Books you never finished

[Catmando]

Catcher in the Rye. I got like a third of the way or halfway or something into it and just gave up. Strangely, though, it's still sitting in the top of my locker at school.

[VectorZero]

The Windup Girl. Liked the opening, was looking forward to a biotech thriller about GM and cyborgs and stuff but ... the (characters) misanthropy and misogyny just got to me; stopped caring.

Also never finished catch-22, so I guess that makes me a member here

[dubsola]

I almost didn't finish A Confederacy of Dunces, but the sense that I had to be missing something forced me to keep trudging onward. I should have just gone with my instinct. I hated the book. I was more interested in the story of how it was published, to be honest. Too bad that "story" ended in the first few pages.

Same here. I really want to like the book, my friend bought it for me saying it was his favourite, and the publishing story made me think 'This is going to be awesome'... but no. I have a lot of patience for weird things but this book just didn't do it for me.

The Baroque Trilogy are some of my favourite books, but I liked them a lot more once I'd re-read them. Some parts are really, really tough going, but he's building a world and I think it's necessary. When you go to those places (like central London, for example) you realise he really made a big, big effort to set the scene.

[distractedSofty]

I never finished Maskerade, and thus have only read 17.5 of the mainline Discworld books. I actually have a copy of Feet of Clay that I purchased at the same time, and haven't even opened it (Which, come to think of it, is disappointing, because I liked the two earlier city watch books).

I stopped due to external reasons (starting my job 4 years ago), but I think the reason I've never been able to pick it up again is because I ran out of patience for Pratchett's writing style: I find it really hard to "get up a good ryhthm" with Pratchett, and am constantly pulled back to "you are reading a book". (I had the same issue with Adams in HHGTTG, but that has the benefit of being shorter)

[raike]

I've yet to finish the third Wheel of Time book, or the latest Dresden Files (their names escape me at the moment). As much as I really like both series, this is unlikely to change in the near future.
I've a book-mark in Road to Reality by R. Penrose, probably around the half-way mark. That's probably not moving.

[delfts]

Just started The Fountainhead. Got really into it, but after about 100 pages, I just had to set the book down. After reading Atlas Shrugged, I got the whole philosophy -- the story doesn't seem to have picked up yet, and I could be spending my reading time better. Sorry, Rand.

[reluctantsaints]

Never finished The Stand. I started it when I was literally like twelve or thirteen and tried to pick it up again over and over through my teenage years and could never manage to get back to it.

Has anyone found Stephen King hard to finish? Fun to start, but impossible to finish?

[Kewangji]

Has anyone found Stephen King hard to finish? Fun to start, but impossible to finish?

My rule for King books is 'stop at about 80 or 90% and imagine an ending yourself. It will be ten times better than whatever shit he put in.'

Disclaimer: I am not exactly a fan of him, but I do find him a very technically skilled writer. I admire his ability to make prose flow. Also I sound like I've read more than three books by him, but I haven't.

[Mambrino]

Never finished The Stand. I started it when I was literally like twelve or thirteen and tried to pick it up again over and over through my teenage years and could never manage to get back to it.

Has anyone found Stephen King hard to finish? Fun to start, but impossible to finish?

Well, there's not a specific book, but I never finished The Dark Tower series. I did read Wizard and Glass, but then I never bothered to read Wolves of the Calla.

[Nylonathatep]

"A Brief History of Time" By Stephen Hawkings.

I think I got lost in the middle of Chapter 3... sure they say there's only one equation in the whole book (e = mc^2), but he cheated. All he did was put those equations in words instead and tried to explain it.

I think It would actually be an easier read if there's actual equations... or maybe I just find equations easier to understand.

[Black Dynamite]

I never finished 1984.

Because I don't own a copy of it, and I was never assigned to read it. Each time I found a copy of it lying around my junior English class, I would spend the entire period reading it instead of doing work (so, around 40 minutes). I never left the classroom with it, I just left it where I found it, and it would be gone the next day. It would show up again a week or two later, and I would start reading it again.

I've read the first twenty or thirty pages several times, but I've never finished it.

[Kisama]

It would show up again a week or two later, and I would start reading it again.

I've read the first twenty or thirty pages several times, but I've never finished it.

Why didn't you continue from where you left off the previous time instead?

