Books you stopped reading (for whatever reason)

I like the idea of this board, and feel bad for the way I've contributed so far, just throwing in an additional item rather than furthering conversation.

So here goes: This may or may not be interesting to consider, but when is the reader at fault for giving up on a book? Lots of books are supposed to be difficult, and in the present dumbed down world the concentration required to finish books may even be an antidote to ADD. So yeah, to sum up, when's it our fault, and when's it theirs? Is it my problem I can't get through Gaddis's Recognitions or is he just obnoxious (or is this question just obnoxious?)?

Well, that's a tough call. I personally enjoyed it and found it quite readable. At the same time, I wouldn't say it is a must-read type of book. I'd say, give it another chance, and if you still don't find yourself getting interested, then bail on it with my blessings.

(xpost)

I've never been able to read Phillip K. Dick. I know that makes me a lesser person, but there's always something that makes me go "oh, brother" and toss the book aside.

i read three quarters with a dictionary and encyclopedia by my side, then developed a theory that Eco was trying to beat me into submission so that he could use me as a vehicle for the real message he was masking under the web of esoteric references.
but it never happened, he just keep going. we reached a standoff and i decided that if he was going to continue then he could do it without me.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen owns this thread....I gave up on it awhile back....it was more of a personal decision, it was actually, in the literal sense, making me depressed...I guess the midwestern, middle class despair was too close to the bone....also, after awhile I just wanted to smack the characters and tell them to shut up and shape up! (fix up look sharp)

I say it owns this thread because I have a friend that did the same thing, and when I talked to my grandmother at Thanksgiving she had also given up on the Corrections..

Is it "presently" and "anyhow"?

Recently, I couldn't get more than a few pages into Northern Lights. I fear I have lost the ability to read fantasy novels. I mentioned on the ILE Ayn Rand thread that I couldn't get more than 5 pages into The Fountainhead. I am unable to penetrate William Gibson or Philip K. Dick. Pynchon's V lost me after a dedicated try which got me nearly a quarter of the way through.

Oh, and Underworld. I gave it the old college try, but gave up amidst all the baseball references.

Another was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I find Dave Eggers really irritating.

Kate, I staggered through Northern Lights and thought it was really boring and dull, so I didn't read the next one. Darren did and said it was really good, so I gave it a try and it's actually way better. Especially since it's from another character's POV.

Me too. The thing is, I love Ford's short stories, especially Rock Springs. But even though there were some great scenes in The Sportswriter, I kept not wanting to pick it back up and finally didn't. I just wasn't interested. On the other hand, I saw him give a reading earlier this year of an excerpt from the forthcoming third book in that series (I guess he's making it into his own Rabbit chronicles), and at least the part he read was really good and surprisingly funny (since I don't think of him as a "funny" writer).

Two other notables I quit on: Kavalier and Clay (is it just me or is Chabon a little on the expository side? I was kind of enjoying, though; maybe I'll take it back up) and Cold Mountain (overwritten, overreaching, overrripe). I did finish Infinite Jest and mostly liked it all the way through, but I still think DFW writes better nonfiction than fiction.

So Frolic's the one I quit on, half through. Had to.

Finnegan's Wake also seems like an obvious book to stop during, one of those cases where the book seems to demonstrate its point far too soon, then crank, and crank, and crank, until the valve or the gasket breaks. You end up feeling a bit like Chaplin through the gears, or a victim of Rube Goldberg.

And for whatever reason I can't read Mann for the life of me, nor Eliot. Both just seem thudding and awful.

M.

I'll still say to read the Recognitions first-- people make the same mistake with Pynchon, reading Crying of Lot 49 first because it fits in your ass pocket, and then thinking that Pynchon's much more pop or cutesy than he eventually turns out to be (although I'd make the argument that 49 rehabilitates itself not once but three different times over the course of the book, an odd and unlikely feat for such a little thing).

Anyway, Carpenter's Gothic is a good, extremely claustrophobic elaboration for Gaddis, but _very_ dry, and a bit slight, in comparison to The Recognitions--it's wonderful in the company of JR and The Recognitions, but by itself doesn't really do what the other two were able.

The Recognitions contains, IMO, the main kernel of what Gaddis does for the rest of his career, and is the only one I'd feel comfortable saying that one could read and then forgo the others. It may be his most readable, as well, excepting maybe the 200 pages after the halfway point. Stick it through. It's one of the few books where I can honestly say I felt palpably _changed_ after having read it. Although, granted, that could have been a sign of age: I've grown prematurely crotchety about this sort of thing. But nonetheless, there was a time when it slipped right through the bobwire and downed a calf or two. It happened. I bled.

Best,

M.

Another nonfiction book I had long meant to read and gave up on was Common Ground, about desegregation violence in Boston in the 1970s. In order to provide sufficient background, the author seemed to have started in about the 1400s.

And The Museum Guard by Canadian novelist Howard Norman. Too repetitious, material stretched too thin. I know it was a style thing, but still.

I bought Fingersmith after two tremendous reviews, and was thoroughly annoyed by the book. Prurient piffle.

Surprised to see Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (a wonderful tale) and Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before (both of which I thought were significant fun) in this mix.

thats all i seem to do at the moment.

I recently found myself fighting though some of Flaubert's Parrot, but eventually stuck it out (and I think that I am glad that I did so). And I was ready to toss An Instance of the Fingerpost with the middle two narrators - but someone coaxed me through that, too.

