|
I pride myself on the fact that, due to my love of reading, it's rare that I ever put a book down and never pick it back up. I usually tend to perceiver to the end, no matter how bad the book, which is possibly the only reason I've been able to get through anything written by Terry Brooks. I am bothered by the fact, though, that one book that I simply couldn't get through was Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. It's not that I necessarily felt it was a bad book as much as I felt it was a disjointed set of perverse rants which, according to Burroughs introduction, it pretty much was. I realize the importance of the work as basically having been the foundation for a lot of Burroughs later works, but I simply couldn't go on through it after I got about two-hundred pages in; ultimately, I simply didn't care. I may go back and finish it just so I can, but I admit the prospect doesn't really hold that much interest to me. Anyone else have any books that they've been unable to finish, despite knowing they probably should?
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 06:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 09:03 |
|
|
House of Leaves. As soon as he started rambling about that stripper named Thumper I just tossed the book across the room. Anything by Jane Austen "Quite! Indeed!"
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 07:57
|
|
|
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Hated every single character. Kovacs or whatever his name was, was obviously just a case of author's wish fulfilment.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 12:30
|
|
|
I made it through the first two books in the series, but I gave up on Robin Hobb's Farseer series in the third, Assassin's Quest. I read a lot, and I like non-generic fantasy a great deal, but while I don't want the books I read to be (to paraphrase Mystery Science Theater 3000) magical wonderlands of Fru-Fru bunnies, I don't want them to be horrible depressing melodramas either. Which is basically what I feel Hobb does. Basically nothing good ever happens for the main character, his life is pretty much constant bruising after bruising. I don't really care if he abruptly gets a happy ending 3 books from now, the fact is I don't really enjoy this sort of constant depressing stuff. I don't know, I find it totally different from A Song of Ice and Fire, which while frequently incredibly sad and depressing, at least has breaks in which likable characters are occasionally happy.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 13:19
|
|
|
Atlas Shrugged, a friend recommended it to me (before I knew who Ayn Rand was), I got twenty pages in before I realized it was a massive pile of poo poo. I'm also no longer friends with that person. She was a huge douche.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 14:09
|
|
|
I'm struggling with the Martin "A Song of Fire and Ice" series mentioned above me. It seems like there are moments of brilliance speckled into the books but for the most part it just seems like fantasy reader-torture porn. No, I don't mean like Terry Goodkind. I mean he basically tortures the reader. It's like he set out beforehand and wrote an amazing back story for the material then decided to treat every single character like poo poo and see how long the reader will tolerate it. I get why people like it because there are spots where you forget the dreariness and dread of "Who will get raped, lose an arm or be savagely murdered for no reason?". To me those spots are too few and far between. I stopped on the second or third book I think, I don't know if I'll go back since I hear it just gets worse in terms of what I dislike about it.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 14:17
|
|
|
A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin. Really enjoyed A Game of Thrones, and this one was chugging along pretty well with some good build up, interesting characterization, and some nice mockery of traditional fantasy tropes. And then Renly Baratheon gets killed randomly by an evil magical shadow. I must've reread that paragraph about ten times to make sure I was reading it correctly. The random insertion of a magical "the plot has to go this way, sorry character you were enjoying reading about!" into a pretty much non-magical world really just killed it for me... Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 14:21 on May 8, 2008 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 14:17
|
|
|
The first Wheel of Time book. I bought it a few years after it came out, and initially I was just too young to get it so I put it down. Then I tried over and over again and usually gave up around the 400 page mark after nothing continued to happen. I keep thinking I should go back and give it a shot, but now that Jordan's dead and it might never be finished I honestly just don't want to bother. Also Song of Fire and Ice. I got maybe two thirds through the first book, put it down for some reason, and I can't be fussed to pick it back up. It just wasn't all that engaging for me. Well written, certainly, but it didn't grab me like I wanted it to. Also it seemed like every time I started to really like a section, he'd then jump around to someone I couldn't give a poo poo about and make me read about them for 50 pages.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 14:23
|
|
|
Ulysses- I tried to read it, I really did, but I either would fall asleep (which I never do when reading), or get a huge headache when I would attempt to read it. It was just such a difficult read, and made no sense to me, that I couldn't justify spending the time trying to wrap my head around what was going on. I know it's supposed to be one of the pinnacle novels, but I can't say a book is a masterpiece when many people can't even read it because of it's difficulty.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 15:17
|
|
|
