Books you never finished

[LE4dGOLEM]

The first wheel of time. I sat up and went "wait. this is dragging. and there's like, 400+ more pages to go. and then, like, twelve more books after this. screw it."

[Pebbles]

Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrel
I'll pick it up again.

Good. It's one of the best fantasy novels of, I dunno, let's say the decade.

I wouldnt go THAT far, but its definitely worth reading. I did like it, despite its length.

[bookishbunny]

Years ago, I started Possession by Byatt. I need to retry that one, too.

[sunkistbabe1]

Andre Norton - Witch World
Joan Aiken - Midnight is a Place
Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne

Along with probably dozens of others. As I said in the disappointing books thread, I'm rarely disappointed by the end of a book, because if it's kept my interest long enough for me to finish it, it's probably pretty good. If not, I never get around to finishig it. But that doesn't mean all such books are bad, as in addition to the above three, there are quite a few others which I enjoyed but still never got around to finishing.

Hey, I remember that one by Joan Aiken. I read it in my teens. It's a pretty lengthy book, but I did finally finish it. I think I had to renew it from the Library a few times. I might re-read it someday, but I do remember I wasn't bored with it... it was just long.

[sunkistbabe1]

The first wheel of time. I sat up and went "wait. this is dragging. and there's like, 400+ more pages to go. and then, like, twelve more books after this. screw it."

Did you even get to the part where they left their village? After that it's one long race, running from trollocs and other enemies. I'm on book 7 right now and book 6 i thought ended with a pretty exciting battle.

[Enigma90825]

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis - Dave Eggers

I got bored of it about halfway through. I heard some great things about it and wanted to see if it was any good, and I didn't like it. (Although, I admit I may have not given it enough of a chance, I stopped pretty early in the book.)

[SatAnpu]

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.

It's in his Out of the Silent Planet series, which is wonderful, but I can never get far enough into the final book to get interested in it.

[Nyarlathotep]

Book I started, but never finished:

Lord Of The Rings

Yes, I'm a wuss. I never finished Lord Of The Rings. Started the first one, but quit after 10 pages.

I didn't either. Got to Return of the King though. Got as far as the Scouring of the Shire or whatever it was and just... just...

Look, Tolkien, the book was OVER. Ring, into fire, Middle Earth's saved, YOU DIDN'T NEED TO GO ON OK?

[Mix]

I'm another one for Mostly Harmless. I've tried 3 times but I just can't do it.

I also stopped partway into Ship of Dreams by Robin Hobb. I don't know why. I just put it down and didn't feel like picking it up again. And then a month passed, so I decided to move on.

[Narsil]

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the worst novel I have ever read. Period.

[George Orr]

Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond. I got around 60 pages in, and stopped for good.

[liza]

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the worst novel I have ever read. Period.

Ooohhh, don't say that. I have to read that this week, along with My Antonia and a Passage to India. Hmph.

[bookishbunny]

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the worst novel I have ever read. Period.

Ooohhh, don't say that. I have to read that this week, along with My Antonia and a Passage to India. Hmph.

I started to love the Scarlet Letter around the second time I read it (reda it 3 times - all for school).

[notyouravgjoel]

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the worst novel I have ever read. Period.

I can hardly imagine anything ever surpassing it in badness.

[william]

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the worst novel I have ever read. Period.

LOOK. WE GET IT. YOU'RE CHEATING ON YOUR HUSBAND. NOW START SAYING THINGS THAT MAKE SENSE.

Making a little more sense prosewise, but having an even worse adultery plot, is The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Remember what the Awakening says: It's better to abandon your kids by committing suicide than to commit the principal sin of having sex with your husband.

[Ended]

'On The Road' by Kerouac. Never got into it.

Also, 'Passage To India' by EM Forster. One of those books which I only enjoyed reading when I was actually reading it; the moment I put it down, I lost interest.