Lauren, you're right on the money. The book does not change. If you don't like cutesy magic realism, I'd advise you to bail now. Back away from the book.

So what is so excellent about A Suitable Boy and what can you tell me that might get me to the point of pulling it down and replacing its current employment as a bookend with Stephenson's Quicksilver?

The author of Pride & Prejudice, Emma etc is Jane AustEn. AustIn is a city in Texas with a lesser literary reputation.

Improbably romantic names + long descriptions of trees and flowers x Menacing Weir = Hardy in his prime.

It's all about man vs nature, with nature influencing all the major characters in various ways. Particularly the Dorset maiden who gets drowned in the weir.

A gloomy affair, but worth perserverence.

I used to have a stance that when I'd first started a book, I'd finish it. Alas, a few Stephen King books killed that idea for me, as there was no way in hell I'd finish "The Tommyknockers" and "Needful Things".*

Oh, I also stopped reading Gormenghast, but that was because it was a library book that had to be returned; I had been dumb enough to keep it lying about for far too long before flipping it open. Very enjoyable, both easily read and highly evocative. THIS is what I want fantasy to be like - in fact, it's the first fantasy type book I've read that I can truly say I've enjoyed. I figure I'll just buy the trilogy omnibus eventually.

Jack Vance - The Demon Princes.
Yes, that might be just about the worst title ever. It took a friend's constant bugging to finally convince me to give it a shot, but I didn't get much past chapter two of book one before I said "ehh, go to hell!"
It might just be because I've not had any urge to read any science fiction in a long time though, as I didn't mind his writing, and the story seemed like it could go interesting places, despite the distinctly western-story opening.

The best statement on God of Small Things was from a friend who said "She wrote a conventional novel and then hit the Randomize button on her computer."

Possession's neither that good nor that bad. My sister rereads it once a year. I made it through for a book group, but did so by saying "Oh -- clever pastiche of Robert Browning for the next fifteen pages -- duly noted. I'll come back if I've got time." All the old English majors did the same thing and finished. Dutiful people of other backgrounds tried to read the poems as they appeared and didn't finish.

"and pickwick papers."
This is one of the few times you need to stick it out -- Sam Weller doesn't show up until Chapter Five or so, and that's when it takes off. Huck Finn's got the same problem, of course -- the great book starts late and ends early, with dumb chapters in both directions. But then, he didn't know he was writing a Great Book.

Is this true? Did he have a cocaine addiction in the 80s?

in pynchon's defense, i tried to read "v" when i got back & made it only about 40 pages in before quitting because i had no idea what he was talking about (literally).

Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I loved loved loved the foreword and the theme flow chart, but the beginning wasn't that great. I'm all for squalor and description, but I wasn't digging his mom puking in a bucket. McSweeney's rocks, though.

Bright Lights, Big City. The book's still good, and I eventually finished it, but it doesn't live up to the promise of the first 20 pages

I was planning to read The Crimson Petal... but these comments make me think I'll save myself a heavy load coming back from the library after all.

Fante - Ask the Dust - I fear I may have lost my taste for Bukowski (and co.)

Gibson - Pattern Recognition. Read a line I think it was "the fridge was empty except for the smell of long-chain polymers." I laughed, stumbled on for a few more chapters and closed the book.

I recently gave up on the second vol of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because the pictures ran out ha. I have no concentration span these days. I used to never give up on books but now I sometimes get overcome by inertia before I even start them and before I know it they're due back.

Books started and not finished this year include George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones (too flatulent), Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair (appallingly written) and A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry (too Oirish). I've just finished Auster's City of Glass having failed to finish it the first time, despite its being no more than a novella. I'm not incapable of liking metaphyical novels, but I feel pretty lukewarm about Auster's work despite his impressive brain. Beckett did much the same thing even more cleverly without making me feel more of it would be a good thing.

100 Years isn't hard to get through in the sense that dense, difficult prose is hard to get through. It's more like a Country Time Lemonade with five extra sugars.

I tend to do this more often with nonfiction books than fiction. It's a natural litmus test to how interested I am in a particular subject. I may be interested enough to check out the book but not 800 pages interested.

One work of fiction I can specifically remember not finishing was The Stand. I saw the 8 hour miniseries when they aired it back in the early 90s, and the book seemed like a more drawn out screenplay of that series so I didn't bother.

i wish i was still a moderator here so i could change this thread title. i must have been drunk. and i didn't believe in the space bar in 2003 for some reason. all my posts do that. so annoying.

Recent unfinished books include

Ramsey Campbell "Hungry Moon" - profoundly boring. Couldn't keep the characters straight or bring myself to care about any of them.
Mick Wall "When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin" - Couldn't get over the sections written in second person.
Jack Ketchum "Peaceable Kingdom" - by the 3rd or 4th story there had just been too much rape

think I hit this last night with Nigel Smith's biography of Andrew Marvell. Love marvell, & smith knows an awful lot, but he's a terrible, terrible writer, shits out the worst sort of academic prose, no head for structuring his material. It made me quite angry.

It's not up to the level of most of the books mentioned ott, but I looked at the first page of James Hadley Chase's Blonde's Requiem, got up and pulled my copy of Red Harvest from the shelf, and confirmed that Chase had plagiarized a couple of Hammett's paragraphs from that novel's first page. That did not work for me.

