Have you started following us on Twitter? We ask questions of our followers most days, and yesterday the question of choice was:
Which book have you never been able to finish, no matter how many times you attempt it?
Amongst others, we received the following replies:
Dune by Frank Herbert
@pablod: *runs away and hides*
The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
@teshiron: For some reason, I just cannot get into it, despite my love of epic fantasy.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
@tdelucci: Everyone tells me I’ll love it and it seems like my kind of story, only I can’t get past chapter 4!
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
@laughablefellow: Though I haven’t given it another go for a few years!
The Bible
@marianne9: The last time I tried I didn’t even make it past the begats.
And then there is always one….
@thenashmeister: The Neverending Story. Geddit? Geddit? Sigh. I’ll get me coat…
Let us know if you agree or disagree with the above list—and do tell us those other books you feel should be on it!
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
I just don’t get all the hype.
The Last Guardian of Everness by John C. Wright. Like the mists in the book, where things go when they are forgotten, this book went. Both my friend and I stopped reading about halfway through and couldn’t remember anything of what we had read. (Loved all his other books, though! Couldn’t put them down.)
The Otherland series by Tad Williams. After several attempts, I’ve made it only 2/3 through the 3rd (of 4) volumes.
Pablo! But Dune is my favorite Sci Fi book!
But anyway, yeah, I’d cast my vote on The Silmarillion.
@@@@@ 1 – second, third and fourth that one (oh, the many times I have tried). Also Chabon’s Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Just too much….
A Game of Thrones by George R Martin. I read the first few chapters and ended up taking it back to the bookstore and trading it. It is the only book I have ever done that for.
Pride & Prejudice! I cannot, for the life of me, get to the end of that story! I tried the Jane Austen novel and couldn’t finish it. I tried the Colin Firth movie and couldn’t finish it. I tried Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and couldn’t. finish. it. I don’t know what else to do. Do Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy ever get together? I suspect so but I’ll never really know.
@1 and @@.-@, I actually made it through Gravity’s Rainbow, and I still don’t understand the hype.
I’ve never made it past page 3 of Ulysses or the first paragraph of All Quiet on the Western Front.
I had no trouble with Silmarillion, but I am a professed Tolkien fanatic. :P
I don’t know how, but I forced my way through the garbage that is The Sword of Shannara… Wow that book was bad. I can’t force myself to read book two. I can’t say about Dune or any of the ones commented on above, but I didn’t even come close on The Bible. I got to Exodus and called it quits.
As for some others… Twilight. Yes, I tried just to see what the fuss was about… I ended up skimming it, and even that was hard. The most horrendously awful book on the planet. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke was pretty bad, too. Got about halfway through that one.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – even though it is exactly the type of book I would enjoy, I cannot get through it. It puts me to sleep. I did finish The Man in the High Castle but didn’t want to. I had a real dislike for that book.
The Book of the New Sun. I’ve tried several times but I keep getting bogged down after Severian is exiled.
@10: I’ve been thinking lately that a Tor.com-style reread of The Book of the New Sun would be fantastic. Maybe include the rest of the Solar Cycle (the Long Sun and Short Sun books) too.
The only book that I’ve never finished is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars. Someday I’ll go back and read it and Blue Mars (along with Red Mars again). Not in any particular hurry, though.
1984. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for it and I liked the movie with John Hurt. But the book is just to damn bleak to finish.
Dhalgren. I’ve started it 5-6 times now and never get more than about a third of the way through before putting it down. Oh, I’ve also not been able to finish Titus Groan, but I’ve only tried it twice or so.
I hate to say it, but I’m currently having that problem with Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. I’ll read a chapter or two, drift off to something else, come back and read a couple more, drift away again…For some reason I just can’t get into it. About seven chapters into WoK I gave up and switched to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter Vendetta, and ended up reading that twice.
Maybe once I’ve finally got my hands on and read Towers of Midnight (thus temporarily curing my Wheel of Time addiction) I’ll be able to go back to WoK and do it justice.
I can’t say I NEVER got through the 3rd book of the Covenant trilogy, but the last time I tried, I just couldn’t get through it. TC is just too whiny, rambling, and self absorbed. The ending is pretty good if you can get to it, but I just couldn’t do it.
I made myself finish Dune the last time I tried, but I think I’m spoiled by the Wheel of Time. I just don’t like the world of Dune or the natives, compared to Randland and the Aiel.