[maafy6]

HHGTTG by Douglas Adams. I got bored with it about three chapters in. The style was just...repetitive to me. "Look, something ridiculous and/or inane! Laugh at it!" I couldn't quite make it there, and I really, really didn't care what happened to Arthur.

Also, having gone to a school that was 90 per cent engineers (and almost all of the rest were proper science majors - physics, math, et cetera) it seemed everyone else had read it and made it the nerd's Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. I really do want to punch people that think references to 42 are funny or cool and try to foist them up on me.

Also, Catch-22. I read it up until the last chapter, and for some reason stopped. At the time, I would read before I would go to bed, and it seems I just got that far and then missed night after night after night. One day I will go back and finish it, but by now I'm at the point I need to start from the beginning again.

There's a few more books on the list, but I don't want to make myself seem so noncommittal this soon.

[Peevish]

I said I "was reading" The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass for about a year and a half. And I would pick it up from time to time, get back into it. I think I'm down to the last hundred pages now, but it's been over 2 years at this point. I realized that every chapter was going to introduce a bunch of new characters, weave them into an interesting miniplot, and then dump every single one by the end of the chapter. And the writing kept getting more and more pretentious. After about 340 pages I realized it was never going to actually say anything.

But I abandon books all the time. Because one day I'll die, and who wants a legacy of shitty books to flash before their eyes at the end?

[McHell]

Hm, the original post says "books you enjoyed but not finished" (but then describes books Semicolon didn't enjoy at all)... So lots of books some hated and some loved; I used to read through LotR every two years or so, until it kept changing --- it's a different book at 10 than at 20.

Book I loved but stopped: I left it in an airplane, and couldn't find it anymore --- "Journal of a disappointed man" by WNP Barbellion. Awesome. It's a... diary. Of a frustrated kid. I will find and buy it at some point.

[parkaboy]

I'm still getting through the Illuminatus trilogy. i started it about 5 months ago and have been pecking my way through it.

twice i have tried to read Shardik by Richard Adams... i LOVE Richard Adams, i'm only missing one or two of his books but for some reason i jsut cant bring myself past halfway of Shardik. =(

[aion7]

I never finished Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which constantly annoys me, because it was so cool.

I couldn't stand The Silmarillion. If I wanted a creation myth, I'd read a bible.

[cathrl]

Assuming you're also allowing series...

HGttG. The first book was fun. But it was enough. More of the same just never attracted me.

"Bridget Jones' Diary." Again, fun, quirky, different...and after a hundred pages it was all just more of the same fun, quirky and different, and I wasn't interested any more.

There are plenty of books I haven't finished because I wasn't enjoying reading them, most in the last five years or so. I'm finally over my "it's published therefore it must be worth my time to read it" phase.

[Rex Idiotarum]

I'm a pretty selective reader, and it often doesn't make me drop books.

My Record for Dropped Books that I was forced to read for class;
#1 Lady's Detective Agency, 14 Pages, and that was with me forcing myself to read the First Chapter.

If there is one book that includes everything I don't like to see in a book, or was otherwise a disappointment, it's this one. The chapter starts off with a vivid, but boring description of the African Landscape, then a lady enters, talks to the Lady Detective. She reveals that she has a visitor that may or may not be her father, blah, blah, blah, cause only a man can be so devious as to exploit another person and blah blah, blah, suddenly there's a flashback to the Detective's father on his deathbed, where he tells her to sell his cattle, and lead a rich life owning a store or something, and she goes into one of those "I'm going to be the hokage a Detective!" And he dies with a look like, "Aw... @#$%!

Okay, I like genious in novels. Creative solutions, you know. Ender's Game type stuff, and usually Mystery Novels have that sort of element. This one completely lacked that element. She solves the mystery with a little deception, claiming that she was a nurse, and needed the guys blood for his daughter who was injured in a car accident. He confesses to not being her father, and the Detective confesses that she isn't really a Nurse, and the Daughter is fine.

