I happen to be a Neal Stephenson geek. But I can’t get past about the 2/3 mark of his most recent book (Fall) , and even getting there was hard. I thought maybe it was me.
I made it to 59% (chapter 43) before finally giving in to The Eight Deadly Words.
When I read “Atlas Shrugged”, I completely lost all interest in continuing on when I figured out who John Galt was. This was about 3/4 of the way in.
There is a plot recap summary at the beginning of the second book. The rest of the series, and the 2nd trilogy, are both excellent reads but the first book is truly terrible and is written like a teenager trying and failing to emulate the lyrical and scholarly side of Tolkien. I gave up several times on it, and may have brute-forced my way through it but don’t recall for certain.
Good one. I’ve read it and I don’t know how Mr. King so thoroughly imagined the loss of a child. Or Cujo, dear Og.
I’m a horror fan, but don’t read books with scenes of abuse or torture. I nearly quit my current book when it was implied that a dog had been killed.
IMO, the scariest part of Stephen King’s writing is how well he understands the normal human dysfunctions.
From the sublime to the silly, I stop reading a lot of books because they are just plain bad. This morning’s entry onto the list was because one of the characters had a “lined face” (i.e, fairly heavily wrinkled, like an old person), but “blue-black hair” with no gray.
I’ve seen a few people with wrinkled faces and hair that isn’t gray. At best it looks dyed, at worst the person looks creepy.
I read Cujo in 9th grade, but tried several times to read The Shining during college. I just couldn’t make myself care. Later I read the unabridged version of The Stand in something like 2 days. So it’s not King; not for me, anyway.
I had to give up on Lonesome Dove. 100 pages in and the author is still introducing characters. Screw it, at some point that cattle drive had to leave town but I wasn’t waiting around for another page to find out when. Out of curiosity I just read the plot on Wikipedia, and I am somewhat pleased to learn that most of them died. That’s what you get for wasting my time, book characters!
He’s the exact same character as all of Dagny Taggart’s lovers.
It wasn’t one thing, but I stopped reading Naked Lunch at the mention of the practice of killing children in the middle of raping them because their death spasms give good orgasms.
I stopped reading *Lolita *after about fifty pages because it was too good.
I found myself savoring the prose; going back and reading the same sentence over and over again because it was so beautiful. Then after forcing myself to move on (“you can always come back and read that sentence again later”), I find another beautiful sentence in the next paragraph. It was like I was eating the finest gourmet meal in the world, and I wanted to enjoy each and every morsel as thoroughly as possible and hoping that it would never end.
Eventually I realized that at this rate, I would never finish the book. So I put it aside to re-read at some later date. It’s still on my shelf in the “to be read” pile.
I am going the grain on this one, but I thought The Handmaid’s Tale was terrible. I guess I actually finished it, but I wished I hadn’t. As an SF fan for very nearly 70 years I have read my share of dystopias, but this one was just too over the top.
A book I stopped reading less than half way through was Dark Money by Jane Mayer about how the billionaires, especially but not limited to the Kochs, had come to dominate American politics. I was so disgusted and nauseated, I could not go further.
I have just come to Book 2 of the latest Stephenson and I am not sure I will finish it. I am also a tremendous fan of his. Again it is just so over the top.
I am a tremendous fan of Stephen Brust. So when he said that the Khaavren “trilogy” (the third “book” came out in three volumes), which I enjoyed enormously, was motivated the The Three Musketeers, I had to read the latter. Couldn’t finish it.
I have a book that was to good to read, too! White Oleander. It reads like a poem, and the prose is beautiful, but I was so distracted by the prose that it took tremendous effort to actually focus on the story, and it gave me a headache. I tried it once and put it aside for later, because it seemed beautiful but I couldn’t manage it at the time. Tried a second time a while later, and when it made my head hurt again I decided to give up, and conclude that it was beautifully written but not going to happen for me.
As for a book that was so emotionally upsetting I had to give up? As an adult? The closest I can think of is Michelle Knight’s memoir Finding Me. I’ve read quite a few memoirs written by women who survived being kidnapped for long periods of time, so I fully expected to read stories of rape and torture. What I was completely unprepared for was to read how utterly awful Michelle Knight’s life was prior to being kidnapped. She was so severely neglected and abused in her childhood that she ran away because being homeless was a step up from her home life. Then she got pregnant as a teenager, and for maybe the first time in her life, she loved someone who loved her back (her baby). And then when she was out trying to find a job to support herself and her child, her mother’s b/f abused her child, and the child was taken into protective custody. And when I read about the government taking her child, I fully understood why it had to happen, but also felt such strong feelings of sorrow and helplessness that I started crying. I mean, I’m prone to tearing up at poignant endings or emotional scenes, but this wasn’t tearing up, this was crying HARD. When my husband saw how upset I was, he suggested that I shouldn’t read books like that, but I brushed him off and finished the book anyways. So I didn’t put the book down forever, but I did have to take a break to emotionally re-group.
As for books that I had to stop reading because I didn’t consider them good enough to be worth my time? More than I can count.
Boring AF.
This is on pause: The Denial of Death - Wikipedia
I read that book when it came out, and while I did finish it, I too thought it was just awful.
I could feel my face lighting up when I saw this at the library, because I find the whole story of the Mercury 13 beyond fascinating, but I barely made it into Chapter 2 because I just plain old did not like this woman.
She totally fell through the cracks from day one. She got married recently; I sure hope it works out because if anyone deserves to have happiness in their life, it’s her.
I recently started reading “The Hiding Place” and had to stop when I got to the part where the occupying German soldiers went door to door confiscating radios, and an ethnically Jewish neighbor who had long ago converted to Christianity poisoned his beloved dogs, because he feared for all their futures.
The Martian. Boy, was I looking forward to this read and was planning to see the movie when it came out. Made it about half way through, and tossed the book into the “Donate” pile.
So very dull, like chartered accountancy.
With me, it’s more like “books I hadn’t stopped reading but wish I had.”
I’ve only had two books that I just couldn’t finish in recent memory.
The first is Stephen Erikson’s “Gardens of the Moon: Book One of the Malazan Book of the Fallen”. It came highly recommended to me by Amazon and others on here and elsewhere, because I generally like fantasy and military themed stuff, and I really liked the Black Company series of books by Glen Cook.
I never could get into it- it just seemed like a whole bunch of lame fantasy tropes and overly convoluted plot, without a whole lot of explanations how the “main” characters interact with the rest of the story until I’m guessing further in than I got (1/4 to 1/3 in).
The other was “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This one is fine in terms of the actual writing, but again, I got about 1/4 to 1/3 in, and there are two unrelated storylines that are in there, neither of which is terribly compelling in their own right. I don’t doubt that they’ll combine at some point, but getting there is my problem.
Mr Brigg’s Hat, a Victorian true-tale murder story, NYT bestseller. Fascinating in its historical details, but too detailed. The cadence is spend 50 pages describing the historical minutia of waistband tailoring, incrementally move the plot forward a millimeter, spend 50 pages describing passenger ship manifest quill ink, move the plot another millimeter, and on and on. I had minutiae fatigue and never was able to finish.
You are not alone. He’s has an incredible imagination, The Baroque Cycle is a work of genius. But I have no idea what on earth was going on in “Fall”, I struggled on to around the halfway point hoping something coherent would emerge before giving up.