The Bible isn’t that bad, really, you just have to pick your spots. Skip the begats, skip boring stuff like the construction of the tabernacle, and the details of the sacrifices in Leviticus. There are some very good stories though. A lot of Genesis and Exodus are very interesting. The history of Isreal from King Saul onward is very interesting. There’s all kinds of interesting stuff, if you know where to look. There are wars, intrigue, love, betrayal, etc. Song of Solomon is very sensual, it’s about a newly married couple. There’s a lot of wisdom, how to deal with people, how to manage your money wisely, etc. Aside from Leviticus and such, I have to admit I had a hard time getting through parts of Isaiah, and the rest of the prophets other than Daniel. All the scolding and warning the wicked nations all start to sound the same after a while. But anyway, don’t think you HAVE to read the whole thing straight through in order, because you don’t. If you have a hard time getting through a part, skip ahead a bit.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Sooooo boring. And everyone insisted it got good after the first 100 pages, but once Blomqvist finally got out into the countryside it dragged on even slower. And the climax was over in about 1 paragraph. I finally did finish it, but it was like pulling teeth. I sat through 500 fraking pages for a 1 paragraph ending…and there was another 100 pages of coda. God, it was awful. I put Kraken on the backburner for this stupid book and that annoys me most of all.
greenland@6: That makes my heart hurt. I haven’t stopped reading Pride and Prejudice since I started it 7 years ago. Seriously. As soon as I hit The End I flip right back to the beginning and start again.
BenM@15: Perhaps I am jaded from experience, but I read the entire Bible several times during my stint as an evangelical Christian (Seventh Day Adventist, to be precise). Every Friday we had to memorize Bible verses and recite them. We had 2 hour Bible classes every day. Baptismal classes were credit classes. So my feelings about reading the Bible are less than pleasant. I never found it enjoyable at all, either as the Word of a completely hypocritical and obnoxious God or as the paraphrasing of God’s Instruments. It was something I had to slog through to pass classes, and that was my opinion of it back when I though evolution was hokey because there weren’t half-man/half-apes running around.
The Fellowship of the Ring
I’ve tried two or three times and I just cannot get into it. Never gotten very far beyond the hobbits leaving the shire each time I’ve tried to read it.
Catcher in the Rye – Awful awful awful. Holden Caulfield may be my least favorite literary character of all time.
The Dark Tower series – I like a lot of Stephen King’s stuff, but I never could make it through that series. I gave up on it about halfway through the 4th book.
Jhelmer@18, for me Stephen King writes some of the greatest short stories of all time, but he tends to make them 800 pages long. The later books of the Dark Tower definitely suffered from this. The only way I made it through them was to listen to them on audiobook, because for whatever reason the slow pacing just didn’t bug me. I guess because audiobooks in general force a slower pace so it just didn’t seem so painful.
LoTR (stopped at end of v1, it was good but not great, never worked up enough interest to start v2); Air (well written but oh so boring, I lost interest); Star Maker (loved LAFM but couldn’t finish SM); Revelation Space (got 95% of the way through it and then realised I didn’t care enough anymore; might go back to it, god knows I loved Pushing Ice); His Dark Materials — I enjoyed Northern Lights/Golden Compass & The Subtle Knife but interest flagged early on in The Amber Spyglass for some reason and I’ve not gone back to it, so far. The Bible – life’s too short to waste on impenetrable nonsense. I don’t mind a bit of fantasy every now and then, but that much all in one indigestible lump is too much.
Dune I finished (three times so far), but I still can’t see why it’s so feted. It’s good but not great, it’s got too much magic for me to consider it SF. Possibly the most overrated SF/F novel ever.
A Tale of Two Cities was a horrible bore for me along with A Scarlet Letter. They forced us to read both of these “classiscs” in school, but I just couldn’t stand them.
For my own personal reading list there was only one book that I thought was so horribly bad that I just had to throw it in the trash, and I never do that! It was so bad that I can’t remember what the title was any more. I do remember (with a shudder of horror) what it was about and I hope that someone here can remind me of the title. It was an alternate history where magic was real and it was set in the “Roman” era. A kid is sent to learn magic so that he can fight with the army against Rome’s enemies. I do remember that it was supposed to be a series of books, but I couldn’t even get through it once because nothing ever seemed to happen. I must have gotten through 3/4 of the book and there was never any actual magic used.