James Sallis's Drive. Tries to have stylish writing but there are so many clear mistakes that it's laughable. For example: in the first chapter, the narrator repeatedly miscounts the number of dead bodies in the room. Another example: a car "somersaults twice" but somehow lands on its roof.

Yeah, tried to read that one too. His book about Chester Himes is good though. And he has a book or two about guitar players that are OK.

thank the moderator gods.

i am pretty neurotic about finishing books, the last thing i remember stopping was blood meridian by cormac mccarthy because it was giving me horrible depressing nightmares. i haven't tried to read anything else by mccarthy.

it was REALLY hard for me to get through neal stephenson's snow crash... i left it on a park bench because i just didn't want it anywhere near me. lots of people i otherwise respect really like this guy and i don't get it! awful.

Old thread title here, for historic purposes:
What's A Book You Started To Read Recently(Or Not So Recently)Where All Of A Sudden You Decided-Hmmm-That's Enough,Thanks!

stop!

i think when we switched to nu-ilm i was no longer a moderator here. the only other one was chris p. i think? i made him a moderator cuz he wanted to be one for some reason. so this board is moderator-free. cuz chris isn't around, right? causistry.

i stopped reading that book air guitar that someone gave me. speaking of guitars. the cultural crit book that some people like a lot. by the art critic...whatshisname.

"Kafka on the Shore" by Murakami. I think I just got tired of the incessant wackiness.

xpost
Dave Hickey. Wish I would've stopped reading Air Guitar, more like Hot Air Guitar amirite

xpost I struggled through that one but definitely left it with an "OK, no more Murakami for a while" feeling. By the end it was making me pretty angry, though.

Read all of Isherwood's memoirs up until the mid '60s, realized I couldn't give a flying turd about the decay of queeny Charles Laughton

xxpost

or Air-Conditioned Guitar since he goes on @ great length about being the only living art critic in Las Vegas

In Cold Blood: True crime, meh.

xpost I might pick that book up again sometime, there was a lot of things about it I really liked and I enjoyed that book of short stories ('The Elephant Vanishes') he wrote but I really wasnt in the mood for it at the time. I think I put it down after the cat-slicing part.

In Cold Blood is interesting more for its historical significance in journalism than its narrative drive, I'll give you that

xpost Have you read any of his other novels? A Wild Sheep Chase, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World were all way better (those are the only others I've read).

i can't even get through a murakami short story in the new yorker. but that's just me. i know people love him.

I think he works best as a novelist based on the few I've read vs. The Elephant Vanishes which I didn't care for at all, but I can see the novels being polarizing, too. He's someone you definitely have to be in a very specific mood for, as he pretty much just writes subtle variations of the same book over and over.

there are some writers...i feel like i'm always watching them do something. like i'm watching them make an elaborate meal and i just want to eat. i don't want to watch them cook. that's why i like good sci-fi. because good sci-fi is like watching a really good magician. i just get wrapped up in the story or i just follow them blindly because i want to know where they are going. and when i'm done with their book i say how'd they do that!?

i tried to read a paul auster book years ago and it was like watching someone cooking in their kitchen and i got SO hungry. like, great, you bought really good ingredients, just put it in the oven already. i have this problem with a lot of kinda magic realism types. they never whisk me away. i'm too busy noticing every little move they make.

i'm really bad at metaphor by the way.

scott that metaphor is perfect!

Paul Auster bought real good ingredients but fucked the recipe up pretty bad.

No, I haven't read anything else by Murakami but a few people have recommended 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicles'. Another highly rated book I couldnt be bothered finishing was 'All The Pretty Horses'.

i've never even tried to read murakami, at first it was as a rebellion against trendiness/oversaturation but i guess i should give him a shot at some point.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is probably the best place to start, although I've heard very good things about Dance Dance Dance, too.

Brion Gysin, The Last Museum.

A man whose posts I followed remarked that he'd read Atlas Shrugged almost all the way through, but decided to abandon it with eight pages left to go.

i've stopped reading wind-up bird three times now, i dunno.

it was like page 300 and he was still sitting at the bottom of the fucking well. spoiler warning i guess.

I don't remember that part.

there are some writers...i feel like i'm always watching them do something. like i'm watching them make an elaborate meal and i just want to eat. i don't want to watch them cook. that's why i like good sci-fi. because good sci-fi is like watching a really good magician. i just get wrapped up in the story or i just follow them blindly because i want to know where they are going. and when i'm done with their book i say how'd they do that!?

i tried to read a paul auster book years ago and it was like watching someone cooking in their kitchen and i got SO hungry. like, great, you bought really good ingredients, just put it in the oven already. i have this problem with a lot of kinda magic realism types. they never whisk me away. i'm too busy noticing every little move they make.

i'm really bad at metaphor by the way.

― scott seward, Wednesday, July 25, 2012 11:49 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's a great metaphor, actually. Although with the first few Auster books I read felt more like I was watching a magician cook a meal, I guess. But I rarely have patience anymore for Great Writing that calls attention to itself. I prefer well-crafted but not overly assuming prose that leads the reader along the path of a good story. Some of my favorite writers are able to write capital P Prose and still spin a good yarn, e.g. E.L. Doctorow, but that's a rarity.