Spoilers Below posted:The random insertion of a magical "the plot has to go this way, sorry character you were enjoying reading about!" into a pretty much non-magical world really just killed it for me... The point is that magic exists, albeit rare. This makes the presence of magic that much more jarring and odd. I mean, the very first prologue of the very first book has people coming back from the dead as wights after fighting an otherworldly ethereal being. Don't get me wrong, parts of Ice & Fire drive me nuts and made me want to stop reading (namely Bran and Sansa chapters) but there are too many good parts for me to stop. As for books I couldn't get through, Catch 22 is mine. I liked the wit and humor, but it got so bleak and the storyline got so repetitive that I just couldn't pay attention anymore.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 16:58
|
|
|
The Gunslinger posted:I'm struggling with the Martin "A Song of Fire and Ice" series mentioned above me. It seems like there are moments of brilliance speckled into the books but for the most part it just seems like fantasy reader-torture porn. No, I don't mean like Terry Goodkind. I mean he basically tortures the reader. It's like he set out beforehand and wrote an amazing back story for the material then decided to treat every single character like poo poo and see how long the reader will tolerate it. I get why people like it because there are spots where you forget the dreariness and dread of "Who will get raped, lose an arm or be savagely murdered for no reason?". To me those spots are too few and far between. I stopped on the second or third book I think, I don't know if I'll go back since I hear it just gets worse in terms of what I dislike about it. Yeah, Martin comes across as a butcher. It seems like his idea of characterization is to make you like characters just so he can make you go "Yeeuurgh!" when he kills them. Anyway, my answer: Swann's Way by Marcel Proust. AFter three attempts I've made it all of 400 pages into it, but I can never finish it. I always fall asleep. It's beautifully written, it's just so beautiful it puts me to sleep. The literary equivalent of chloroform. Calenth fucked around with this message at 17:21 on May 8, 2008 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 17:16
|
|
|
I'm horrendous with books, I usually drop any book over 200 pages once or twice before I actually get through it. To that end my latest drop was The Road, which I just couldn't stand, it was getting kind of repetitive. I was almost skimming by the end and got through most of it, I don't see the point of finishing. My most dropped is A Tale of Two Cities, I know it's good but poo poo, I don't think I'll ever finish it.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 17:48
|
|
|
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. I've been trying to get through it for the lsat few months, but it's so hard to follow and so massive that I don't really think there's a point to finishing it. I'll probably try once I'm done with classes and have free time again.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 18:19
|
|
|
Women's Rights? posted:The first Wheel of Time book. I bought it a few years after it came out, and initially I was just too young to get it so I put it down. Then I tried over and over again and usually gave up around the 400 page mark after nothing continued to happen. I keep thinking I should go back and give it a shot, but now that Jordan's dead and it might never be finished I honestly just don't want to bother. Apparently since he knew he was going to die he gave another writer all his notes and told him how he wanted it to end. I think the only book I started and never finished was The Bible. I'm not religious or anything so that is probably a big factor in that one.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 19:28
|
|
|
Solvency posted:Ulysses- I tried to read it, I really did, but I either would fall asleep (which I never do when reading), or get a huge headache when I would attempt to read it. It was just such a difficult read, and made no sense to me, that I couldn't justify spending the time trying to wrap my head around what was going on. I know it's supposed to be one of the pinnacle novels, but I can't say a book is a masterpiece when many people can't even read it because of it's difficulty. If you want to give it another shot, I'd suggest reading Harry Blamires' _New Bloomsday Book_ as a guide. It's basically a plot summary for each chapter, explaining what's going on formally. It gives you a good literal foundation of just what the hell is going on. Pretty essential, I think, especially your first time through.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 20:58
|
|
|
Lord of The Rings. Two hundred pages of hobbit singing was quite enough, thank you. The Da Vinci Code. I was expecting it to be pulpy, but it was just poo poo. Not worth my time. And dozens of others which I've forgotten because they're not as famous as LOTR and Da Vinci. If a book hasn't grabbed me by the first couple hundred pages, there are plenty out there who will, so screw 'em.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 21:29
|
|
|
I started reading The Amityville Horror in High School, as I had already read a lot of Stephen King's stuff and was developing a taste for the horror genre. And it wasn't that TAH was bad, in fact it scared me so drat bad I refused to finish it. Does that qualify with the general idea of the thread?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 21:35
|
|
|
The Poisonwood Bible. I had to read it for English III in high school, since then I've taken Oprah's Book Club list to heart..as a list of what not to read.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 22:16
|
|
|
Totally TWISTED posted:The Poisonwood Bible. Oh god I DESPISE that book. One of the few books I've actually thrown away. The whole thing just reeks of the author's smug self-satisfaction, even though the different narrators are the broadest caricature imaginable. And that mute girl! Her "wordplay!" Gah!