I think I’m the only person in the world who actually really, really liked The Silmarillion. In some ways, I liked it better than LotR.
The Bible is definitely on the list. I’m an utter heathen, but I got a KJV to read as literature, but I don’t think I got past “In the beginning…” before I got bored and stopped.
I’ve never been able to go beyond a few pages of any Jane Austen book BUT Pride and Prejudice. I simply adore P&P, the book and the Firth/Ehle miniseries, but every other Austen makes me go cold. I reallyd don’t understand it.
I adore the Silmarillion and enjoyed Pride and Prejudice, thought Dune was good but not great but read the whole Frank Herbert series.
I did get through the Bible
But I will say I have tried and tried to read Gravity’s rainbow..even got pretty far through it last time, but just have never been able to quite finish it. I am not sure why…
I also had a lot of trouble with New Sun, but am still trying
My co-favorite with Pride and Prejudice is Persuasion. The main female lead has a lot in common with Elizabeth Bennett and the books share a similar tone, with Persuasion being a tad more mature and slower paced.
Yea! Someone else disliked Catcher in the Rye. Hated it, never understood why it is considered a classic. As I recall, I probably never finished it either….
I have to agree with BenM on the Covenant series. I got so tired of the protagonist being thrown around I never finished the series, I think I stopped somewhere in the second book.
Catcher in the Rye turned me off in the first two pages, even though I had to read it for English class. I was not crazy about Lord of the Flies either. I finished it but was left feeling slimey. And as a 17 year old that was distinctly uncomfortable
Loved Dune, and the others Herbert really wrote especially the ones right after Dune, not so sure on the ones his son is doing. I have them but some of the motives do not make sense to me.
I have read the Silmarillon in sections at a time, not straight through, but I also like folklore/myths/legends of any kind. I think that is one of the reasons I like the Malazan series and WoT.
I have to say I have attempted to read Cherryh on my sister’s recommendation but was not able to get into the world.
I will have to check on Gravity’s Rainbow as I had not heard about it.
It makes me sad to see my favorite book(the Bible) getting so much scorn here.
I will admit that the Simarillion is one of the hardest books to get through(I took a couple week break halfway through – very atypical for me). Brothers Karamazov was also a tough one, but I managed.
dshan, agree with you about Dune. I read it when I was 17 or so, eager to see why it was so acclaimed. I enjoyed it, yeah. I’ve even read it again since. But I really do not understand why it gets the attention it does…sorry Dune fans!
I’m really trying to recall if there’s any book I’ve tried to finish and not been able to…but can’t think of any! I have an extreme inability to *not* finish books I’ve started. I have to know how they end. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
I do remember when I was about 8 or 9, I found Gone with the Wind in our house. I started reading it(reading was a passion, even then!), but my mom took it away. She told me it was too old for me. Maybe someday I’ll get back to it.
The Bible, The book of Mormon, Dune, the time traveller’s wife, A fire upon the deep, The Talisman, Wuthering Heights and about every book ever written by Stephen Baxter.
Destination Void, The Dosadi Experiment, Children of Dune, and at that point I simply gave up on Frank Herbert, though I did like Dune.
Jared Diamond’s Collapse is sitting on my shelf, half-finished for the past year or so; it’s just too fucking depressing to continue reading for now; maybe on my deathbed or something.
Beyond the Fall of Night, the execrable sequel to Against the Fall of Night by Gregory Benford and (supposedly) Arthur C Clarke. Just horrific.
I remember as a teenager trying to read Donald Glut’s novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back and simply giving up after a couple of pages, it was so bad. Gene Roddenberry’s treatment of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, ditto, and George Lucas’s Star Wars. I think I pretty much gave up on film novelisations around that time. I think I also have a few Star Trek novels sitting in a pile somewhere that I don’t think I ever even opened.
Surprisingly (to me) I made it through A Tale of Two Cities, as well as the unabridged The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After, and enjoyed them. Of course, I was a lot older than when, in high school, I’d been subjected to Great Expectations, so maybe that had something to do with it.
And I think I made it through Hawkings’s A Brief History of Time, though my brain was thoroughly fried, though I have yet to make it all the way through Greene’s Elegant Universe. String theory is weird….
subwoofer, you reminded me – I never finished Crime and Punishment either. I actually made it about 5/6 of the way through…just couldn’t take it anymore.
