I commented somewhere

I made a comment on Adam K's blog that I'd like to ruminate some more on here. Here's my comment re Eugenides' Middlesex:

am I the only one who has already attempted to read it? I guess I am part of a small percentile that didn't get into it. Maybe all the junky pop fiction I've been reading since graduation is affecting my tastes. Since college, any time I can't get into a book by a certain time, I give up and read a new one. I do give books a good amount of time to grab my attention and interest, but sometimes, they just don't.

The last great book I read was "The Known World" by Edward Jones. That is greatness.

And I think you all would be interested in "Erasure", about a black professor who writes a blaxploitation book as a joke, and it goes on to win awards and acclaim.

Before I graduated from college, I felt that I had to read a book. Even if I felt that I wasn't getting into it, even if I thought it was bad, I would finish it. I guess I felt that I had started it, so I should finish it. Now I just stop. It's my time I'm wasting, and I don't owe anyone the responsibility of reading a book I don't like. I make the attempt, at least.

I do, however, also have a bad habit of buying books I read parts of, and putting them away for later. I have done this with Soul Mountain and Caramelo, along with other books. I really should get to finishing them.

More than a couple of times I have read a book a third of the way through before I realized I had already read it. Luckily, this doesn't happen frequently. It's annoying.

edit: Erasure really is a terrific satire on race and publishing in America. It's funny, and it hurts, at the same time. Here's a bit of the synopsis:

Avant-garde novelist and college professor, woodworker, and fly fisherman — Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African-American, he is offended and angered by the success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African-American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. Her book’s success rankles all the more as Monk’s own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. Forced to assume responsibility for a mother rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer’s, Monk leaves his home in Los Angeles to return to the Washington, DC, house in which he grew up. There he must come to terms with his ailing mother, his siblings, his own childhood and youth, and the legacy of his physician father, a suicide some seven years before. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk — or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh — is offered money, fame, success beyond anything Monk has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.

I read it a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely.

I have to point out that it makes a big deal about "African-American fiction" as a genre, and I saw it in that section at Borders. It was somewhat ironic.