I read and absolutely adored Wolf Hall. So I was really really eager to jump into Bring Up the Bodies ASAP - in fact within two minutes of finishing the first one (I love my Kindle).
Got halfway through and then I don’t know what happened. I fizzled out. It’s perhaps because the prose is too damn good: it’s so poetic and dense that reading it was a bit like eating an entire cheesecake to oneself.
I really do want to finish it, but maybe I need to wait for a beach vacation or something.
I took a swing at Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers this year. I enjoyed it for a while, but like a lot of those English social novels most of the characters were somewhat unlikeable, and I wasn’t in the mood.
I tried to read “The Buried Giant” by Kazuo Ishiguro . I enjoyed other books by thie author; it was supposed to be a fantasy - but I couldn’t get into it. so slow and boring.
Trollope never did it for me. He’s a B-lister, and for the length and relative dearth of plot most Victorian novels present, you need an A-lister’s characterization to save it.
I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. I should have loved it, but I couldn’t get through Beatlebone, by Kevin Barry. It was just too damn weird and I couldn’t get past the fact that it was author’s weirdness I was trying to plow through, not John Lennon’s.
I may eventually try again out of sheer cussedness (and because I still really want to like this book).
I liked it. Slowly paced and measured to be sure, but that’s rather typical of Ishiguro. The subject matter was a nice change of pace for him too.
I, too, didn’t finish Wicked. Got about halfway through and just decided that was enough. I just didn’t care enough to finish it.
Most of the books I quit reading I don’t bother to remember the titles of. I did read the first two to the Hunger Games books and then decided I didn’t need to bother with the last one. I may still read it at some point but it’s not on my short list of books I want to get to.
I had to force myself to finish “Mockingjay”. I had the same experience with “Divergent” (liked the first 2/3rds, forced myself to read the rest) and had no desire to read any of the sequels.
Yeah, I’m not planning to try again. He did have a hilarious line:
[QUOTE=Anthony Trollope]
Of the Rev. Mr. Slope’s parentage I am not able to say much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from that eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy, [i.e. Dr. Slop] and that in early years he added an “e” to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him.
[/QUOTE]
I mean, that’s funny 4th-wall stuff.
It really picks up after the first 75 pages, IMO.
Did you read The Warden first? It’s about half the length and I thought most of the characters were likeable.
Re this one – the Rev. Mr. Slope and the allusion to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – very much not to do with 2015; but, long ago, I tried TS, and admitted defeat not many pages in. It would appear to me, to be one of those “love it or hate it” works – many people, certainly, love it. An uncle of mine, whose intelligence and taste I respected, considered it pretty well the most original and witty fictional offering ever written. It failed to work that magic on me: I agree with the verdict of a “hater”, who described it – approximately – as “a load of dreary, disjointed nonsense”.