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 22:24
|
|
|
Bukowski's Run With the Hunted. I didn't get that far through it and quite liked his poetry but what i did read i enjoyed less and less until i reached this story where he's being given head by an ugly old woman and it feels like shes going to draw blood and he's praying to god he wont cum. It was something along the lines of that. Finito. The first book i've willingly put down with absolutely no regrets.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 22:43
|
|
|
Turtle Coffin posted:Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. I've been trying to get through it for the lsat few months, but it's so hard to follow and so massive that I don't really think there's a point to finishing it. I'll probably try once I'm done with classes and have free time again. I couldn't get through Gravity's Rainbow. I hit 250 pages in, realized I had read 250 disjointed pages of Slothrop loving womena with a Poisson distribution of missiles hitting around where he was getting action and got bored and put it down.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2008 22:59
|
|
|
I couldn't get past five pages in Clockwork Orange. That made-up language irritated me to no end, even with the "glossary" in the back of the book. I also never finished Les Miserables. I got about 600 pages into it, started something else, and it just fell to the wayside. I'm going to finish one day, though, because I did really like what I read of it. Yeah, I suggest you don't read Ulysses unless you have a book of footnotes to help you. I only got through it because 1) I was taking a Joyce class, and 2) I had Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford. Trust me, the third chapter may be a bitch, but it gets better afterwards, especially if you have something to guide you when you read it.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 18:28
|
|
|
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jesus what a pompous piece of poo poo. You'd think the sun shone out of black assholes, and that they were God's gift to the world and were so sensitive and loving it made slavery a horrible thing. Oh wait, it was anyway.  Harriet.The Hunchback of Notre Dame. What an unreadable pile of poo poo. Seriously, two paragraphs of story in between a hundred pages of "And the bottom brick on 23 Rue De Merde was slightly off-gray, and when the sun shone on it just right you might see the grain. The brick above that..." Victor Hugo.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 19:10
|
|
|
War and Peace. I got halfway through, reached the end of Book 2, then felt like reading something else. I was meaning to come back to it but never did. I really enjoyed what I read too, so I may pick it up again soon hopefully. Also, The Catcher in the Rye. I've read plenty of books in which the main character is an anti-hero, but in all these cases he/she was actually interesting. Holden isn't. At least, not to me. I just found him irritating.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 19:50
|
|
|
Black Trombone posted:I couldn't get past five pages in Clockwork Orange. That made-up language irritated me to no end, even with the "glossary" in the back of the book. I also never finished Les Miserables. I got about 600 pages into it, started something else, and it just fell to the wayside. I'm going to finish one day, though, because I did really like what I read of it.  It wasn't made up, it was transliterated Russian. Then again, I got off lucky and finally got to use my college Russian for something useful. I couldn't get past the god awful dialect of Riddley Walker
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 20:00
|
|
|
Catch 22 - I liked it the first time, but not the second time and certainly not the third time. And then I realised I was only a third of the way through the book. Gravity's Rainbow - Some funny ideas, great visuals, fantastic characters, but good god it's difficult to read. I'm savomg this for when I get a really good reading chair. The Crucible - My drama teacher talked my ear off about how wonderful it is, and I failed to enjoy it. To be honest, I prefer the modern McCarthy witch-hunt over the metaphorical olde thymes one. LooseChanj posted:The Hunchback of Notre DAme. What an unreadable pile of poo poo. Seriously, two paragraphs of story in between a hundred pages of "And the bottom brick on 23 Rue De Merde was slightly off-gray, and when the sun shone on it just right you might see the grain. The brick above that..." Les Miserables is a lot like that, only Hunchback is 500 pages while Les Miserables is 1,200 pages. I plowed through all of them, but yeah, it's a lot like that. The worst transgression was when Valjean descends into the sewers and Hugo descends into a chapter called "The Entrails Of The Monster", which starts as a history and detailed description of the Paris sewers, and then turns into an essay about Hugo's idea to set up nets to catch the poo poo that floats out and use it to fertilize the fields. 
