I wonder if different reading styles are part of the difference here; when I read, while I see the words on the page, I more or less have a little mental movie running in my head. So stuff like writing style is mostly important as far as how well it lets that little movie flow while keeping things adequately described. Or, if it’s particularly bad, then the movie never gets started, and I’m literally consciously trying to parse sentences to figure out what the author is saying.
So if I can get the movie going, I almost always finish the book, unless it’s just dumb or goofy for some reason. And I know I’m really rare in this regard, but I have not yet finished “Gardens of the Moon” by Steven Erikson, despite having finished like 30 other books since starting to read it. It’s not that he’s a bad writer, it’s that I just don’t like the story so far, and it’s seemed more like work than anything else.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow- mystery set in Demark and Greenland. Starts out great, by mid book I felt it too muddled, turgid and contrived. Never finished.
Crytponomicon. Too damn big! After more than 100 pages, saw almost 900 to go and gave up.
His speeches were very good. Even now, I’m told that people who watch/listen to them find them very good. Like JFK or MLK. I /think/ that by that stage someone else was writing the speeches for him.
Did not read more than a couple of pages of Game of Thrones. Once when young I started reading a particular SF book, and thought: It must get better. They wouldn’t have published it if it was this bad all the way through. I’m older and wiser now.
When I was 9, stopped reading Gone With the Wind before I got to the end. I can’t handle tragedy. It breaks my heart. And I knew how GWtW ends ('frankly dear, I don’t give a damn"), and I didn’t want to watch Scarlet do that to herself.
I just gave up on **A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising **by Raymond A. Villareal. The writing was so bad in the first two chapters that I had to move on. I liken the writing style to talking with a person who is staring at their Instagram feed at the same time.
I tried three times to read Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, but I could never get past page 27.
I quit reading Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls after 90 pages or so. I read the first two sentences of To Sail Beyond the Sunset and resolved not to read it.
There are a fair number of books that I wish I hadn’t bothered to read and/or finish.
In response to you and other posters, I forced myself to read Atlas Shrugged two summers ago.
It truly is a piece of shit.
As far as I’m concerned, Rand took much of her plotting techniques from 1930’s pulps. I think I figured out just about every major plot revelation by page 200 or so. It wasn’t difficult if you’ve read a fair number of Doc Savage novels. I will admit that Lester Dent and his ghosts wrote a fair amount of garbage, but at least you can read a Doc in an hour or two. It took me an entire summer to force myself through Rand’s “masterpiece.” That was only because I took a few breaks to read a couple of Repairman Jack novels, Burroughs’ *Llana of Gathol[/] and John Carter of Mars, and Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. Afterwards, I read Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby to scour my mind.
Rand’s characters are just believable as John Carter and Doc and his gang, but lack their nobility and sense of humor.
I made it farther in the series. I should have quit, but I kept on, thinking at some point it would get better. The first book was bad. The second book wasn’t any better. About a third of the way into the third book, I realized things still weren’t getting any better, asked myself why I was bothering, and dropped the book and the series/author. Never looked back.