Let's count it, 1. Overuse of Imagery to the point of Boredom, 2. Complex words that are not pronounceable in the English language, 3. Men is Evil Feminist Themes ((I hate when this occurs, as an Individualist, I don't like discrimination in any sense, especially those that feel they deserve the right to discriminate a group that traditionally discriminated again them.)), 4. Jumps around a Lot, ((even in the first half of the one chapter I read, it bounces around like a Caffeine Addict on a Pogostick with ADD. I should know.)) 5. Plot just made me hate the characters, what little of it that I found, 6. The absolute lack of intelligence.

I've heard the book gets a little bit better as it goes on, but I doubt it. There's just too much wrong.

I ended up dropping out of the class, listing off, in detail, everything that is absolutely horrible with this book to the teacher.

Well, I've also been known to drop many books when they become thick and boring. Dreamcatcher, Sphere, Fellowship of the Ring, so, it really takes a book that is the equivalent of literary crack to keep me on it. I still don't know how I got past Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ((Probably to find out who dies. I now regret that decision.)) or The Dark Tower Series.

[Aleril]

"A Million Little Pieces"

Read through about half of it, then got really bored of it. Mostly because it is all "I CANT STAND THE PAIN"

[lowbart]

The Brothers Karamazov. I tried reading it a few years ago and gave up. Maybe I'll come back and give it another shot once I am older and more able to stomach Russian literature. I saw a play of The Cherry Orchard and liked it, though. Maybe because the plot was negligible and the play was really more of a sociological snapshot than anything else.

Treasure Island. I was supposed to read it for my 6th grade english class. I quit after the part where the protagonist was floating by himself in the ocean, and aced the test anyway.

Class In Suburbia. I thought it was pretty interesting (sociology nonfiction) but it was outdated, and I kind of lost the book physically.

The Poisonwood Bible. Sorry if you liked it. I read three chapters and decided it was way too boring.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Actually I don't remember if I finished it or not. I just read the end so I could spoil it for my sister.

I wish I could put The Dark is Rising on this list, but I forced myself to read the whole thing.

[Malice]

Well, I've also been known to drop many books when they become thick and boring. Dreamcatcher, Sphere, Fellowship of the Ring, so, it really takes a book that is the equivalent of literary crack to keep me on it.

I can understand getting bored with Fellowship, but how the hell did you get bored with Dreamcatcher or Sphere? They've some of the most exciting, fast-paced plots I've ever read.

[Amarantha]

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I got nearly all the way through, but then ran out of steam. Must pick that up again...

[Yliatas]

Jesus is Here and Silent Spring are two books I never got around finishing. The first one is not because I'm not interested, but because I'm just too lazy to pick up where I left off. As for the second, I just couldn't stand it. True, there is some good stuff in that book, but I couldn't stand the writing style.

Oh! And reading the post before mine, I also haven't finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Sophie's World. I didn't finish Zen because I had to return it to my friend (and forgot about it until now) and I just stopped reading Sophie's World because I got caught up in reading classics.

[Cramulh]

Joyce - Ulysses
The French translation. Amazing novel, but I never managed to find what it's talking about. Still, it's amazing.

[theamberkey]

Shantaram.

I really, really, wanted to finish this. I consider it one of my favorite books in the world. But I've only read half of it and can't seem to bring myself to read the rest.

I guess I'll have to do it before the movie comes out at least...

[Jesse]

Joyce - Ulysses
The French translation. Amazing novel, but I never managed to find what it's talking about. Still, it's amazing.

Ulysses? It's about an ordinary man's life, but written in the style of the Greek epics.

[JayDee]

Man, if I started writing a list of books I never finished, I'd never finish it!