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 20:10
|
|
|
I've picked up Dune three or four times but I can't get past the first 25 pages or so.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 20:43
|
|
|
jhunt posted:I've picked up Dune three or four times but I can't get past the first 25 pages or so. It takes about 100 pages for things to pick up. I had to trudge through it at about 10 pages at a time because it kept putting me to sleep. Now I'm having a hard time putting it down. My last one was Starship Troopers. I really made a good attempt to get through it and then I just couldn't handle it anymore. I was expecting politics! action! carnage! and instead I got quite possibly the most bland main character ever written saying "Golly gee! It sure is great to be a soldier!" for 150 pages. destructor muffin fucked around with this message at 00:48 on May 19, 2008 |
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 21:57
|
|
|
Crime and Punishment, Ive actually read about 2/3 of it just cannot finish it. Tried 3 times!
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 22:02
|
|
|
I normally really enjoy most of Stephen King's work, but I could NOT finish Lisey's Story. B-O-R-I-N-G.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 22:08
|
|
|
Nathander posted:I am bothered by the fact, though, that one book that I simply couldn't get through was Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. It's not that I necessarily felt it was a bad book as much as I felt it was a disjointed set of perverse rants which, according to Burroughs introduction, it pretty much was. I would have thought that at the very least the funny would have coasted you through to the end. It isn't particularly long and it isn't a difficult read so long as you don't make the mistake of thinking it is much much more complicated than it really is. If you miss details I found it better to skim past and just get the overall jist of the scene then move on rather than step back and reread meaning into everything. That isn't to say you cannot do that because it is absolutely not a work of nonsense but you will not enjoy anything when you constantly get hung up on a line and end up rereading it 5 times. Then again, if its not right time then its not the right time. Save it for when it is. You shouldn't feel compelled to read the book because contrary to what some may say it doesn't make you retard if you havent read book y by age x. However, if you ever feel up for a rollercoaster ride through everything that is poo poo in the world with a stop every 5 minutes at the funny farm, do consider picking up Naked Lunch again because it is hilarious and tragic and you've seen it all before but you just didn't realise it was that bad.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 22:50
|
|
|
leefy greans posted:If you want to give it another shot, I'd suggest reading Harry Blamires' _New Bloomsday Book_ as a guide. It's basically a plot summary for each chapter, explaining what's going on formally. It gives you a good literal foundation of just what the hell is going on. Pretty essential, I think, especially your first time through. This is good advice - I read Ulysses the first time while in a Joyce seminar, so we spent the bulk of the semester on it and had a lot of guidance and a good support system for discussion and all that. I've read it a couple of times since then, but reading it by yourself and cold the first time through definitely presents a daunting task. Part of the issue with Ulysses, I think, is that the central "joke" of the novel is that Joyce takes the template of the Odyssey and uses it to write a novel that revels in the mundane and the banal. In that sense, one could read it as a condemnation of modern life - an expose piece on how stunningly un-heroic most people are. With that in mind, it's very easy to understand why so many people are so turned off by the book - Joyce was very deliberately writing about "boring" things, and his chosen writing style often directly reflects the subject matter (for example, the Proteus chapter is terrifically dense and difficult and a bit of a turn-off at first, but you have to keep in mind that Stephen himself is kind of an insufferable twat, so it makes sense that his "stream of consciousness" would be at once very erudite, and extremely pretentious). The book, however, is far from boring. The flipside of the whole "banality of modern existence" reading is that one can also find "heroic" moments of affirmation amongst the rubble. Remember, the book is the story of two men, Bloom and Stephen, who are both somewhat "lost." Bloom is alienated from his wife (whom he believes is waiting at home that fateful day for the purpose of cheating on him with another guy), and Stephen is dealing with the death of his mother, his difficult relationship with his father, and his own tendancy towards moodiness and depression. So while much of the "action" of the book actually consists of rather mundane activities, Joyce also takes care to observe the quietly poignant and meaningful things that take place in the average person's life. It's both funny and touching - this is the novel where the epic "reunion" between "father and son" reaches its pinnacle as Bloom and Stephen urinate together in Bloom's backyard. There's a certain sadness to it, but there's also this glimmer of affirmation, often summed up by referencing the very end of the novel as it tracks Molly Bloom's thoughts before she drifts off to sleep, and culminates in the famous line, "and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." To sum up, it's a book that's worth taking the time to properly frame and understand the first time through.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 23:55