There are many books I've never finished, but the ones that come to mind right now are The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas, and Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin. The former because I just put it down one day and never felt like picking it up again, and the latter because it felt too sad, although I do intend to finish it one day. I'm also ashamed to admit that I'm still on the introduction to Gödel, Escher, Bach despite having had the book since last September - it's not that I have stopped reading it, it's just that I struggle to make a decent chunk of free time to actually concentrate on it, so I'd rather read something a little more pulpy in the spaces I do get.

[Black Dynamite]

Because when I'm reading a book, I want to read the entire thing without having any interruptions. By interruptions I mean large breaks in time or starting other books. So, each time I am interrupted I feel compelled to start from the beginning again. I think I do this because I feel like the experience of the book is ruined when the beginning is forgotten or foggy and I start it somewhere in the middle. That makes me feel incomplete in some way, or that I didn't actually read the entire book because I skipped something.

This is probably an awful reason, huh? It's also why I haven't finished the fifth Wheel of Time book, or A Game of Thrones. I was interrupted, and I really don't feel like starting over.

[nemui10pm]

I've attempted War and Peace and The Silmarillion three times each and still haven't finished either, but each time I get a little further than the last time, so maybe someday I will. I also tried to read Twilight to see what all the (positive and negative) attention was all about... It was mind-numbingly boring. More boring than the first two books I've mentioned. I've decided that the funny looks from the librarian wasn't worth it, and gave up about a quarter of the way into the first book.

[LaSargenta]

Crime & Punishment. Tried twice. Got to the same page each time, when seeing his sister and mother after the crime and find my knuckles are white and hands are shaking and I'm sweating. I look up, realize i'm in my own home, in a comfy seat, with a (now cold) mug of tea next to me. Second time it happened, I decided I really had nothing to prove, acknowledged it is a powerful book, and went on with my life. Pretty sure I included the book in my next bag o books to the used shop.

Now, other end of the spectrum: That first 'sleeping beauty as erotica' piece of crap by Anne Rice...so dull, duller than dishwater...and being porn is NOT an excuse for dullness...could not fathom why so many people I knew went for it.

[Oryx]

I've never been able to finish john krakauer's "Into the wild" book (yes it's related to the movie)... I thought the movie was excellent, and decided to buy the book, hoping to get more details about the story; i don't think i even read two chapters. The book is just boring , relating, not the story itself, but how the writer managed to put the book together etc... All in all, i don't even think it's a crappy book, i just can't manage to motivate myself into reading it.

[Biliboy]

I almost always finish books, even the silmarilion, but a few have slipped by. I've gotten about two pages into atlas shrugged, the great gatsby and anything by Ursala K Leguin. Something about them just doesn't click. I also stopped about halfway through book three of the Bourne identity books when I was younger, couldn't handle the constant intense suspense then.

[Nem]

Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice. Got about a third of the way in went - screw it, I've no more idea what his overall argument is and I don't think he's supported it any more than he had at the start of the book, this is just a waste of my time. It's just... really poorly written. No central point to provide structure to the book, meandering anecdotes with horribly over-inflated prose drawing on a wide range of often unrelated topic areas. Some people really like it, for reasons I doubt I'll ever know. Certainly reading the summaries of it that others have put online it doesn't appear to be worth reading in any more depth.

[Cathode Ray Sunshine]

Never finished The Stand. I started it when I was literally like twelve or thirteen and tried to pick it up again over and over through my teenage years and could never manage to get back to it.

Has anyone found Stephen King hard to finish? Fun to start, but impossible to finish?

I finished The Stand and loved it, but I can definitely see how it would put some people off. Have you read other stuff by him? I've heard comments that his short stories seem to be much more accesible and even better than some of his (much) longer stuff. I personally recommend Night Shift.

And I have to agree with Kewangji, his endings aren't bad, and I've never felt like they ruined the story, but after reading a lot of his stuff I certainly got to a point many times when I said "I hope it ends here, because it just works".

[Vieto]

The Catcher in the Rye: I got halfway through this book in high school (it wasn't required reading for us, but I wanted to read it anyways) before I just couldn't stand it anymore.

Dune: Hear me out. As a kid, I played Dune 2000 by Westwood studios, then a few years later I watched Dune (not sure if it was the movie or the miniseries, I suspect it was the latter because it was in three parts and was long as heck), and then I read the book. Needless to say, I couldn't finish it.