401 replies to this topic

[litechick]

Giving up on a book is not something that I do lightly but sometimes you just have to admit defeat/disinterest and put the book down and move on with your life.

It is particularly troublesome with an author you really like.

So give us the list, what are the books you not only could put down, but absolutely had to put down?

For me, I will start with my general Jane Austen disappointment.  It took a little mental adjustment to be able to roll with the language and the crazy, convoluted social customs but Pride & Prejudice was worth the effort.

I would like to enjoy more of the same but frankly, I have been unable to finish any other book from her.  I have forced myself 1/2 way through Mansfield Park but ultimately I always throw it down because I just don't care about any of these characters and I just don't give a shit.

[Astra]

I have about 400+ read books on Goodreads shelves and only 6 are on a shelf gave-up-on. All of them I absolutely had to put down because I could not read the gibberish.

Lord Foul's Bane (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever #1) by Stephen R. Donaldson


Bag of Bones by Stephen King


The Soddit by Adam Roberts


The Claw of the Conciliator (The Book of the New Sun #2) by Gene Wolfe
TBH, I had to give up on the first book but there was SO much raving about the series that I forced myself to carry on and give the series a fair chance. quit 1/3 through the book.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller


The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

There was one more series , so much of my life time wasted on it. I had to give up starting with book 2, instead I read all 7. Oh, horror!
Crown of Stars by Kate Elliott
I trusted reviews of Westeros Werthead. I thought his taste in fantasy was very good and he was raving and even re-reading the first 5 books. I learned. I don't make the same mistake twice

Edited by Astra, 18 December 2011 - 10:29 AM.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Astra,

I've made it through Claw and I'm now working on Sword of the Lictor.  Perhaps I have difficulty with unreliable narrators but I'm still not really getting into this series.  I plan to finish but it's a bit of a slog.

[hobbleit]

Twilight.  Just an awful book.

And War and Peace.  I just could not get into it at all.  Managed 100 or so pages and couldn't read any more.

[Nearly Headless Ned]

Northanger Abbey-Jane Austen. To be honest I didn't give it much chance.
Lord Fouls Bane- Stephen Donaldson. Couldn't deal with the prose. Felt stodgy to me.

[dog-days]

litechick - have you tried Emma? I think that in tone, it's probably the most similar to P&P, while Mansfield Park is the furthest away.

I don't force myself through books that for whatever reason don't interest me, so there's quite a large pile of stuff under my bed that makes me twitch with embarrassment.

My biggest failure is Dostoyevsky. I read the beginning of C&P and gave up. Then I read BK through to the arrest of Dmitri, after which I stopped, having been enjoying the novel quite strongly until then. Possibly if I invested in a really good annotated edition, I might get further.

Long books aren't normally a problem for me. I'm fairly sure that I've read more Victorian doorstops than I have contemporary lit-fic. But Dostoyevsky is just like this unassailable wall to me. And I'm a literature grad.

From  the genre side of things, I gave up on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the first couple of chapters.

Edited by dog-days, 18 December 2011 - 09:14 AM.

[Datepalm]

Not counting stuff that has been in progress for months or stuff I never fnished during a kind of bad attention span, not finishing aything phase....

most recently:

Leona Wisockers Secrets of the Sands. Just boring with a tiny little undercurrent of squick. I wouldn't have even noticed the squick, but there was absoloutely nothig else to pay attention to.

Jon Courtnay Grimwood - The er, something, Blade (fallen? assassins? something?) Lots of Squick. Ew, giant, overwhelming, pointless squick. And nothing else. Barely any plot, characterization that consistsonly of squick, etc, etc.

and ages ago I couldn't finish the first Runelords, becuase, to remind the world of the one truth that i'm sure I know, the first Runelords is The Worst Book Ever.

[Gypsy]

hobbleit, on 18 December 2011 - 08:00 AM, said:

Twilight.  Just an awful book.

And War and Peace.  I just could not get into it at all.  Managed 100 or so pages and couldn't read any more.

I tried to hard to get thru W&P but I was so lost in the Russian names that I finally had to give it up.

Right now I'm dragging myself thru Brisingr because I've read the first 2 books in the series and I own the last two as well, so I feel obligated to read all 4 (the "Inheritance" series).

Edited by Gypsy, 18 December 2011 - 12:06 PM.

[Astra]

Ser Scot A Ellison, on 18 December 2011 - 07:53 AM, said:

Perhaps I have difficulty with unreliable narrators but I'm still not really getting into this series.

This particular bit I hated.

hobbleit, on 18 December 2011 - 08:00 AM, said:

And War and Peace.  I just could not get into it at all.  Managed 100 or so pages and couldn't read any more.

dog-days, on 18 December 2011 - 09:12 AM, said:

My biggest failure is Dostoyevsky.

Cannot say I feel sorry for you guys. At least you have a choice. I didn't. I was put to the wall    and forced to read   or else...

Edited by Astra, 18 December 2011 - 09:44 AM.

[SkynJay]

Recently I dropped Blackdog, by KV ?(cant remember last name), a rather new book.  Loved it for about 100 pages, then slogged through the next 70.  Finally gave up.

[Happy Ent]

Snow Crash

Girl with the Dragon Tatoo

Should have just stopped, but had to know:

Wheel of Time, Book 1

Name of the Wind

Edited by Happy Ent, 18 December 2011 - 09:53 AM.

[Raksha the Demon]

Stuff I Managed to Read (for high school and college) and then NEVER Touched Again:


Madame Bovary - Monsieur Flaubert, if you felt that life was so petty and futile, then why did you bother to write the book at all?