I stop books all the time though. Ones I remember stopping in recent years are Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea (just didn't want to be stuck listening to the narrator talk), The Razor's Edge (just didn't grab me), Augustus by John Williams (found the whole construction forced and painful), Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (enjoyable but fine to read in snippets - may pick it up again). I stop non-fiction all the time but I feel like there's no real need to finish certain non-fiction books

enjoyed charles yu's novel about time travel, so i bought his first book of short stories, 'third class superhero' (annoyingly has no hyphen), and it was, 1st story aside, dull sub-george saunders modern-life-is-so-commercialised stuff, all the stories much the same, so i gave up

I really, really, struggled with Robinson Davies. Everybody told me that I'd love him, but his books were so belabored and ... wordy. If I hadn't read John Fowles at an early age, I'd feel the same about him. I got sick to death of John Crowley, Dan Simmons, Stephen King (novels, not short stories), Richard Ford, late Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence and H.G. Wells.

What skot says is interesting w/r/t watching somebody cook. There are some writers I should really dig, and whom I respect, but whose prose or story never comes together and just ... lies, inert, on the page. A good question (and follow-up thread, maybe), is of the not-difficult writers that gave you the most trouble. Or the books that couldn't, for whatever reason, connect with you.

xp to hunter - I got about halfway through an Iris Murdoch book trying to impress a girl, although I don't know if I ever told her I was reading it. It was like a second-rate F.M. Ford novel.

Fowles and Davies also have that Jungian/psychoanalytic predilection in common. Kind of hard to take seriously.

I most recently took a hiatus from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War... it's great, but I was in need of something light.

"the not-difficult writers that gave you the most trouble."

i have a problem with really flat deadpan affectless stuff and for years i would try to read john rechy and jean genet cuz they were transgressive and cool and all that but that matter of fact dead thing would basically make me forget what i was reading on every page. i think i would actually start daydreaming while i was reading. every once in a while i will pick up some genet and try again. maybe this explains my problem with murakami a little bit. japanese fiction can be very deadpan and matter of fact (i always wonder what i'm missing in translation). i mean i love kobo abe for the deadpan thing he does but its the over the top situations that make it work so well (i think he does kafka just about as good as anyone ever has since kafka). i was really proud of myself for finishing a mishima book a couple years back because i've struggled with him before too even though he's not really difficult to read.

I think the *great* writer I gave up on most quickly was probably Henry James.

:o

so instead of rechy i fell for james purdy and there is always celine and a bunch of other people if i need some lunatic french people in my life. (i can't read de sade either and he's not hard to read but zzzzzz....)

try agsin later with james!

again

at a later date.

Agsinbite of inwit

What James should I start with?

James Morrison of course

I got about halfway through an Iris Murdoch book trying to impress a girl, although I don't know if I ever told her I was reading it. It was like a second-rate F.M. Ford novel.

― bamcquern, Thursday, 26 July 2012 02:39 (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FfoKY8W7b1w/0.jpg

Oh I've seen that Willy Wonka burn in like the last two or three days. Think of something new!

http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/4319_108119904198_3348685_n.jpg

start with some james short stories. ease on down that road. one yellow brick at a time.

It doesn't make me proud to admit that I've thrown out a book before finishing it but yeah, Murakami's "A wild sheep chase". I don't like his other books either. Or Ishiguro.

I think part of my frustration was that I went through a heavy Oe/Mishima phase and everybody was like "oh you like that? You should read this completely terrible other thing!"

Haha, that's better. I don't like to see a smart person like you develop rote ilx gif zing habits.

i mean to be fair i've never read any of ford madox ford's second rate novels

i gave up on parade's end! i'll try again someday. just too much of a commitment at the time. i kept putting it down and reading other things and then forgetting what had happened.

I like Ford, I just didn't like Murdoch that much. I didn't DISLIKE her that much either. It was kind of a by-the-numbers infidelity/marriage thing.

i think murdoch was a very talented novelist who kind of viewed it more as a recreation than anything else? i don't know. the novels display an obsessive repetition of two or three narrative germs, but then philip dick remains one of my favorite novelists since forever so i feel like i can't really get away with that as grounds for dismissal

i have never read a novel by murdoch, drabble, or lessing. i know, right! i have looked at them a hundred times. held them in my hands. never pulled the trigger. i am never in the correct mood for their books.

drabble is awesome! 'the millstone' is one of my favorite books.

i'm super-picky about what i buy so when i put down a book it's generally more 'i'm not ready for this' than 'i can't stand this.' i've read the first 20 pages of so of 'anna karenina' about three times and came to the former conclusion every time.

seconding The Millstone. and The Ice Age is THE proto-yuppie 70s novel predicting the 80s. but I've read nothing else by Drabble.

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich..interesting then meh by page 65.

Ishiguro is a good one. I brute-forced my attention through all of Orphans, got to the end, and chucked the book across the room. I've said elsewhere that George Eliot (specifically Middlemarch) gave me no pleasure, either, but I think I owe it another try.

i think murdoch was a very talented novelist who kind of viewed it more as a recreation than anything else

Also, she famously refused to be edited

Loved Hickey's Air Guitar!

Reviving this, because it is interesting to see what people start, then stop, reading.

Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel. I started this one many months ago and laid it aside after about 150 pages (as I recall). The author was very interested in details that I thought slowed the pace to a crawl, so I finally lost patience and quit.