I also now remember that I couldn’t finish The Fountainhead. I think I only made it halfway.
I’m so glad to see I’m not the only one who couldn’t finish Gravity’s Rainbow.
There are very few books I don’t finish. Hundred Years of Solitude was the only one for school. I felt bad about it, but at some point I stopped caring about all the various Arulitos and Remedioses and couldn’t read any more about them without falling asleep.
The David Weber/Linda Evans Hell’s Gate series. After the Umpteenth chapter discussing the economics of using interdimensional travel, I put it down and have never picked it back up.
@16 Milo1313,
Definitely agree with you on Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I thought it was okay, but certainly not worth the hype people gave it. The prologue was excellent, and there were occassional flashes of brilliance in the middle, but there were too many boring chapters, too many contrived coincidences, too many characters whose actions didn’t fit, and too many moments where the characters “brilliant deductions” were things I had thought of in the first chapter. The end was awful: the plot I cared about was dismissed in a couple paragraphs, then we spent 100 pages on a plotline that I couldn’t care less about. Finished it but have no desire to pick up either of the other books.
Forgot to add yesterday:
The Windup Girl (too depressing) and The Darkness that Comes Before (too dull). This is rather cathartic!
My younger son and husband are fans of the Shannara series but I cannot get into it in spite of repeated attempts.
I made it only partway through the Dark Tower series (lost me at Wizard and Glass (?) although my oldest son and husband liked it)
Love the work Sanderson is doing on WOT but (looks around quickly) I cannot get into Mistborn.
I read Simirillian (sp?) years ago.
In school I could never make it through Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage
I think Catch 22 is the one I just couldn’t do. Others come to mind that I abandonned because their writing style was too archaic (Robinson Crusoe, though that may have been the specific printing, every other word was capitalized) or I just couldn’t keep up my interest (Stranger in a Strange Land, the women all read like bad actresses in a 50’s moster movie), but Catch 22 was more like… I just couldn’t do it. The tedium, I remember it reading like a fever dream. Which I think it was supposed to…
It’s a shame to see Dune and Book of the New Sun as repeats on the list, those are both in my all time top five of fiction.
The Sound and the Fury– I enjoyed the concept of stream of consciousness, but that book was hard going, and though I passed the papers I wrote for it in class, I was never able to finish it. (college)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell– Perhaps it was that I was in Korea at the time reading it during exercises for the Air Force, but I could never really get into it. Guess it’s trying to read a book through MOPP gear….
The Bible- I’ve heard all the morality tales it contains. Do I need to read them?
I’ve started Gravity’s Rainbow twice now, but haven’t been able to complete it, which is odd, considering how much I enjoyed V.
Catcher in the Ryeand Jane Eyre- I don’t know if was the fact that they were thrown at us as god’s gifts in high school, but I’ve just never been able to read them completely.
Crime and Punishment, though I enjoyed The Idiot and The Possessed.
War and Peace, though I enjoyed Anna Karenina.
The Hobbit– Granted, I like The Lord of the Rings, but its predecessor has never been able to grab my attention.
And…I had to stop reading Finnegans Wake twice before I finally plowed through it one weekend.
The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring. Both I’ve tried reading multiple times and stopped pretty close to the beginning. Before that, Fahrenheit 451 oddly enough. Short book, but somehow I could never finish out the last few chapters. Took about 4 yrs sitting on my “to-read” night stand shelf before I finally finished it this last time!
I too have heard bad things about “100 years of solitiude.” Thankfully, I never had to read it. Catch-22 was okay, but got boring after a while. I never really liked Catcher in the Rye all that much either, but I read it because I had to. On the other hand, my grandpa gave me The Three Musketeers as a Christmas present, and I really enjoyed that. I also read Don Quixote in high school study hall, and that wasn’t bad either. (That’s also where I first read the Covenant Chronicles. The second trilogy was better than the first, IMHO.)
Dhalgren. It is the only SF novel that I have ever been unable to finish. Not surprised to see it on Artanian’s response as well. Was surprised to see “Collapse” listed by NomadUK since I thought it was rivetting. Hopefully books like that will inspire us to avoid a collapse of civilization or at least do something to prepare for it, just in case.