Du Cote de Chez Swann (Proust) - I forget whether that was the title of the entire series or just the one book I read, en francais, but one was enough; and I will never eat a "Madeleine" cookie again, thank you.  (of course, there was a Monty  Python skit about a reciting-Proust-in-a-bathing-suit beauty pageant that made me laugh uproariously...)

Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky.  Argggggghhh.  The protagonist decides he has to kill someone to give his life meaning, and murders a woman who never hurt him or anyone.  And I had to sit and read it.  

Anything by Jane Austen:  I know she's a great writer, but her style and my attention span don't get along.  Maybe it was Northanger Abbey (which I had to read for school and at least finished, but found totally forgettable)...Did she write that?  See what I mean about forgettable...

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller:  Just could not hold my attention span.   Most modern novels don't, so that probably says more about me than Mr. Heller.

Don Quixote, by Cervantes:  I tried, I really did; especially because I loved the teacher in my college Western Literature course (well, loved to listen to him and look at him; I really didn't know him that well).  I just could not make it through the book.  I gave up after about a third of it.  I do love the musical Man of La Mancha.  Just to show that I can get through some bits of classic literature; I adore the Iliad, and I enjoyed Bocaccio's Decameron.



Stuff I Tried on My Own and Gave Up:


Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney:  I felt bad about it, but I could not make it through this huge novel.  I loved his much shorter piece The Ballad of Beta-2, though...


That's the only one that comes to mind, though I'm sure there are others in my forty-or-more years of reading Stuff.  

[Errant Bard]

Let's see:

Reaper's Gale
The Fires of Heaven
Wolves of the Calla
Devlin's luck
The Dawn of Amber (gaaaaaah. John Gregory Betancourt, I wish you never touched a pen or a keyboard)

Astra, on 18 December 2011 - 07:46 AM, said:

I trusted reviews of Westeros. I thought his taste in fantasy was very good and he was raving and even re-reading the first 5 books. I learned. I don't make the same mistake twice

I think you mean Werthead.

for the rest, you make baby jesus cry in the choice of authors you choose to throw the word "gibberish" at.

Happy Ent, on 18 December 2011 - 09:53 AM, said:

Snow Crash

Whoa, why? I would have thought it was just your alley. Is it something like that you cannot abstract yourself from the differences between Stephenson's projection for the future, and what really happened?

Raksha the Demon, on 18 December 2011 - 10:11 AM, said:

Du Cote de Chez Swann (Proust) - I forget whether that was the title of the entire series or just the one book I read, en francais, but one was enough; and I will never eat a "Madeleine" cookie again, thank you.

Series is "A la recherche du temps perdu", and "Du côté de chez Swann" is the first volume. You know, I had the same reaction, reading that stuff when I was in middle school (though I tried it voluntarily) and I am French. It wasn't the only author I didn't like too, but I tried it when I was adult, and found that the problem was with me: the writing is great, the themes are nice and the book is great, I just didn't have the experience to appreciate its worth, when I read it first.

(On the other ahnd I don't know how it fares in translation, and in my experience, non-native who don't practice the language regularly would not actually care for (such) style)

Edited by Errant Bard, 18 December 2011 - 10:30 AM.

[Astra]

Errant Bard, on 18 December 2011 - 10:22 AM, said:

I think you mean Werthead.

Yes, you are right. I will edit the post.
Thanks!

[Mikael]

Gravity's Rainbow - sex sure can be boring...

[Kosciuszko]

The only stuff I've never really been able to finish is Goodkind. I'm pretty confident I could even finish the last Eragon book if I cared enough to read it. But Faith of the Fallen completely crushed me.

ETA: Just remembered that I did put down Shadow of the Torturer, for something actually well-received to put in the thread. But I didn't really feel compelled to do so; it just sort of got lost amongst a lot of other stuff.

Edited by Kosciuszko, 18 December 2011 - 10:35 AM.

[Datepalm]

Happy Ent, on 18 December 2011 - 09:53 AM, said:

Should have just stopped, but had to know:

...

Name of the Wind

What on earth did you have to know? I read a hundred odd pages, but it's such an infinitesimal fraction of the book it hardly counts as 'couldn't finish'. More like 'couldn't start'.

Raksha the Demon, on 18 December 2011 - 10:11 AM, said:

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller:  Just could not hold my attention span.   Most modern novels don't, so that probably says more about me than Mr. Heller.

Yes! I knew I was forgetting stuff. I tried it a couple times in highschool, becuase it really seems like something I should love, but I never managed more than the first hundred pages or so.

[SkynJay]

Raksha the Demon, on 18 December 2011 - 10:11 AM, said:

Stuff I Managed to Read (for high school and college) and then NEVER Touched Again:


Madame Bovary - Monsieur Flaubert, if you felt that life was so petty and futile, then why did you bother to write the book at all?

I may have been the only person in my lit class that actually enjoyed that book.  Still have not found many who agree with me that it is worth reading.

[hobbleit]

Raksha the Demon, on 18 December 2011 - 10:11 AM, said:

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller:  Just could not hold my attention span.   Most modern novels don't, so that probably says more about me than Mr. Heller.

I've had that book on my shelf for about 5 years and have never read it.

[Mack Kilimaro]

I run into this whenever I attempt to read Philip Roth or Nabokov.

Within the fantasy genre, the only thing I've given up on in recent years was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

Mostly in agreement with everyone mentioning Russian stuff, as I only made it through books like C&P and War and Peace out of sheer determination to say that I'd done so. Although, to my surprise, when I got to the end I thought that I was glad I stuck with it in both cases.