Books you stopped reading (for whatever reason)

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