Books you never finished

[clayasaurus]

Emma by Jane Austen

fuck that shit.

[kanavazk]

I've never read through Lord of the Rings.

(No comment.)

[quintopia]

Ivanhoe, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, super-compressed edition (I almost made it!), Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

[Rowsdower]

Mein Kampf. It is so long and about nothing. So boring.

[fransisco4]

Rendezvous with Rama-too young
Farenheith 451-too young, fixing that mistake tonight.
Third book on a series of book by Lewis. It had planets and stuff.
Ficciones-Borges, im reading it on little parts.
A series of book about a machine that can control the weather.
Update: Lisey Story
War of the worlds
Bradbury shors stories


I don't know what many of you find so hard about reading LotR, just finished reading them a week ago and they are great.
Guy that said that the ending was unnesecary- The cleaning of the Shire is one of the best parts, and has some MAJOR plot development. Unlike Bombadil.

[kinigget]

the only one I can think of at the moment is the second book of the wheel of time series. The first was good and I finished it in less than a week, but I had severe trouble making it through the second, mainly because it was very poorly written, but I'm still figuring out reasons why I didn't like the book. It made me sad that a book as amazing as the eye of the world should be appended by such a bad book. I wanted to reach through the book and strangle about half the cast by the second chapter.

[rustedneurons]

Manufacturing Consent (Noam Chomksy) - I got about halfway through it, then started something else. I'll finish it oneday though.

[maxfischer]

I like how so many people, like myself, just couldn't get through Heart of Darkness. It's pretty short...

I absolutely adore Milan Kundera but I just can't finish "The Joke." I've tried so many times!
I couldn't finish Confederacy of Dunces either.
I don't finish a lot of books...

[Kazuke]

Got halfway through the last Harry Potter book and said "fuck this." Then I picked up the Dresden Files and never looked back.

[Libertine]

I never finished "Godel Escher Bach" by Hofstadter or "Kafka on the Shore" by Murakami. I've got a bad habit of just looking up the ending on Wikipedia if I get bored/curious. I stopped reading Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" with only about 10 pages left but it's repetitive so I don't think I'm missing much.

[Ixtellor]

I started reading two different Issac Asimov books, ( I forget which two)
and was unable to finish either, because even though his story lines were cool, his writing style is boring.


Ixtellor

[Liet Kynes]

HGTG 4 and 5- they we're more confusing than the other 3 and I in't feel like finishing.

[Hollandb]

I don't think I ever finished "Shadow of the Giant" by Orson Scott Card. I don't know why, I guess I just forgot to finish reading it. I really should some time, he's an excellent writer, and that is an extraordinary series of books.

[Narsil]

Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon

I'm sorry. I really am. I trudged through Gravity's Rainbow somehow but this just owned me at about page 300. Too long; too much stuff, and damn if I know what's going on anymore. I'll pick it back up over Winter Break.

[anouk]

Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky; I forced myself to read until just after the crime, and then I just couldn't of cared less what happened.
Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man; I can't even remember what it was about.
The Wall Jumper; No plot, and if one would seldom appear, it would disappear as fast as I could read it. I put it down with 30 pages to go (it was fairly short to begin with).

[Averazul]

i started reading lord of the rings, but stopped about 10 or 20 pages short of finishing the fellowship part of it. But then, i was reading them all together in one large book. If i had been reading the fellowship in it's own book, i woulda finished the last 10 pages just to be done with it.

I really just stopped reading because of the inconsistent degrees of detail used in the book. My favorite example is crossing the bridge of khazad dum in moria. The part bursts into a large cavern, with this many stalactites like this, and stalagmites like that, and there's a chasm bout this wide and sloping a little like this, the bridge was about this long, arched to such a degree, a little narrower here than there, and some goblins off on the wall shooting arrows, and a slighte breeze, and then aragorn crossed, then the hobits, boromir, legolas, gimli, then gandalf broke the bridge under the balrog and it pulled him down too, then everone emerges into sunight and there's rocks here and trees there and a river like thats and the grass in the breeze and the birds do this and the sun is at some angle and the clouds thusly and blah blah blah.

