while I finally forced myself to finish it, I'd never ever ever re-read it and definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
Cool list! I'd create a similar one of my own, but the only book I can think of at the moment is The Silmarillion by Tolkien. While I loved The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, The Simarillion stymied me on my first attempt. However, as I later found out, after you muscle your way through the first quarter or so, it ends up being very enjoyable. I'd recommend it.
The Silmarillion would go on the list of "started once but never went back to" books. I suppose I wasn't sufficiently interested to muscle my way through it. Or perhaps my friend's theory that if you read the Lord of the Rings trilogy before age 12 you'll be able to make it through The Silmarillion, otherwise you won't, is correct.
Good theory. I qualify, which probably explains it. A friend of mine put it this way: "Are you crazy?! You can't just read it. You need a strategy. You have to reward yourself for each successful page read. I used chocolate chips. After about a bag or two, you'll be far enough in that you won't need them anymore."
Dagnabbit! I hate it when I forget to login! I just changed the UI to make it more idiot-proof (and caused a couple server errors in the process, making me feel even stupider).
Talking about the UI.. I'm now just curious what'll happen when this goes all the way to the right margin ;)
It'll get really really scrunched. Elegant, huh?
Actually, I went over to Slashdot and looked at a bunch of their discussions, and noticed that they generally didn't thread much deeper than 3 or 4 levels, so figured I'd be fairly safe (and I was, until now :)
slashdot definitely has a high volume of stuff.. but in my experience there's just SO much stuff on there that none of the threads get followed up to very many times because there's so much other stuff to comment on.
So the question is, do I change the UI to better accommodate this level of threading, or do I assume it will be the exception rather than the rule, and leave it as is? I like the fact that I can view and read all the comments on one page, rather than clicking a subject to read the rest, which is why I opted for this implementation (not to mention the fact that I haven't been collecting subjects, which would make implementing a subject-click-to-content approach problematic). But even if we agree it should be changed, I'm not really sure how I would do it.
I like being able to view them all as well..
and it probably is the exception, i was just curious what happened :)
Though I didn't come up with it, I have done much to popularize its spread. Matt Williams introduced me to it, I'll ask him where he got it the next time he's sober.
note: he's talking about the silmarillion theory.