All in the past year: Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri (a gift), first few chapters consisted of nothing but backstory, awful translation. The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood, a playmobil dystopia. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, my first ever Hardy. Seemed like an overwritten potboiler, could not summon up any sympathy for Tess.

I also quit Wolf Hall. I just didn't find it a very pleasurable read, and then a burst of (what I perceived to be) clumsy alliteration just gave me an excuse to drop it altogether.

I'm just reading Northern Lights, which I quit twice and is a super fun, easy read. There's a subset for "books you stop reading for no particular reason and then lose the momentum to pick up again".

In the last year I've been good - only quit RL Stevenson's Kidnapped (dull) and Neuromancer (incomprehensible). And I'll cop to getting bored and skimming the last half of Things Fall Apart.

Moby Dick. About half a dozen times.

"Osama" by Lavie Tidhar. dude does not understand noir plot structure.

Ledge, I recall trying to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles as a senior in high school and managing to write a really long term paper based on the ~100 or so pages I actually made it through. I recall loving The Mayor of Casterbridge and thought I'd be into Tess. Wrong.

I abandoned 'Daddy Love' by Joyce Carol Oates after two pages, is this a record? Got it from the library purely because she is an author I wanted to investigate; got a bad feeling after those two pages, read some reviews, and noped out of there so fast.

Ha, first response here is The Glass Bead Game, a book I read in a single sitting (and I have abandoned plenty of books, believe me)

Recently have finished several bad jazz books, largely due to sunken cost fallacy and general crippling bloody-mindedness.

I think mainly its been me reading several books at the same time and not being very tidy. So I can pick up and focus on one book and let others drift out of focus and into the background/piles of stuff. So may return to a lot of things at a later date.
I did finish Mother of Invention last week which may be the closest thing to one I half thought of giving up on. & Salsa by Sue Stewart this morning which has been neglected for too long and out of the library for about 6 months.
I think I did start reading Constance Garnett translations of Dostoevsky and possibly other titles and gave up because the style was more genteel than I was expecting from the original author's reputation but have heard things that would suggest her translation may be closer to the original feel than I would have expected. Still don't think I have finished anything she translated. Still need to read Crime & Punishment in some version which I should have done over the last couple of years.
I think I may have read opening pages of Ulysses at some point and not got much further. Did read an 100 page sentence by Beckett in my late teens and need to get back to reading Joyce. Went to Nora Barnacle's place in Galway a couple of weeks back has me in mind of that.
Do still hve some books from 20 odd years ago taht I never got into but I do still buy books regularly so am continually reading. & have read some things I bought way way back earlier this year. So I think most things I am thinking I will eventually get back to . & may read a lot of other stuff beforehand. Which might give me different perspectives on reading those things when it does happen.

I started Swann's Way for the first time recently and there was something about the way Proust writes about bedtime and scheming to get a goodnight kiss from his mommy that I found frankly repulsive. I'm currently reading and enjoying Either/Or by Elif Batuman and there's a part where she writes about having the same reaction.

Xpost I refuse to believe you read Glass Bead Game in a single sitting, it's like 600 pages long or something!

I'm abandoning books far more often than I used to. Last one (just a few days ago) was a Benjamin Wood novel (The Young Accomplice), it was just a bit too relentlessly middle class English.

I generally don't quit reading books. The only one I can remember is 30 years ago I only made it about 1/3 into the first of three volumes of 1001 Arabian Nights.

I choose carefully and read slowly so I only read a handful of books a year.

I choose carefully and read slowly so I only read a handful of books a year.

xps to give some context, I was looking after a basically abandoned bookshop for a whole day and had nothing else to do

I'm currently reading and enjoying Either/Or by Elif Batuman and there's a part where she writes about having the same reaction.

― Chris L, Monday, 22 August 2022 11:40 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

On this note, I couldn't finish Either/Or by Kierkegaard. Volume 2, Or, is tedious as fuq.

She writes about that too!

Stevolende, I've enjoyed David Magarshack's translations of The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. They don't seem that genteel to me.
Swann's Waygoes through quite a few turns: maybe try skipping ahead. Lydia Davis's translation (and her explanations of why she took her approach) v. enjoyable.

one hundred years of solitude. all the names were the same and then it got ruined by a leak.

the famished road. too long.

i did go back and finished 'son of the circus' after about 20 years.

I've also got a chapter into Middlemarch, twice, before plumping for something else.

I'm also a Swann's Way fail - nothing wrong with it, but those long sentences just required too much concentration at the time I was reading it, I will return to it at some point I hope.

I like how the first line gets its own page on French Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtemps,_je_me_suis_couché_de_bonne_heure

NYRB are putting out a translation of the 1st vol and Charlotte Mandell is also working on another volume of Proust too.

Funnily enough I am halfway through a book I quit a couple of years ago (Laxness' Independent People) and finished Grossman's 'Life and Fate' earlier this year, which I had quit about five years ago.

One novel I didn't make it halfway through was Keith Gessen's ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN (2006?). It belongs in a thread like this as it's no MOBY-DICK, it's hard to say why it was unfinishable, but I kept bouncing off it and gave up. I suppose it irritated me.

The one novel I need to pick up again is Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. Really enjoyed the first vol but decided to take a break. A bad idea.

