I usually will finish a book, but not always. Exceptions I can think of: “V” by Thomas Pynchon (the beginning wasn’t as funny as I had hoped) and “Life of Johnson, Vol I” by James Boswell (some of the anecdotes were interesting, but I’m not sure I need to read several thousand of them).
The last one I bailed on was The Martian. I ditched it halfway through.
This book should have been right up my alley, but man I found it boring. Tedious discussions about how he can make this work. I absolutely LOVE stranded and survival stories of all sorts, but this was just boring.
I also did not care about the characters on Earth. Oh well.
I also gave up on The Martian, far less than halfway through. The characters were not well written, and the writing in general was bad and boring.
In general, I tend to give up on books more often these days. I feel that I don’t want to waste time on second rate reading. A book may seem promising to start with, but get worse as it goes on.
With non-fiction, I tend to skim and only read the parts I’m interested in.
“This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?”
– Samuel Johnson, on reading to the end of books
“Alas, Madam! How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page!”
– Samuel Johnson
Thought of another…although I actually finished it.
I adored The Secret History. It was a world I found completely mesmerizing and believable. I came to it late and when I find an author I like I tend to read most of their stuff all in a row. So, next I started The Little Friend. GAWD, I hated it. Hated the protagonist and ALL the other characters. The setting was depressing as hell, and it went on and on and on and on …
But I finished it.
Nearly killed me completely on Donna Tartt. I have The Goldfinch in one of my piles, but I’m hesitant now to read it. Anybody got a recommendation on it???
P.S. to the person who wanted to read a Salman Rushdie book, as I mentioned upthread I found Midnight’s Children completely engrossing.
You could make the same argument for the Shannara series. Read it at the sweet spot of 12 going on 13. Loved it. Never reread it and I never will.
Tried Lord of the Rings when I was 19. I was asleep within 10 pages, without fail. Read it all because, ultimately, the fringe benefit of being an insomnia cure made it useful.
Feel kind of bad the knock-off series sits better in my memory than the original, but then again I loved the Hobbit. Going into LotR, I was hoping for more of what I got from the Hobbit.
On topic: I can’t remember the book’s title, something about witch doctors and/or death. It was a nonfiction book written in the 1920’s about medical strives. I thought it would contain interesting anecdotes and practices. It didn’t have enough of those and was more serious than I liked. I tapped out 60 pages in when the author, himself a doctor, was calling midwives and nurses grossly incompetent at child birth and how only male trained doctors would protect the masses from the scourge of abortion.
All the time. My reading time has been cut into by my writing so I don’t waste time on something I don’t like.
You beat me to sunk costs. At the time I am making the decision, it comes down to whether it’s worth the extra opportunity cost of the time need to finish.
Good word.
It has been a while since I tried to read further.
You cannot reason a person out of a position they didn’t use reason to reach.
You made it halfway through? I couldn’t even make it fifty pages in before I gave up. King’s name may be on that book, but I doubt he wrote much of that boring, bloated thing.
I give up on books a lot. Chuck Palahniuk is hit or miss for me–I either love his stuff or can’t finish it. And I buy a lot of ebooks through BookBub, on 99-cent whims. If they don’t grab me, I give up and move on.
Nitpick: That was Sleeping Beauties. I didn’t think it was that bad. Certainly not one of his best.
When I was young and reckless with my time, I had my 100 Page Fiction Rule - if I’m having trouble making myself go back to a book after reading a hundred pages, it’s time to abandon ship.
As I’ve gotten older and more realistically cognizant of my mortality, that’s become a 50-page rule…if I don’t like it enough after 50 pages, there’s always going to be something out there I can find that’s better. It mostly gets applied to genre fiction - police procedurals and science fiction, for example.
I have never been able to get even a quarter way through anything written by Louie L’Amour or by Patrick O’Brian. And God knows, I’ve tried. I know these guys are rated as good and popular authors, But I just can’t get interested in anything they write. To me they have an uncanny ability to take a great story and turn it into boring drek.
I tried the Lord of the Rings at roughly the same age, freshman year in college. Had the flu and a fever, finished all three books in one weekend. Between the fever and the books had some pretty bizarre dreams when I would occasionally doze off…
Now that you mention it, A Tale of Two Cities is another book I started many times over decades and thoroughly enjoyed once I forced myself to read far enough to get the story rolling.
Funny enough, I had Dhalgren in mind when I opened this thread, and I read it when I was 15. I gave up somewhere around 350 pages in when it occurred to me that the author had spent so much time on setting and character and gay erotica that he hadn’t bothered coming up with a plot.
Carl von Clausewitz’s On War
I could not get through all the clauses in each paragraph.
I know it’s an english translation but apparently Causewitz is german for adding dozens of commas per paragraph. I tried finding and outlining the subject and verb in each paragraph and that gave me a few more pages. I was reduced to totalling up all the commas per paragraph and writing in the number as an academic exercise. I gave up.
It’s not for nothing that he’s called Clause-witz. 
See Tolstoy’s contemptuous opinion of Clausewitz in War and Peace.
Now there’s a long novel that’s actually worth reading. But to get into it you have to plough through the first few chapters, set in a very affected and artificial high-society soiree. They are not at all representative of the whole book. The Maude translation is probably still the best.
I currently have six books in my not-finished shelf on Goodreads, but there are a few more. My very first one was “Iphigenie auf Tauris” by Goethe in school. The very first book I could not finish even if I tried. Still got a good grade on the test of it by browsing the book during the test. Nowadays, I borrow a lot of audiobooks from the library simply based on what is available, and if either narrator or Story actively annoy me, I quit.
One I Kind of abandoned is Don Quixote - it’s not that I don’t like it, but the volume my mother gave to me is beautiful, but so massive that I can only read it at the desk, and that just feels like a work assignment.