Reddit mentions of The Family Fang: A Novel

There was a post about this on either /r/books or here a couple months ago. Goodreads made this interesting infographic.

One of the reasons for stopping—"extremely stupid"—cracked me up.

I wish I could find the reddit post on this, but one commenter remembered an interesting "rule" someone had told them: "subtract your age from a 100, and the remainder is the number of pages you should read before dropping the book." I like the idea that the older you are, the more precious your time is, and the better sense you have of your taste and books…therefore, it's cool to drop books a little sooner. But the younger your years and the less your experience? Gotta read a little more before you shut the experience down.

For my two cents—and since your discussion interests me and perhaps mine will interest you—I rarely stop reading books. It's rare to dislike a book so much I won't give it a full run. However, I also note that when deciding what to read, I have a pretty good sense of what books I'll like. But I don't know…is that because I decide in advance that I'm gonna like a book? In which case, I'm a bit of a fraud? Ha, it's something I think about.

A book has to fail in a pretty spectacular way before I give up. I'd have to reach a subjective determination that the whole premise fails or that it lacks thorough inspiration. As an example, this is the last book I gave up on (almost two years ago). I don't read the one-line critic blurbs before I'm done with a book, so after "finishing" my read of this book, I checked out what others thought, and one of the top positive comments summed up the failure for me: "It’s The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’d call The Family Fang a guilty pleasure, but it’s too damn smart….A total blast." In my opinion, that was all the book was—it felt like a failed mock-up of a Wes Anderson narrative. All quirk but no character. And this was its only benefit from my discernment—if you really dig Wes Anderson, this would satisfy your craving like a guilty pleasure.

That said, I didn't think along the lines that the book was bad or poorly written—it just failed at that initial and critical level with me. Sure that's fickle and I'm using the academic criticism equivalent of the nuclear option in chalking something up to mere druthers. But, like I said, it's rare. And in life, I feel there's rare but occasional room for an unexplained subjective "didn't work for me." I hated giving up on this book in this way, because I can't enter thorough discussion or defense on my decision. And I know a team of people worked really hard to make that book, and I don't doubt others could've loved the book. I just felt like reading something else.

Huge disclaimer: I haven't read any of these yet! But I somewhat obsessively keep a list of books I'd like to read, and these are all on there, with the "dysfunctional family" theme in common.

The Middlesteins

The Corrections

The Family Fang

I own the last two, but haven't quite worked down the book pile far enough to reach them :)

I have a few other titles in mind, but these seem to fit your request the best.