Aimless did you have any luck with Wolf Hall? It finally seems to have clicked with me and I have no idea why.

I haven’t quit Simon Gray’s Smoking Diary but it might be on an infinite pause.

I quit an excellent new amateur Kindle-only translation of Dumas’s 20 Years After because the formatting is so poor. Not sure if that’s a good reason; book itself is excellent

PG has 20 Years After. and i have a copy that i've improved (epub only at the moment, but i think i can run it through calibre...)

(here if you want it - http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/TwentyYearsAfter.bin - download it and rename to azw3 and let me know how it goes - first attempt at converting to azw3)

Ha, first response here is The Glass Bead Game, a book I read in a single sitting (and I have abandoned plenty of books, believe me)

This is one of the few I can remember not finishing. I don't even remember why. I picked it up because it was cited in another work which also now escapes me. It's going to bother me until I can remember.

i finally gave up on Ducks Newburyport after 400+ pages. this is ages ago already. so, almost halfway through the book. i felt it was still some sort of accomplishment. and i really did enjoy reading it during a time of plague. but i was starting to read five pages every month or so and that's when i knew i needed to call it quits. definitely keeping my copy. and if i ever need to read some Ulysses as written by Erma Bombeck again i will know where to turn.
the pandemic, in general, finally gave me the okay to not finish things. i always felt sorta bad not finishing a book, but not now! it turns out that life CAN be too short for some things. heck, i'll have 20 pages of a book left or 20 minutes of a movie left now and just go on to the next thing. i got the drift. no need to continue. thank you for the time we had together. i must be going now. its very liberating.

I gave up on The Corrections after 150 pages. Mainly I just found it annoying.

This year - Wolf Hall and Lonesome Dove because they’re both too effin’ long. I enjoyed LD and will go back to it next time I need a beach read — I just wanted something new after reading 300 pages and not being even a third of the way through.

I was impressed by Wolf Hall, found it easy enough to read, but I stopped after I realised I wasn’t enjoying it, just waiting for it to finish.

Oh and a book of Kelly Link’s short stories, after reading three that were merely okay.

I quit The Kindly Ones a few chapters in because it filled me with sickness and dread. I don’t think I’ve finished a novel since, for life reasons.

Funnily enough I have left the most books unfinished (about five out of fifty) than any other year I can remember. Don't think it's the pandemic, more to do with a lack of patience as I get older.

i'll have 20 pages of a book left or 20 minutes of a movie left now and just go on to the next thing

I couldn't stop at that point, I'd be too invested in seeing the gestalt (even it I hated it). Also, I feel like I can't comment in depth on a work I haven't completed other than to say "I didn't finish it, here's why".

I stopped reading The Winter King when I realized, despite it being reasonably well-written, I didn't need to further read a grimdark Arthurian tale.

L'Homme Qui Rit, Victor Hugo - my french was not up to a novel that seems to start with 50+ pages of technical information about sailing

The last books I left lying around in the last 12-18 months are Hopscotch (Cortázar), Auto-da-fé (Canetti), and Herzog (Bellow).

I wish I had smart things to say as reasons for each, but I guess I just didn't have the patience, or the atmosphere was wrong, or the characters morally unappealing, or it was dated. I'm usually persistent, something must really be wrong for me to stop.

Gave up on Zeno's Conscience earlier this year, just didn't care at all for the guy.

The one novel I need to pick up again is Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. Really enjoyed the first vol but decided to take a break. A bad idea.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 23 August 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Oh yes I finished it this year. V easy to get involved again once I picked it up

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Didn't realise it was fundamentally an architectural treatise before going in

> Gave up on Zeno's Conscience earlier this year

don't tell me, the first half took 4 days, the third quarter took 2 days, the seventh eighth took a day and it just felt like you'd never quite finish it

It doesn't make me proud to admit that I've thrown out a book before finishing it but yeah, Murakami's "A wild sheep chase". I don't like his other books either. Or Ishiguro.

I think part of my frustration was that I went through a heavy Oe/Mishima phase and everybody was like "oh you like that? You should read this completely terrible other thing!"

(eleven years ago)

I actually threw out Never Let Me Go, also. Not really "threw it out", just read half of it on a flight, dozed off, was packing up my stuff to deplane, saw it sitting there in the sleeve and elected to leave it. I did read and finish The Remains Of The Day and hated it also. Basically all I read these days is re-reads of Nabokov and the Irish classics, idk, I'm crotchety now.

xp well played

lol I don't know how anyone could get a rec for Ishiguro based on Mishima and Oe aside from racism

I guess it's inevitable that books I like (Remains of the Day) or love (Herzog) will show up.

Certain of my favourite books, like Naked Lunch, really don't have to be read in full to get it or not get it. I mean I like the book in its totality, but if anyone didn't like any random 30 pages of the book, I don't know that they would benefit from forging onward.

I bought The Country Will Bring Us No Peace by Matthieu Simard last night. Gave up after 30 pages. Luckily it only cost me 89p.

The Bible. Despite "we see through a glass darkly" and even "Take a little wine for thy stomach's sake," Paul/Ex-cop Saul can't help being a drag, and I know how it ends (thanks, spoilers).

