I Give Up: I did something I very rarely do but should do more often, and that is to stop reading a book before I finish it. There have been plenty of books in my life that I continued to slog my way through because I felt a duty to finish what I started. Why? What exactly is the pretext for continuing a book if you cease to be interested in it? Life's too short, isn't it? It might be because I felt like I would have wasted my money if I didn't. This month I found two books for free online, and in both cases I decided not to finish them. We'll see if I ever do this for a something I actually purchase.

You can get Kafka's Metamorphosis just about anywhere online (it's lived way past any copyright expiration) but Gutenberg.org is as good a place as any. I feel silly describing the story because if you are familiar with literature you know that it's about a man who wakes up one morning and finds he is a gigantic insect, if you didn't know that, well, how silly would I sound describing it to you?

Generations of serious readers have drawn all sorts of inspiration from it and discovered all sorts of meaning and symbolism in it. Haruki Murakami, whom I wrote about last month, is certainly one of them. I don't doubt there is depth there to be found, but it turns out I can't be bothered with a book unless I can get into the story and the characters. No one in the book seemed very human; they all came across as merely dramatic devices, not actual people. Anyway, after a couple of chapters I felt no compulsion whatsoever to keep going. Maybe if I was younger and my tastes were in the formative stage I might have hauled through it and tried to take it to heart. As it stands, I'll probably just have to make it through life unable to engage anyone in a serious discussion about Kafka. Pity.

The other book was one I recall having been assigned in a 10th grade English class, not reading, and faking my way through the subsequent exam -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. It's available at something called VirtualSchool.com and there is a ton of background info on a nicely done wiki.

It is only superficially about motorcycle maintenance and it is only marginally about Zen Buddhism. It is intended to be a philosophical tract about the conflict of deterministic and the intuitive, the romantic and the classical, and how it resolves into a search for value. During a road trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco, the author uses his interaction with his companions, his motorcycle and the landscape as a springboard for a series of explorations (which he calls "Chautauquas") along these lines.

Approaching the book again in adulthood, it held some promise. The framework is a story about his relations with his companions, his son, and his history of mental illness, which was reasonably interesting (again, I find myself mainly looking at story and characters). He was also doing a decent job as a travel writer.

But, oh the philosophical diatribes! It was strictly adolescent level stuff (I now understand why it was assigned in 10th grade) blown way out of proportion and loaded down with pomposity. That combined with his annoying habit of picking apart every word and action of his companions and turning it into some sort of character flaw, well the whole thing just put me in mind of another book I once read that had a mildly interesting story that was completely crushed by philosophical obesity: Atlas Shrugged. I did force myself to finish Atlas Shrugged many years ago. Not so Zen.... I was done with it after finish maybe one third. That, my friends, is wisdom ascendant.