It was about 30 pages later that they were all having a discussion about something important to thier journey and i noticed gandalf was being unusually quiet. I flipped back some and saw that he was dead, which explained a lot.

Also, the whole balrog/moria thing seemed like a trick (on gandalf's part). he says "Oh we simply mustn't go thru moria, that would be far too dangerous but i will not say why! /reverse psychology/ Oh alright, let's go to moria. Oh look a balrog! Well, you guys go ahead, i'll stay and fight the beast! The 'defeated the balrog' badge is the last badge i need before i can become a white wizard! i'll meet up with you guys later"

[Immortal_Z]

I never managed to finish The Return of the King simply because it started to get too thick. Instead of reading normally, I found myself sludging through the language. Not for me.

Inkheart and Inkdeath.. I read Inkspell cover to cover, but not the first or third books. Translated from German. I am fairly sure they lost a lot of their charm during that

[Minchandre]

I never managed to finish The Return of the King simply because it started to get too thick. Instead of reading normally, I found myself sludging through the language. Not for me.

Inkheart and Inkdeath.. I read Inkspell cover to cover, but not the first or third books. Translated from German. I am fairly sure they lost a lot of their charm during that

I could never hack Two Towers! Somehow, whenever I got halfway through or so I just couldn't take it anymore. I tried like three times. Having heard your confession, I feel better about mine.

EDIT: I also agree with Averazul's sentiments. The end of Fellowship seemed kinda tacked on...it should have ended as a cliffhanger with the Balrog being vanquished. Hell of a climax.

[Allenr]

All books my english teachers assigned to me that I actually started. The list is long and has: MacBeth, The Hatchet, Tale of Two Cities, and Romeo and Juliet

[yolesaber]

Great Expectations. Eh, it just wasn't what I hoped for.

[1hitcombo]

Great Expectations. Eh, it just wasn't what I hoped for.

I thought Great Expectations was ok when I read it in high school. I couldn't get through David Copperfield on my own though. It's tough to read something so dense and wordy without getting bored and tired. From what I've read (about 1/3) there were some really good parts but all of it was engulfed by really dull parts.

[Absolute]

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I suffered through the whole thing in english, tried reading the original German when I was in A.P. Deutsch 3 in high school. It was hopeless, German must be the easiest language with which to be (deliberately?) incomprehensible. Of course, now I don't remember much German at all, so I couldn't finish it if I wanted to. Pity.
Come to think of it, I haven't read any philosophical work all the way through in years. I've been spoiled by reading a philosopher who, being a non-native speaker, lacks the mastery of English required to be truly unintelligible.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, skimmed what I thought were the important parts, didn't really understand it until I recently read P.J. O'Rourke on The Wealth of Nations. If anyone reading this ever gets Wealth as assigned reading, skip it and just read O'Rourke, it has all the important parts and then some, and it's funny as hell.

John Milton's Paradise Lost Ugh.
Tolkien's Silmarillion see above.

The Color of Water by some idiot, Their Eyes Were Watching God by some other idiot, and a bunch of other hackneyed sob stories assigned in school. Everything I've ever started by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Anne Rice(wtf was I thinking), or Michael Crichton. Once I can tell how a story will end, it takes humor, prose, or ideas to keep me reading, none of the above has any.

[Mysidic]

"The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I only have the first part of it.

I got through the first four chapters easily, but stopped around the fifth. I pick it up every now and then, but I'm not sure I'll ever finish it in my lifetime. It seems that I have to pause at the end of every chapter, and think about it, let how terrible the prisons were sink in. By the time I'm ready for a new chapter, I'm reading something else. Only book that I like that I can't finish. :-/

[jferry]

Atlas Shrugged

[Allenr]

Atlas Shrugged

You should go finish that, RIGHT NOW!

[Absolute]

Agreed, I know it's poorly written in places, but it's the book which is most unfair to judge without finishing.

[mikhail]

Catch 22. I read about 80 pages, and when I realized it wasn't going anywhere, I put it down.

