Wait…There Is A Book I Didn’t Finish And Never Came Back To

People are always talking about books they didn’t finish and never got back to. People have asked me about this, and usually I tell them that I can’t think of any. There were several that took me one or more times to get started into (such as War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time, but I hadn’t been able to think of one that I started and hadn’t finished.

I finally remembered one. “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson” or “An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man” by Gurdjieff. I picked up a copy somewhere around 18 years ago, started into it a bit, and just wandered off. I barely even remembered it until now.

So why didn’t I finish? Why haven’t I returned to it?

Well, it isn’t supposed to be a very good book. It’s long, but so are a lot of things. But, Gurdjieff isn’t rumored to be a particularly good writer. He was a mystic, and his books are important for the mysticism…which is of course hidden in the text. Casual readers supposably read right on by it. The writing, I’ve heard, is crap.

I can’t comment on that, though. I read a little ways into it and got distracted by other things. I wasn’t that interested at that point, but I don’t think I can really comment on the book because I hadn’t gotten that far in. I just wasn’t that interested in it.

Regardless, I did want to mention this because I finally remembered it was a book I started and never finished. There was one I could name after all.