Some books never make the  TBR, though I have owned them for years. I shiver with apprehension every time I look at them, and yet I cannot give them away because they might make me wittier or thinner, or provide escape reading in February, the month devoted to The Green Hat and Terry Pratchett.   

Kathy Acker’s Don  Quixote was published in 1986. Neither my spouse nor I remember buying it. It’s as though it grew from the shelf like one of the pods in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Though I have tried to read it several times, I am repulsed by her profane, potty-mouthed, post-modern  prose. And yet reading it would make me  hip and fabulous, because Acker is the Patti Smith, or is it the William Burroughs? of “punk” literature. 

Acker was relentlessly hip, and her writing relentlessly dull.  In this boisterous little novel, a female Don Quixote has an abortion and then travels with dogs across America and London, meditating on the insane cultures.  There is  one amusing bit:  Quixote believes that Prince should be the president of the United States, because “all the presidents since World War II have been stupid anyway.”  He would have been better at show biz than Reagan, an actor.

Acker’s prose is awkward.  “Don Quixote decided the only thing was to be happy.  Since the only reason she went out of the house was to fuck, she decided that to be happy’s to fuck.”

But isn’t that clumsy writing? 

Edna Ferber is an underrated, once popular, writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her novel, So Big, a page-turner about the struggles of a successful woman farmer and her worthless son.  Not surprisingly, Ferber never attained the kudos of comparable male Pulitzer winners, like Sinclair Lewis and  Booth Tarkington. 

I discovered Ferber’s historical novels when I found a Ferber omnibus at a sale.  She reminds me slightly of Willa Cather, and I’m surprised Ferber is not in the women’s sub-canon, if not the traditional academic canon.  I enjoyed her novel Showboat, which was made into a Broadway musical and movie. And her melodramatic, fascinating novel, Giant, which was adapted as movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, traces the drama and dysfunction of an unhappy, rich oil family in Texas. 

But there is one Ferber’s novel I cannot read, Cimmaron.

Cimmaron is, in a way, a Western, set during the Oklahoma Gold Rush. I read 125 pages, but the dreary landscape undid me In every scene, Oklahoma is dry and dusty, or muddy and dirty, and if I remember correctly, there are boards instead of sidewalks. 

It is culture shock for Sabra, a young woman from a Southern family, who follows her husband, Yancey, a lawyer, into the wilds, because he wants the free land: there is “a land rush.”  Sabra has the impossible task of turning of shack into a home, while Yancey, a lawyer, has to prove himself to their rough neighbors.  And everybody has a gun. Nobody in Oklahoma in Cimmaron ever thought of gun control. 

Depressing, yes? But will I finish Cimmaron in 2024?

It does feel like the time of year when I should read a historical novel.

Richard Garnett’s biography, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life, is, in many ways, an appealing book. Fans of Russian literature will be curious about Constance Garnett, the famous early translator of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.

Her grandson, Richard Garnett, has written a thorough, if plodding, biography, with fascinating source material, including letters from Chekhov and Tolstoy.

It’s the size of the pages I don’t like,  This attractive paperback has oversized pages crammed with print.  Mjnd you, it’s not the size of the print so much as the size of the pages. But I might finish this in the summer, when the natural light is brighter, and it will seem more readable..

Do you hang on to books you positively dislike or will never read? Do tell.