I haven't finished a million books. I start a lot. and read a lot. but the lot i start is more. Notably: Catch 22, Jude the Obscure, lots of science ones, mostly it's not because i don;t think i would like them if i finisehd them, usually it's because something easier and quicker came along or i got distracted. I liked bits of Catch 22 i just fuond it impossible to keep going because tehre didn't seem to be a plot to follow.

Catch 22. I read about 80 pages, and when I realized it wasn't going anywhere, I put it down.

God I love that book.

...Wait I haven't finished it either.

Catch 22 - I found the attempt at humor more annoying than funny, and any time I mention it I feel like I'm the only person who disliked the book ( a lot of my friends cite it as the only book they had to read in high school they enjoyed)

See, I never saw Catch-22's humor as universal. I love that book. My sister hates it. We even have fairly similar senses of humor, but it's one of those things that you do or don't find funny.

I started reading Catch-22 in my very early teens, I think, maybe even earlier, and gave up on it after less than a hundred pages. I've long intended to pick up a copy again.

I don't stop reading many books, though some take forever to get through. I tend to read anything up to about eight books in parallel, and anything I'm finding slow going can just get deprioritised. There are a few exceptions:
Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. I read most of his books as a teenager. As literature, they're shit, but some of them are decent pageturners, and they take a while to get through, mostly because they're longer than telephone directories. I got to this one, read 150 pages, was bored out of my tree, realised that I was less than a tenth of the way through the book and gave it away. Unlike Catch 22, I've never felt any urge to return to it.

Moby Dick, second worst novel I've ever read. I stopped reading it during the multipage essay on why whales are fish, as I kept on falling asleep before I could finish the page. I was trying to read that page over an entire week.

Moby Dick (started reading it in middle school, never picked it up again)

Moby Dick. Ugh. I gave up on that after maybe 50 pages. It was so dull, it kept putting me to sleep. Again, I was reasonably young at the time, but still, I can't bring myself to try it again.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Proof in my opinion that school hates us. the only book I've not finished, and the only book to put me to sleep. His other books were ok, but that one is just BORING.

Great Expectations. Eh, it just wasn't what I hoped for.

I thought Great Expectations was ok when I read it in high school.

When I was in school, we had to read a novel for the state exam (for kids about 15 or 16). The class started going through Jane Eyre. It was awful. We hated it.
At the same time, our teacher gave us a list of about 20-30 classic books to read. We had to read a few of them and write reports. One of the ones I picked up was Great Expectations. As we never actually got more than about half way through Jane Eyre, I had to answer questions in the state exam on Great Expectations. It was bad, but Jane Eyre was far, far worse.

Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man; I can't even remember what it was about.

I read it all for my end of high school state exam. It's awful. I'm Irish, and I've grown to hate Joyce more than Cromwell.

I never finished "Godel Escher Bach" by Hofstadter.

I keep meaning to finish that one myself.

[BlueEyedGreen]

I began The Pickwick Papers a full six years ago, and never finished it. I began War & Peace two years ago, and never finished it. I'm not generally one of those people who can never finish a book, but those two were so long that life got in the way and they were swept by the wayside. I really enjoyed myself reading them - War & Peace was looking like it could be one of my favorite novels ever, and The Pickwick Papers had some of Dickens' best characters, if you ask me - but they're just too much for a slow reader, such as myself, in a turbulent world, such as this.
Anyone else have tales of unfinished books?

[apoklips]

I started The Brothers Karamazov and made it about 500 or so pages in. It was fairly enjoyable, I just got distracted by other things. I still intend on finishing it, though. One day. Probably not soon.

[NO1PCKTHS]

I started Dante's Divine Comedy, stopped about 3/4 of the way through Inferno. It'll have to wait until after college. AE doesn't equate to having time to read.

[Amarantha]

I barely managed to start War & Peace, let alone finish it But I was only 15 when I tried; might get a bit further now.

I never quite made it through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I loved the book, and I tried so hard, and I nearly got all the way through, but just never quite made it. And then I had the ending spoilered a couple of years later I should totally try again.