Bad joke aside, There are a couple of books I've tried to read a couple of times, and given up. One day I will try again. These include:

The Silmarillion - Plus Children of Hurin, I guess, which I've had sitting next to my bed to read pretty much since it came out.
The tales of the thousand nights and a night - Translated by Richard Burton. I grabbed the entire 16 volume set from Project Gutenberg, but I always lose my place. I think I've read the first two volumes a couple times, by now.
Gullivers Travels.
Dante's Commedia - I've read Inferno two or three times. I've read Purgatoria a couple of times, to at least the wall of fire. I started on Paradiso once and got maybe 3 cantos in.

[zenten]

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.

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the worst novel I have ever read. Period.

I can hardly imagine anything ever surpassing it in badness.

That would be Edison's Conquest of Mars, worst story ever written.

[Nyssa]

Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski.

Maybe one day I'll finish it, but not today. Probably not tomorrow, either. In fact, I'll just write the next few months off as a failure to read that book.

[mrlabenz]

Never finished:
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
the Harry Potter series.... SO overrated
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
the 8th Wheel of Time Book... the series is just too long, and now that Robert Jordan has passed it will never reach conclusion

[asanisimasa]

The Brothers Karamazov. I tried reading it a few years ago and gave up. Maybe I'll come back and give it another shot once I am older and more able to stomach Russian literature.

That's probably my favorite book. Definitely not an easy read; it took me a while to get it in to, so the first half went pretty slow, but once I actually started to get a lot more interested I couldn't put it down. It's really wonderful, and I highly suggest picking it up again.

Some books that I lost interest in halfway through (doesn't mean I didn't like them, just that I never finished them) were...

A Confederacy of Dunces. I couldn't finish it either. I'd like to pick it up again, I did enjoy it.
Point Counter Point. I love Huxley and have read a few of his other novels, but I just couldn't get in this. I would read a few pages and then put it down, until I eventually just had to return it to the library. I'll read it all the way through some time...
House of Mirth. My girlfriend gave it to me to read a while ago; one of her favorite novels. I didn't get very far into it. It's been sitting on my table ever since.
There's probably a lot more that I can't think of right now. I didn't finish Heart of Darkness at first, but the second time I got through it and loved it. Same with The Trial, slow at first but now it's one of my favorite novels.

[Sinta]

The Alchemist - recommended to me by so many people who claim it will change my life. I read a few chapters and decided to just not continue. I couldn't stand it.

[ian]

Point Counter Point. I love Huxley and have read a few of his other novels, but I just couldn't get in this. I would read a few pages and then put it down, until I eventually just had to return it to the library. I'll read it all the way through some time...

I've read this, but don't have a clue what is was about. Read the wiki article and still can't remember. I do remember thinking it wasn't very good though.

[Laura]

I didn't finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, either. Bored me to sleep quite well, though, so it's still relatively close to my bed for those long insomniac nights.

Most notably, I've never been able to finish Tess of the D'Urbervilles. My friend loves it and bought me a copy, she was so desperate that I read it. I've never got more than about ten pages in. And that's weird for me, you know? I'm usually really good at giving books a chance before I move on.

Boo hiss.

Most expensively, I never finished reading "Shelters of Stone" by Jean M. Auel. I paid out of the arse for my copy, and still haven't finished it. I've had it for five years.

[Reid]

I didn't finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, either. Bored me to sleep quite well, though, so it's still relatively close to my bed for those long insomniac nights.

Most notably, I've never been able to finish Tess of the D'Urbervilles. My friend loves it and bought me a copy, she was so desperate that I read it. I've never got more than about ten pages in. And that's weird for me, you know? I'm usually really good at giving books a chance before I move on.

Boo hiss.

Not sure why you found Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell boring, after the introductory bits it seemed to set a fast enough pace to keep me flipping pages. I can agree entirely with not finishing Tess of the D'Urbervilles though. It is one of the very small number of books I truly despise. I stumbled across a short story Hardy had written and thought it was actually very well done, but something about the pacing and subject matter of Tess truly bored me. It probably didn't help that I was required to read it for school.

Thus far I have failed to make it all the way through Clausewitz's On War. Very interesting if you like military history or theory, but also very dense.