And Gravity’s Rainbow. I took a crack at that one when I was in high school (which would have been no later than spring 1975). Didn’t get very far. Tried it again about five years ago. I think I got a little farther, a bit over a hundred pages this time. But it was still too murky, and it was way too easy to picture Pynchon sitting there at his desk using one hand to write while the other hand was . . . uh . . . under the desktop as he appreciated his own genius. Not an image I want in my head. (And I don’t know any behind-the-scenes stuff about him to actually accuse him of that attitude. I’m just saying it’s easy to read the book that way.)
Maybe I simply don’t have the intellect to deal with it.
I regard authors that write deliberately “difficult” works with baleful stares.
If I were an evil overlord (currently working on evil, overlord to follow), I’d order Thomas Hardy’s remains be ritually desecrated every Christmas to lift spirits .
At least George R.R. Martin has the good taste to generally end his tales with a brief happyish ending for someone. If he ever finished GoT (most unlikely), I’d assume one or two pages of happy endings for one or two characters to bookend the thousands of pages of misery.
Love Hornblower, so mates recommended Master and Commander and others in the series. Nope - just did not click for me, and I’ve attempted a couple of others since.
Regarding Good Omens (as mentioned numerous times above) - as a Pratchett fan, I tried … and tried again. And failed again.
My Pratchett attempt was The Last Continent which I got bored with pretty quickly. At the time, I was hoping to find an author with a bunch of stuff to read. These days I don’t do nearly as much book reading for various reasons so it’s unlikely I’ll give his stuff another go.
For something I assumed was more of a sure thing, Richard Adams’ Tales From Watership Down was pretty disappointing. I doubt many expected the same exact magic as the original but there really wasn’t anything to recommend about it. I got through it once and never picked it up again.
I tried reading All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren earlier this year. There were times reading the book when I wondered if Warren was getting paid by the word. Run-on sentences, paragraphs crammed with way too many analogies, an entire chapter dedicated to telling the story of the narrator’s distant ancestor that seemed to have no bearing on the main plot whatsoever. I found myself internally yelling “Get to the Point!” at Warren’s ghost at several points.
The bones of a good story were there; unfortunately, they were buried beneath a morbidly obese body.
Sarum, by Edward Rutherfurd. It came highly recommended and it looked like it was going to be An Important And Worthwhile Endeavor but at 1145 pages it proved to be too much. I bailed a few hundred pages in.
I haven’t read this, although the library I volunteer at still gets them regularly, and we do put them out in the store and they do sell.
I read “The Handmaid’s Tale” shortly after it came out, ca. 1990, and while I finished it, I didn’t think there was anything great about it on any level. However, if you want to read a GOOD book about a place called Gilead, try the Marilynne Robinson book of that title. No dystopia there.
A non-fiction mega-best-seller I couldn’t get into either was “The Boys in the Boat.” Because I already knew how the story ended, and didn’t find the intricate details of the boat’s construction anywhere near as interesting as the author did, I tried to read the junior version, which was written on about a 6th grade level. Nope, couldn’t get through that either.
I haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, and did not know there was a Gilead in it. But I second the nomination for Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. Wonderful, wonderful book (and to be honest, and to invert the theme of the thread, I wasn’t sure I particularly wanted to like it when I started…)
I read The Years of Rice and Salt but kept hoping it would get better. While I found the basic premise interesting I couldn’t stand the way the story seemed more to concern itself with the reincarnation angle instead of how history diverged.
Wicked.
I LOVED the musical. I mean, my username… obviously, it’s a Wizard of Oz reference, but at the time I chose it, it was because Wicked had a hold on my heart and pretty much all my usernames for anything were somehow Wicked-related.
So of course I wanted to love the book. It was just more of my favorite thing. And there were others in the series- sequels to Wicked and other “twisted” stories.
I’ve never actually finished it. It’s soooooooo slow and joyless. I mean, I get that the musical is a fairly simple story and a fat novel will, of course, have a lot more to it. And that the musical was my favorite thing in the world when I was, like, 12-15 years old and the book is not really geared toward young teenagers who just relate with their whole hearts to feeling ostracized for being different.
I do still have a copy on my shelf (and Son of a Witch, which I got as a gift at some point), but I haven’t tried to read it since I was a teenager. Maybe I’ll give it another go.
In the late 70s a book by Robert Anton Wilson caught my eye. I read it but didn’t really “get it”. But, it was book one of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, so of course I hunted down books two and three, which had to be special ordered.
I read books two and three but I still didn’t “get it”. So, I hunted down Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati. Five more of his books, all about the same thing more or less.
To this day I do not really understand why he wrote all those books. He was playing around with mescaline, and maybe that’s why.
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