The Silmarillion is another that tends to bog me down. I've given it several red-hot goes, but in the end I gave it up.

[Jahoclave]

I finished Anna Karenina and have considered the matter of these long novels closed.

[Amnesiasoft]

<This post was redundant after the merge>

[Dream]

The two I'm worst at were, or are, Crime And Punishment and Gravity's Rainbow. I've read far longer and slower books. War And Peace was a pleasure cover to cover. But for some reason these two just won't make it, no matter how many times I try. I'm on hiatus from Ulysses right now while I put together a portfolio of music. Hopefully I'll get back to it. I hat how much I love these books, but don't keep reading.

[Cathode Ray Sunshine]

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand- I absolutely despise this book! I got halfway through it before I threw it down. I should have done it sooner! What a waste of time!

I'm currently reading that book now. I really loved Atlas Shrugged (though I want to make it clear that Rand's view on sex is right down crazy and I don't agree with some of her views) but that book was amazing. Great characters, compelling storyline, everything. So I thought about reading her other masterpiece, The Fountainhead. I'm not even halfway and it's the most boring piece of crap I've ever read. It makes me wish I was illiterate. The book is just dull, the characters make me sick (Keating can't even take a crap without getting Roark's approval.) I know what some of you might say, that I think that way about them because that's the way it was written, and that might be true yes, but I find myself not caring at all for any of the characters, except for Roark, who is not even on the book that much (at least from what I've been reading).Anyways, sorry for rambling; I will finish it though because I think the theme of the book is interesting, but I really doubt that I will pick it up a second time.

[wanderer1213]

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea- It is such a great story/concept, but the insane profusion of novella-length fish descriptions and other such unnecessary digressions REALLY got to me after a while.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich- It is a great book, actually fairly readable, but it is crazy time consuming. I probably could have finished it if I had a few more months of summer, but once school started I was done for. Now its been long enough that I don't feel like I can pick up where I left off, but I don't think I could deal with restarting. Anybody else have that problem with half-read books?

[Minstrel]

Only book, aside from school reading, that I never finished was the second volume of Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory. I really, really wanted to finish that one, but I just lost the heart to keep reading after a while. Seemed like the same thing page after page after page, knights attacking castles and each other and smiting each other constantly, and occasionally a tournament happens. "And so wherefore Sir Pelvacius did smite him unto Sir Claudius and whichthereafterforetowhen Sir Claudius did summon him unto his knights and smite mightily unto Sir Pelvacius" yadda yadda yadda.

[Spinoza]

Rudyard Kipling - Kim

[Freiberg]

The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

Well, I finished the trilogy itself, but I did not finish the other books. I got to the end of Foundation and Earth and stopped. Odd, considering that the trilogy itself was the best literature I have ever read.

[lu6cifer]

I have way too many of these.
Atlas Shrugged - I finished it, but I skimmed the last half. Jon Galt's 90 page rant I knocked down to about 10 pages.

I read most of Atlas Shrugged, but I couldn't find the willpower to get through John Galt's rant--even though the entire book was just one, giant rant (I jokingly call her Ayn Rant sometimes)

Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man; I can't even remember what it was about.

I got through it, with the help of Wikipedia and Sparknotes. I think it was about some guy who was tired and frustrated of his society and his religion, and wanted to get away from it all...

I barely managed to start War & Peace, let alone finish it But I was only 15 when I tried; might get a bit further now.

I finished it after six months of reading, on and off. I think reading War and Peace kind of scarred me for life, because I now find myself uninterested in any sort of Russian author.

I also tried reading Ulysses. Three times. Then I realized that for me to even remotely understand the book, I'd have to set aside a few month's time of straight reading.
For all those who didn't finish Catch-22, the plot does pick up ~100 pages into the book. Plus, there are some really hilarious parts (notably the Major Major Major Major chapter). I think it's mostly difficult because there are so many characters to keep track of, because from what I recall, each chapter is essentially a new character.
Also, Stephen King's The Stand, of which I got about halfway through.