I get stuck on "Jane and Prudence" although I otherwise love Pym

Also gave up "Neuromancer" and Harrison's "Light" because I found them incomprehensible. Obviously Harrison is a better writer, but with both it was a case of "these words cannot create a picture in my brain"

lol I don't know how anyone could get a rec for Ishiguro based on Mishima and Oe aside from racism

Mm that might be a step too far, generally recommending “other Japanese authors” because of my interest in the postwar Oe-Mishima axis, but you’re not wrong really

I might enjoy Murakami more now that I’m not expecting earth-tilting politicism

Think I went to Murakami first -- Wind-up Bird Chronicle is still more than worth a read imo -- as then went back to those others as Murakami disliked them.

I thought Men Without Women was outstanding.

Mm that might be a step too far, generally recommending “other Japanese authors” because of my interest in the postwar Oe-Mishima axis, but you’re not wrong really

But Ishiguro isn't Japanese! It is his heritage and part of his identity sure but for the most part he is a British author with very British concerns. As someone who also moved to a different country as a very young kid I feel v defensive of ppl assuming "identity = place of birth".

I dunno, his first two novels are on Japanese themes (as well as British ones) so it's not entirely wrong to place him, at least for a while, within a Japanese writerly tradition.

He's never written in Japanese, and is in fact on record as saying his Japanese is not fluent. And his most famous novel is the most British thing ever. I agree with Daniel, he's basically British, but with a Japanese heritage.

Some authors are affiliated with different places. Being born of Japanese parents in Japan and moving at age 2 is one thing, being born of Ukrainian parents and moving at age 1 to Brazil is already another thing, I think of Nabokov, Conrad, Taiye Selasi... some people cannot be placed and there is no line to be drawn without being reductive.

what about books by favorite authors that you have never managed to finish. and not so much authors whom you love for one one book like all those Christina Stead books i tried to read that weren't The Man Who Loved Children or i would be here all day. but authors who make your own hall of fame. i have attempted The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark thrice i believe. never made it more than 50 pages i don't think. don't remember why. could be the setting. when i try it a fourth time i'll make a note of why i stop again.

"for one book"...

For some years, I have been having a very difficult time finishing any book. I always end up putting them down 2/3s of the way through and then finding it almost impossible to pick them back up. It's kind of like executive dysfunction on a literary scale and I don't know how to deal with it. Short story collections have helped a fair amount, but I want to read big thick novels again!

I actually hit upon an idea the other week -- and which this thread has solidified -- which is to do re-reading as sections of big books (or small ones) again.

I want to revisit stuff without the need of having to finish.

Ah! I didn’t even myself realize Ishiguro was not Japanese. Well then! I suck as much as my friend. Ishiguro’s novel still got binned

Nabokov and Conrad good examples of “not of a single place”.

I unabashedly non-guilty pleasure love David Mitchell’s pulpy good time novels and for a long time joked that number9dream was “Murakami’s only good novel” but I should revisit Murakami I suppose

I have a copy of Mishima Thirst For Love I’ve never finished. Different translator, I think; Donald Keene was my favourite. A translator friend tells me Mishima has a couple novels just-translated from Japanese and the work is insanely good; have to order them. Idk I like Mishima but my interest has waned as I’ve aged.

Didn’t love The Dalkey Archive but I didn’t struggle with it. It’s the only O’Brien I haven’t reread

Idk how I feel about Coetzee, I read Disgrace and was like “oh he’s Philip Roth but in South Africa”, but a friend recommended Waiting For The Barbarians and I only got 50 pages in before I put it into the donation stack

JR, Gaddis - realized the payoff would not be worth the immense effort
Pylon, Faulkner - starting reading it before watching The Tarnished Angels, stopped when I realized I was saying the word "yair" out loud every time I read it
Nightwood, Barnes - insufferable pretentious prose
Ada, Nabokov - insufferable pompous narrator. If that's "the point" I still don't want to know
The Process, Gysin - some gross description I don't remember in the opening pages put me off
Dhalgren, Delany - had my fill of depictions of late-60s urban counterculture with hallucinatory/SF trappings
The Tin Drum, Grass - had my fill of unfunny grotesque slapstick making fun of Nazis
Sleep Has His House, Kavan - first she describes some psychological situation from her past, then she depicts it in "dream form", the two parts undermining each other. I loved Ice, though, where the hallucinatory setting stands on its own without explication
Song of the Silent Snow, Selby - liked or loved his previous four books, found this collection of short stories pointless

i would think The Room would be the step too far for some people when it comes to Selby. its rough to get through.

the only Nabokov i ever finished was Invitation to a Beheading. maybe because it was short. i gave up on Lolita more than once. its the kind of writing that drives me crazy. like Pynchon. i'll bet AI robots could write some good Nabokov books. someone should start publishing AI Pynchon books! he would probably dig them.

Dhalgren, Delany - had my fill of depictions of late-60s urban counterculture with hallucinatory/SF trappings
The Tin Drum, Grass - had my fill of unfunny grotesque slapstick making fun of Nazis

These are two of my favorite books ever, haha

Wow Scott! Nabokov is one of my favourites, and Beheading one of my least-favourites. Wish you liked his prose style more, I think he's amazing. If you want a shorter book by him give Pnin a shot

I quit reading the Magicians series somewhere, I think probably 3/4 of the way through book 2. I liked them, but it took me a long time to read them and for some reason i got totally confused somewhere in Book 2, couldn't tell some characters apart, and then figured fuck it I don't really need to read these (I stopped watching the tv series later when it started as well. I guess...maybe I don't like it?)