|
|
|
Hedrigall posted:Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Hated every single character. Kovacs or whatever his name was, was obviously just a case of author's wish fulfilment. I did the same thing with Altered Carbon, and can't even remember why because it was so forgettable. I just put down Earth Abides by George Stewart. The protagonist, Ish, walks through a world of survivors that are all weak, sexist, racist, and dated archetypes. Alcoholics drunk in the street? Of course. The first female surivor he encounters: fragile, cracked under the stress, just like a woman right guys? After some sloppy hunting and boring cigarette smoking, Ish passes farming blacks returning to their primitive agricultural roots. Makes sense to me! Drive? Why bother, walk! And there's still electricity!? I've never gone after a book and Me too'd negative reviews on Amazon until I put down Earth Abides.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2008 23:56
|
|
|
Cosmonauticus posted:House of Leaves. As soon as he started rambling about that stripper named Thumper I just tossed the book across the room. Same here. His little story within a story was annoying, and I'm sure he thought he was being incredibly clever. It's to bad because I was looking forward to reading it.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2008 04:33
|
|
|
Buck Lodestar posted:To sum up, it's a book that's worth taking the time to properly frame and understand the first time through. Totally. Which is why I'd suggest the Blamires book over _Ulysses Annotated_ for a first attempt. I took a Joyce class, too, and I found myself returning to _Ulysses Annotated_ less and less as I progressed the book. There are some helpful references and such, but overall I found that it was too much trees, not enough forest. Not even trees -- the bumps on each mushroom of each individual tree. Which, sure, is interesting once you've gotten your bearings, but my first time through I just wanted somebody to throw me a bone and tell me what was fricking happening.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2008 06:27
|
|
|
I had to read Heart of Darkness for a high school English class, and absolutely hated it. I never finished it, because it was just the most tedious thing I've ever read. Also, Jane Austen made me realize that it's possible to pay no attention to something that you're reading.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2008 07:36
|
|
|
Couldn't get through Les Miserables, hard as I tried. I couldn't deal with excessive descriptions of the tenants of the house Marius lived in before he lived in it, and Marius' grandfather, so on. I actually skipped the Waterloo section before that, and was very puzzled as to the huge backstory on the Bishop, a good 40 pages before Valjean's name even comes into it. That said, I was 14 in all this, so maybe if I tried now I'd find more meaning in it. I haven't finished Ulysses yet but that's not to say I'm finding it impossible, it's just I'm in the last year of High School (we studied Portrait, hence my interest) and I have no time for proper, considered reading. I am thoroughly enjoying every page of Ulysses, and had just finished Wandering Rocks when I read it last.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2008 14:21
|
|
|
LooseChanj posted:Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jesus what a pompous piece of poo poo. You'd think the sun shone out of black assholes, and that they were God's gift to the world and were so sensitive and loving it made slavery a horrible thing. Oh wait, it was anyway.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2008 16:24
|
|
|
I was unable to get through The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I'm not really sure why but something about the writing style and content just turned me right off. I gave up halfway through. This was near 10 years ago and it still sits on my bookshelf. I'll give it another chance sometime soon.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2008 16:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 09:03 |
|
|
ZeeBoi posted:I was unable to get through The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I'm not really sure why but something about the writing style and content just turned me right off. I gave up halfway through. Yeah, I had a similar experience with this one. I got a few pages in and was turned off by style. I mean, I like thick, lyrical writing, but there was something smug and self-congratulatory about it. I don't know, it was a while ago for me too. If you decide to give it another shot, let us know what you think...
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2008 18:23
|
|