This probably won’t surprise anyone, but I downloaded some free books and they were incredibly awful. Pretty sure they were self-published and the site that had them took anything. Honestly, the summaries on the site were written better than the “books.”
Once again proving that you get what you pay for!
I have put a book away a few times. It’s funny, my son just recently asked what my least favorite book is. I have two answers, both of which I put down for good somewhere around half way through.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
Both books were recommended mostly for their humor, but I guess I just don’t get that style of humor.
Posted before: David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” I’ve ripped through his other work multiple times, but I stall out 3/4 through every time I resolve to get through it.
I just could not get into *A Confederacy of Dunces. *
I read those as a teenager and enjoyed them. Then I realized with North and South he has a real Madonna/Whore thing with women, and it struck me that every woman in Kent was raped. Gang raped, date raped, doesn’t matter. Every single generation the woman was raped. I haven’t really picked him up since. I guess I grew up.
I’m a slow reader, books tend to take me about a month, but if one is just absolutely dragging or I’m having a difficult time following it for one reason or another, I’d prefer not to waste my time.
The last book I couldn’t bring myself to finish was American Psycho. The reviews for it are generally positive. The people that didn’t like it or couldn’t finish it generally put it down because of the violence. I, on the other hand, found it ungodly boaring.
An excerpt
Now, for the record, I understand it, I get that the author is showing us how Patrick views the world around him, how incredibly shallow he is, how he tries to fit in. But he also could have shown us that without having the entire book read like that scene from Fight Club when we see the inside of Edward Norton’s apartment.
I thought it would get better, but 200 pages in and it was still an endless list of brand names and what everyone is wearing from (literally) the brand of tie all the way down to the material of their socks…for every person in the group and he was normally out with 4 or 5 people.
It reminded me of What Alice Forgot. While I did finish that and did like it, it could have been half it’s length. It was another case of ‘I get it, she doesn’t remember’. For example, she’s putting on makeup, she doesn’t remember how to do it, but it seems familiar, they spend two pages on her putting on her makeup, and then continue to drag out every single thing she does for the rest of the book.
I remember American psycho getting trashed when it first came out ………the book was supposed to be a metaphor on how materialistic people became in the 80s with no substance behind them other than whgat brands they bought ………
I have an (admittedly irrational) near-compulsion to finish any book I start (I’ve read RPG rulebooks cover-to-cover). There are have only been two exceptions in my 40ish years of reading.
Madame Bovary, for a lit class in college. I just found it so incredibly boring and grinding, I couldn’t force myself to read more than a couple of chapters. I basically BS’d my way through in-class discussions and my written analysis. I regret the intellectual dishonesty involved, but not the decision to give up on it.
A recent book, Console Wars by Blake J. Harris, about the competition in the 90s between Nintendo and Sega. I picked it up on a recommendation from a friend. I was about halfway through when I realized that I wasn’t even vaguely interested in the subject, and the writing was really, really bad, at least to me. It’s supposed to be a non-fiction account, but the writer “re-creates” a lot of extended conversations between various executives, with just bad dialogue. The authorial narration was actually fairly well-written even if the subject didn’t hold my interest, but those dialogues…I skimmed bits and pieces from the last half of the book, but never really finished it.
A few years ago, this would have been “never.” Now it’s “Yes, of course. Life’s too short.”
I do wish there were a good way on the kindle to distinguish “This book is utter dreck.” v. “I want to look at this again, when I’m in a different mood or have more time”
You could use folders. Or just do what I do and delete the stuff you don’t want to read.
I’m reading “The Girl On The Train”. It’s pissing me off to a degree that inspires me to stop reading it and leave it on the stoop so some other book-lover can get it for free. I mean, my god.
I get a lot of great books that way. I got THIS one at an open-air bookseller who basically takes crates of donated books and turns around and sells them. I paid $ .75. So far I feel I got ripped off…
I’ve given up a few other times, but I read a lot of novels and many are total shots in the dark. So, I win some I lose some.
Yeah, that was terrible.
The mentions of Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings reminded me of this quote:
I tried to read G is for Gumshoe. I really did.
You couldn’t get me to try to read another one of Sue Grafton’s books if you put a gun to my head.
How about a gum?
This is a good example of a book that I quit at fifty pages.
There was this book that I read once and tried to read a second time years later but just couldn’t go through with it.
The Talisman by King & Straub.
I LOVE that book, wolf, and reread it every few years. And Black House. I’ve never been able to start Eyes of the Dragon, though, I’m worried it may be too Bachman.
No, that one is probably as close to a children’s book as King gets. I liked it.
*Girl on the Train *was okay, but I figured out who the killer was pretty early.
I read Black House once, but I’m not really a fan of books written in the present tense. I read Hunger Games twice, probably because the action distracted me from the present tense.
There was one Tom Clancy novel I threw across the room, but that was because it had a submarine sinking, killing everyone on board, and at the time Ivylad was on a six month deployment on a sub while I was pregnant with our daughter, so I just didn’t need that visual right then.
I’m one of those who feels unnaturally compelled to finish a book once I’ve started it. But I don’t pick up too many books totally blind. I try to choose those that would seem to be within my wheelhouse, or at least not too far afield.
Having said that, I just could not finish Time Enough for Love. I like a lot of Heinlein. When he’s good, he’s very very good. However, there’s just so much incest and kiddie diddling a guy can take in one book. I reached my limit about the time the grandfather figure was in the hot tub with the little girls.