His friend Allen Ginsburg, on the other hand, a good man, admirable in so may ways (expecially for Kaddish), was something of a gasbag, not big on rewriting, and reading his Collected Poems is like hiking across North Dakota. I stopped just beyond Fargo.
Should bad books be finished
Should one finish a book that you aren’t enjoying? I often do. I think I do it out of guilt more than anything. What is stanger still to me, is that I will often pick up another book by the same author a year later and see if the next book is as bad. In some cases this has worked as I really like “Red Mars”, “Green Mars”, “Blue Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson, while I loathed “The Years of Rice and Salt.”
There are so many good books, I probably shouldn’t finish books I hate. It’s not that I think it will get better just around the corner. It’s that I don’t want to be a quitter. If it’s really stinko, I’ll skim. When it’s over I’ll know the character went to Prague, but I won’t remember exactly why.
I am reminded of something I both heard and read Garrison Keillor say when he was talking about which poems he had included and excluded from his anthology “Good Poems.”
