Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Shouldn't Have Bothered Finishing

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! A few weeks ago, we talked about books we didn't like but were glad we'd read anyways. The actual topic for this week are books we decided to stop reading too quickly. I almost never DNF (do/did not finish) my books, but there are some that if I'm being honest with myself, I should have because the book did nothing for me.

Where'd You Go Bernadette: I knew almost as soon as I started reading this that the tone was a mismatch for me. That never changed.

Bonfire of the Vanities: I'd previously read and hated Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and I should have bailed when I started this and realized within like 50 pages I hated this too. Instead I read the whole thing and hated every second of it.

On Trails: I've actually got a pretty rocky history with the books my book club reads, but I love the group so much so I stick with it. This was last month's read, and the scattered way the information was presented was something that annoyed me pretty quickly and then just never stopped annoying me. This is a minority opinion, though...my book club overwhelming liked it!

The Sisters Chase: This was another book club selection and holy smokes it was awful from the first page all the way to the last. This time everyone else in book club agreed.

Sophia of Silicon Valley: If you're going to like this book, you have to really be rooting for the titular Sophia and given that I thought she was terrible from the jump...it did not work out well.

Vinegar Girl: The gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew are hard to update to the modern world, and the wit and snap that would make it work do not materialize. Skip this egregiously bad book and watch 10 Things I Hate About You.

The Witches of Eastwick: The movie version of this book is a cheesy 80s delight with some genius casting. The book, which I was surprised to find out was written by the legendary John Updike, was a dull, tortured plod and never got good.

The Circle: I was so excited for this book before I read it...a 1984 for the social media generation? Sign me up! But then it fell SO. FLAT. Lazy characterization, clunky dialogue, and the least interesting plot choices made. Though I'm always honest when asked for my opinions, it's very rare I'll actively discourage someone from reading a book. This is one of the few exceptions.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Two Eggers in a row...my practice with any given author is that if one book doesn't work for me, it's just as likely to be a weaker offering or just the wrong book at the wrong time as it is to be that I'll never like that author. Two, though, and I give up. Why I made myself suffer through this simultaneously anxious and boring book before I wrote off Eggers for myself I can't quite understand.

Dune: This space opera hits like 100% insanity right away and I do better when there's a little more world-building first.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Shouldn't Have Bothered Finishing

Book 51: The Witches of Eastwick

 
"There was so much dirt in life, so many eraser crumbs and stray coffee grounds and dead wasps trapped inside the storm windows, that it seemed all of a person's time- all of a woman's time, at any rate- was spent in reallocation, taking things from one place to another, dirt being as her mother had said simply matter in the wrong place."

Dates read: May 8-11, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

Sometimes I feel like a fake "serious reader". Which is the most ridiculous first world problem, I know. But there are so many of the classics, so many high-profile novelists, that I haven't read: Murakami, The Count of Monte Cristo, Faulkner, Catch-22. And until now, John Updike. But a secondhand copy of The Witches of Eastwick, which I'd seen the very cheesy 80s movie version of quite some time ago and enjoyed watching, came into my path and I decided it was time to cross that one off my list.

And this is one of those instances where (at least for my money), the movie was better than the book. They both have a similar setup: three socially outcast women living in a small town in Rhode Island become involved with a mysterious stranger, Daryl Van Horn, who comes to town and chaos ensues. In the movie, the women become witches under Daryl's satanic influence, and band together to turn against him when he causes harm. But that's not where the book goes. The book is much darker, and it suffers for it. When you're dealing with heavy stuff like magic and death and the devil, you need a little levity to keep it from dragging.

When Updike opens his novel, the three women (Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie) are already witches. A widow and two divorcees in a small town in the early 1960s, they are outside the conservative social order and each others' only real friends. They aren't especially nice people: they frequently behave spitefully, none of them are at all involved in their children's lives, and are all sleeping with married men. When Daryl Van Horn, the devil hisownself, arrives in town, he doesn't imbue them with power as much as heighten their ambition (and start having orgies with them, of course, because that's apparently what the devil does). While all of the women have romantic designs on Daryl on some level, they share him relatively peacefully until a younger woman, Jenny, joins their group and eventually succeeds in becoming Mrs. Van Horn. The witches are jealous and band together to use their magic to kill her. Van Horn then skips town with Jenny's younger brother and the women each, eventually, conjure up a good man and themselves depart Eastwick.

Like I said earlier, it's a lot of pretty heavy material without much to lighten it up. The women have some small moments of sympathy, but are largely negative people that aren't very enjoyable to read about. You would think that the literal devil would be a compelling character, at least. He's supposed to be interesting, right? Not as Updike writes him. Daryl is never written as even particularly physically attractive, much less the charismatic wily schemer you would expect the Prince of Darkness to be. There was no one to care about, much less identify with or root for. Updike's writing is good (if you're into the flowery-language-and-run-on-sentences kind of writing, which I tend to be), but the story falls completely flat.

Because I didn't like the book, I spent much less time thinking about it and its plot as a story and more time wondering if I thought this was, as it is usually considered, a feminist work. On the one hand, you have women who are close friends, who have discovered and own their power, who have the sex lives they want to have, who are not defined by their motherhood, and who are unapologetic for any of this. While we're often presented with narratives about men who behave in an antisocial manner and asked to consider them the heroes of the story, The Witches of Eastwick is a rare example of this phenomenon for female characters. On the other hand, they aren't given many redeeming features, either: they aren't funny or really all that interesting, they're petty, and they're driven to a murderous jealous rage over...a man. Their "happy endings" only come when they've each found themselves...a man. I think on the balance, it's more feminist than not, but I will qualify that by saying that Updike writes terribly about the experience of being a woman. When he writes about sex or menses, it's cringeworthy. And even if it's mostly feminist, that doesn't mean I have to like it. I didn't, and I wouldn't recommend it. It's just not fun to read.

Tell me, blog friends...what major works or authors haven't you read yet?

One year ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 51: The Witches of Eastwick