As I've written before, the only novels I've ever quit halfway through — "quit" being something more definitive than "stopped reading but plan to pick up again someday" — are A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Gump & Co.

I don't think that has anything to do with their difficulty. I've read Gravity's Rainbow and The Ambassadors and enough other classics to feel secure in my reader cred. And I've read Spares and Desperation, which proves that I can turn off my brain if the book so requires.

I hate you, Maxine Hong Kingston. Or rather, I hate The Fifth Book of Peace: it's boring, it's excessively preachy, it's narcissistic, and the politics embedded in the book are alternately disturbing (she implies that the victims of the Oakland fires deserved to burn in their homes for supporting the first Gulf War) or irritating — in an unconscionable moment of political correctness, she writes that "the waitperson is a Black woman my age."

The capital-B in "black" is an added insult.

So now there are three books I can't finish. I tried, for hours I tried, and I can't slog through this crap. Or pap, rather, because critics can recognize crap. The Fifth Book of Peace got good reviews.

Staring a website soon where I can stick this stuff. I've been planning this for a while, and it seems like a good project for next term.