IMHO you may be better off not wading into that morass at all.
Mine is Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. He’s an awesome writer, and I usually love his books, but for some reason I haven’t been able to bring myself to start this one for almost two years now.
I will finish Proust one day! I will even maybe get beyond Swann’s Way the next time. I even had a crack at it in French once, but I was hilariously unable to parse most of it.
Nial Fergusson 's recent book Civilisation, the West and the Rest. NY times review here.
I’m too dumb for it. Besides, the writer is more right-wing then left-librul, so I’m afraid I’ll lose my faith if I do manage to read it. :o
Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin, complete with the recorded songs. I borrowed it, and I should’ve read it and returned it long ago.
I buy them faster than I can read them, so I have a bunch of books waiting on me. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books have been staring me down for a few years now.
Game of Thrones for me, too. MrWhatsit has now read the entire series, and we have most of the books around here, but I just haven’t been able to get past the first couple chapters of book 1. Someday. Maybe.
(bolding mine)
Funnily enough, The Ultras is among my list of books that’re taunting me. I read half of it for a seminar and decided that there was no way I was ever going to actually finish it, so there it sits on my shelf waiting for that day when ultimate boredom strikes, I actually finish Ulysses (ha!), and I find myself in need of a new book.
Actually, I might’ve given my copy away, I’m not sure. And I’m not going to go dig through my books to find out. Out of sight, out of mind!
I also have a massive stack of library books on historical theory waiting for me to read them, but they’re all so dull, I’m not even going to list titles. Oh, and I just bought a copy of Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey, waiting for that elusive day when I no longer have a massive stack of library books looming over my desk ominously. I should probably just pre-emptively shelve it so I can unearth it later in a fit of new-book glee because it’s not going to be opened any time soon.
I dust my hard-cover copy of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem every 2 weeks when I clean my bedroom. It’s 928 pages of deep fiction and made-up vocabulary. I bought it when it came out, when I was on vacation (hence the hard-cover - normally I wait for paperback) and haven’t read but 20 pages.
A bunch.
Michener’s *Chesapeake *may have been waiting the longest - maybe 4 years?
Schindler’s List
Buddingbrooke
Letters of Robert E Lee
They all intimidate me, except for Schindler’s List, which I just haven’t gotten to.
Walter Payton’s autobiography, “Never Die Easy,” has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. I really want to read it but I know it’ll make me cry like a little girl, so for now it just sits there taunting me like a loaded gun.
That’s worth a go I think. The made-up vocab doesn’t really bog it down, and it actually has some resolution at the end. The usual Neal Stephenson caveats apply!
The Quran
The last half of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
The Tao te Ching
Tolkien’s Simarillion
Milton’s Paradise Lost
Dante’s Divine Comedy, or even one locale (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio)
The revised edition of ANNO DRACULA
Don Quixoti - the Edith Grossman translation.
Cloud Atlas and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy have been sitting there for a while begging to be read. I also have Stephenson’s Anathem in my iPad.
That’s um, four weighty Stephenson tomes on the do list.
I’ve actually read the Baroque Cycle twice! Maybe because I have them in paperback…
This thread has pushed me to get Anathem for my Kindle. Now if I could just find the time to finish my current 2 books…
Oh yes!
Also, Little, Big by John Crowley, The Quincunx, by Charles Palliser, Weaveworld, by Clive Barker and No Name, by Wilkie Collins.
According to my GoodReads account - I have 155 books on my MountToBeRead shelf - notable items/longest languishing include:
*Infinite Jest * - have heard many good things, but it’s such a brick of a book!
*How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading * Mortimer J. Adler … maybe if I read this, I’ll be better at whittling down Mount TBR…
*Collected Fictions * Jorge Luis Borges - I love his stuff, but this keeps getting overlooked…
*A Short History of Nearly Everything * - Bill Bryson - the mixed reviews keep me from picking this up, I think.
Moby Dick has haunted me for years. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to tackling it.
Another one that has been on my shelf and to-read list for a couple of years is The Terror by Dan Simmons. I am working on finally clearing out some long-standing members of my to-read list on Goodreads, and that is one that I hope to get read this year.
Nah, go for it. It’s a great read. Most of the negative reviews are people nitpicking various factual details, but it’s not like he made anything up out of whole cloth, and overall the accuracy is pretty good. And there are some great anecdotes and stories in there.
Without giving the plot away what was it that made you give up on it? Thanks!