Are the Great Novels worth it?

To finish or not to finish? The dilemma of whether to give up on books we aren’t enjoying or plough on to the end lasts a lifetime, but as we grow older it gets easier. We not only have less time, but also the increased confidence to decide that if a great novel isn’t engaging us, it’s possibly the book’s fault. What does it really matter if Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain defeats us, or Finnegan’s Wake sends us to sleep? We’ve survived much worse than that. 

But in youth, such things torment you, and the more highly regarded the novel, the greater your shame in abandoning it. You still labour under the fallacy there are novels and writers out there you have to have read – Sartre, Beckett, the Odyssey, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and even (God help us) Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities – and the workload is crushing. In my teens and twenties, surveying all the famous books out there, I had a fantasy of being locked in an empty room with one volume a week, someone occasionally feeding me M&S ready meals through a slot in the door, so that I could emerge a year or so later feeling like George Steiner.