I haven't finished Dhalgren either, but only because I can never seem to settle into the formal shift in Ch. 7. I think it's a fascinating book.

I should have stopped reading The Magicians but unfortunately I finished it

Ada or Ardor and Nightwood definitely flawed overblown works I had to power through. I guess it's a style. The opening medieval sexual fantasy in Ada had enough charm, the rest is really long and Nabokov is insufferable as a narrator.
I was quite impressed by The Tin Drum. The line between awe and irritation in literary experiments can be really thin. In certain works (Musil a good example), I experienced both reactions almost simultaneously. Mann as an example of an author who made me blush me with one work, and count the pages with another. A book can be a bit like dating.

I haven't read all of Nabokov's novels, but while Lolita is a remarkable accomplishment, the one I thought was most interesting (and entertaining) was Pale Fire.

Yeah on many days Pale Fire is my favourite English-language novel

That one I did finish, though I can't say I loved it.

Thought of another I didn't complete: Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth.

I very rarely abandon a record or a movie once I've started it, but I don't have those compunctions around fiction; because books take longer to read, and I'm not really invested in the history and the technique of literature in the same way I am with music and film.

Yeah I had an American pomo phase in my early 20s where I picked up everything I could find by Barth, Barthelme (Donald) and Coover at the used stores. I don’t think I finished anything by Barth in the end. Love the other two tho

i think i tried pomo people and quickly realized i didn't have what it took to read them. i was going to buy some barthleme the other day though. because he was funny and his shorts were often very short. my kinda pomo. i went to a new new/used bookstore down the road from me - the guy also has a store in brooklyn and please don't let this mean that we are going to be the new brooklyn - and his used fiction was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 80s gen x bookish grad student dude and it made me itchy. so much barth/coover/hawkes and also bellow/roth/updike/etc. so much of it was stuff that was happening in 1986. nothing old or creaky enough for me. it gets harder and harder for me to find a store that sells 50s/60s/70s hardcover OOP fiction. or obscure 19th/early 20th century stuff. the section had to have been 90% dudes. and i read probably 75% laydeez when it comes to fiction. i couldn't help but think that anyone under 50 would just fall asleep looking at all of that on shelves. his new book section was MUCH happier and hipper and i got some great stuff over there. he also had about 10 huge shelves of used poetry and i thought this was admirable because they will no doubt sit there for people to read in the store long after my death.

"Barthelme"

(Donald)

My copy of Coover’s “Universal Baseball Assoc.” sits neatly on my shelf right next to Darnielle’s “Wolf In White Van”, sorted alphabetically by author, but it’s also a topically appropriate adjacency

Also D Barthelme’s 60 Stories is kinda the ne plus ultra of easy pomo reading, I love it

I read Barth's The End of the Road and some Coover and Barthelme over the years but my brain lacks the dendrites or whatever to absorb them.

i have been enjoying diane williams and gary lutz collections of stories. they are inspiring to me in a pomo way. i read a couple here and there for a boost.

I'll tell you who I've been rereading with pleasure: Joy Williams. What a story writer.

Ya she rules. My favourite Carver collection is Cathedral, whereby Gordon Lish had free rein to posthumously divorce the late Raymond from his Hemingway affectations. I found out about Williams via the Lish connection

i've been reading her since breaking and entering came out and been a huge fan ever since. she has truly inspired me over the years. she has always been big with other writers and i think she is finally better known with regular folks as well. partly because of her environmental stances. (i'm sure you will find me raving about her years ago on ILB and wondering why more people don't read her and now i feel like people really are.)

Yeah her early stories and first novel, State of Grace---Florida girl clouds ov imagery around crisis lines, narrative third and other rails---were revelatory to me, though haven't followed her very well since. A relatively recent New Yorker story seemed unfollowable, and interviews can incl. some Joyce-Carol-Oates-on-Twitter-level snobbery, but the early stuff, at least, is fine as wine.

she's 79 and still doing stuff. god bless. i think she's always been a little cranky.

I know that I've heard some of her stories read on "Selected Shorts," and I've loved them, but I can't think of what they were.

I didn't discover her until 2021, and the rhythm, brevity, and its gnomic virtues gripped me from the start

"Marabou" was definitely one.

love that joy williams and gary lutz have come up, they are the greatest

a friend of mine once compared my writing to gary lutz which is an amazing (and undeserved) compliment

ada was one of my favorite books forever ago! reckon these days it'd make my eyes roll so hard they corkscrew out the back of my skull

+1 to the bible-giver-uppers: i was never a believer but in my teens decided i should read it for its literary and cultural value (and also to brag) but within the first few pages god cursed eve and all womankind so i ripped it up and set it on fire because i absolutely do not play that

more recently i tried frederik pohl's beyond the blue event horizon and it was like chapter 1: "no young man, do not commit rape. there is only a 1 in 6 chance you will enjoy it enough for it to be worth the effort lololol" chapter 2: "dear diary, it sure is tiresome to be a forty year old dude on a cramped spaceship with my bitchy wife and her bitchy 14 year old sister who keeps trying to seduce me, guess there's nothing to do but keep beating the ship's (female) computer at chess lololol" and there were some promising sci-fi concepts to begin with but a writer has to be way more entertaining to get me to power through that much hatred