You people keep reminding me of other books I haven’t finished! And I thought I had a perfect record too! Lsana, I also wasn’t able to finish Hell’s Gate. Wait, is it a series? I never made it through the first one. Is Weber usually better? This was my introduction to him. And I don’t know why, it just…was not interesting. And I feel like it should have been – I just thought all the characters were flat and plot not gripping. Alas. It’s still sitting around here…maybe I’ll get back to it someday.
Ug…Hundred years of solitude…I actually did finish that, but it was the most boring book I have ever read. For those who didn’t finish it, you missed nothing. The end is just as boring as the rest of it. Not sure why it is supposted to be a great work of literature. It didn’t even seem that well written, as well as being boring.
I was also unable to finish the Sword of Shannara…my brother claims the series gets better as it goes on, and so I have tried to make it through the first book two or three times, but each time i get about halfway through, and decide that I don’t care how good the later ones are…its not worth reading the first one.
For Weber…Well, I actually like his books, by and large. I have not read the Hells Gate series, but the Honor Harrington and Safehold series are not bad. The characters are all mostly the same and never really go through any character development of any significance, but he is a very good naval historian. His battles(sea or space) are extremely detailed and technologically precise, which I enjoy, though I have been told it is boring by some others. Its probably not a good sign if you don’t really care if the characters live or die as long as the battles are interesting, but they are still worth reading in my opinion.
The Bible is a good read. Just not something that someone plows through in a day, week or month. Faith takes time.
Woof™.
I tapped out of the Dark Tower Series at Wolves of Calla, and after reading Ender’s Game and enthusiastically moving on to Speakers of the Dead – I don’t think I got passed chapter 2. I seem to remember – pig aliens? Weren’t there pig aliens? Not for me.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read the Bible in its entirety – just not in chronological order.
I did get through Game of Thrones, but I think that was the longest stretch of time its ever taken me to finish a book.
Game of Thrones is another one I never could finish. Early in the characters I liked were getting killed (and it is my understanding that is a pattern for GRRM).
I have yet to finish the Otherworld series by Williams but only because I have been unable to locate book 4. (The last half of book 3 was a bit difficult to get through felt like all 10 years of the Trojan War ;)
@16 Milo1313. I’m not sure what it is about that specific story. I actually like the story, the characters, and the writing style, but my attention wanders regardless.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Great opening line, but I’ve never been able to get much further than that.
I also couldn’t get into Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but I’m told the book doesn’t really take off until Strange actually shows up, so I’ll probably try it again at some point.
I’m not sure how far I got into the Dune series before I gave up, but I think it might have been God Emperor of Dune, and in retrospect I’m astounded I even got that far. Wow, did that whole thing go downhill fast. Same with the Ender’s Game series; amazing first book, then a depressingly rapid downward spiral. Oh well.
47: Leigh, I’m guilty of Neuromancer quittage as well. I think I read the first thirty pages five times before deciding to give up.
On the other hand, I read the first Sandman trade and liked it…but didn’t continue….A year latter I reread it and flew right through the whole series. So, so, so happy I did.
When I was young(er) I had a teacher who was absolutely insistent that I read Treasure Island. I couldn’t get past the first few pages. I ended up begging her to let me read something else, so she gave me The Hobbit . . . and the rest is history.
And I haven’t been able to get into any of the “Shadow” books by Orson Scott Card. Actually read the Enders Game series (four books? OCD as population control a theme of the final one?) but couldn’t make it into the others.
-Beren
Because I am a philistine who was raised by wolves — wolves who were themselves raised by cold emotionless robots — I’ve never been able to finish anything by Philip K. Dick, except for The Man in the High Castle, which I didn’t particularly enjoy.
I chalk it up to my not being smart enough to parse all the metaphysical whinging in his work. It’s probably all brilliant, but way over my head.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – No matter how many times I pick up that book, I get sidetracked and end up reading something else instead. The narrative voice just annoys me after 100 pages or so.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – I cannot count the ways in which Blomkvist annoys me. No amount of Salander being awesome makes up for the droning of the Blomkvist passages.
The Worm Ouroboros – I’m a big ol’ heroic fantasy nerd, and I know that this is the grandaddy of ’em all, but I just can’t drag myself through it, no matter how hard I try.
These are the most frequently retried ones in the past couple of years, but there’s others too. If I listed them all, though, that would take it into the realms of a blog post, rather than a comment.