Nancy Pearl, librarian extraordinaire, posits that a reader should subtract his or her age from 100 to give the number of pages to give a book a fair chance. Using this standard, plus the arbitrary break of 1950 as the oldest limit, which novel has failed this test for you, and why.
I’ll begin with Dune. I have given it six tries, and never made it past page 30.
I don’t think anything has ever failed the test for me.
I have finished some truly awful books. If they’re bad enough, I sometimes start skimming so that I can get through parts more quickly, but there are very few that I don’t finish, and none that I put down quickly. If I put a book down at page 200, I’d still wonder if I hadn’t given it enough of a chance.
In fact, even when books have been too advanced for me, I usually return to them later. For example, I tried reading Stephen R Donaldson at around at age 12 the first time. As readers know, his books are designed to make sure that English majors need a dictionary, let alone sixth-graders. So I tried again two years later, and again in high school… at which point, he became my favorite author.
It’s been said of Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 Look Homeward, Angel, that if you don’t read it when you’re a teenager, you’ll never be able to get into it.
I’d venture to say that the same may be true of Dune. (I must have re-read it five or six times in my teens, but I find it less impressive, now.)
So my six year old daughter has to read 94 pages? Surely that can’t be right.
Well, I guess the idea is that as you grow older, you become a more experienced reader which makes you able to decide more quickly if a book is worth finishing or not. I’m not sure I buy this but that’s the way I interpret it.
As far as I’m concerned, I almost always finish the books I’ve started even if I can’t get into them. It’s not really because I think they might get better - although it’s possible. It’s more matter of discipline: you’ve started it, finish it! I’ve just finished reading Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale and it’s been a long, long time since I read something that I found so utterly unintelligible. Still read it to the last line but it was a bore…
I’ve tried to read the first book TWICE, but it instantly throws you into a world with no context and there is high use of alternate words(drank a bottle of soda=slavered his liquid want with a containment of fizzy quargle) and no clear idea of what is even going on I give up. It doesn’t intrigue me, it annoys me.
The only two books I can think of that I failed to finish are Ulysses and The Silmarillion. I’m not sure either of those books are really novels.
Wow, that sort of “writing” must get annoying extremely fast, indeed.
Crotalus, where did you start on The Silmarillion? If you just opened to the first page and went through sequentially, give it another try. You can completely skip the Valaquenta and Ainulindule sections (which bog down a lot of readers), and still have a coherent narrative for the rest.
I bought it when it was first published when I was in my mid-20s. I did start at the beginning. I think I had already begun to lose my appetite for SF and fantasy at that point. I have so many things I want to read that I doubt I will return to it. But I appreciate the advice, nonetheless. 
So people over the age of 100 can tell just by looking at a book whether or not they should read it?
That, or you realize how little time you have left in your life and you don’t want to waste it reading crap.
As I get older, I realize that I’m never going to live long enough to be able to read all the books I’m currently interested in, let alone all the new ones that will come along. Every hour spent forcing myself to finish a book I’m not getting any enjoyment or benefit from is an hour I could have spent reading something I really want to read.
I’ve never heard of this test, nor Nancy Pearl. But it seems rather stupid. So a newborn needs to read a 100 page book? OK, let’s ignore that one as too extreme. A 5 year old needs to get to page 95 before deciding whether to like a book? Has Nancy ever met a 5 year old?
I’m 38. I’ve got to get to page 62? Why? What is it about one more year’s experience that allows me to subtract a page?
What about those with poor eyesight? Can they read less before giving up because they bought the large print book? What about if I got an e-reader? What if the book has an occasional picture?
Or maybe I should ask the larger question out there. Even if you only counted books published literally today until the date of your death, you will never, ever, finish reading all of them. To say nothing of books already in print. So given the sheer number of options available in the world, why am I wasting an average of 75 pages worth of time on a book I find to be of no interest to me rather than a book I would be interested in?
I’m getting to that point. It used to pain me to not know how anything ended once I’d started it, even though it’s terrible, but as I’m careening toward (mumble-mumble age), I’m getting over that.
By the time you get to be my age you learn that you don’t have to eat the whole egg to find out it’s rotten. I’m looking at you, Dean Koontz.
Am I the only one who can pretty much tell after about one page if I’m going to enjoy it? By that I mean if I enjoy the writing or not, since that’s the most important criteria to me. I chuckled at the Dean Koontz thread, as I knew I hated his work just about immediately. Though I know he’s a horror writer and often compared to Stephen King (god forbid) I find him unbearable. Mr. King, however can ramble about seemingly boring crap and I’ll be mesmerized because of his “voice”.
Apparently I’m a big flunkee in Ms. Pearl’s world, but at least it’s a world where I don’t wasted time reading stuff I don’t like.
I read the first page of Gravity’s Rainbow for about 20 minutes, before I gave up.
Come now - it’s a little florid I’ll grant you but it’s not that bad a start to a novel.
Just skip to the end. Nobody is going to rat you out for not running every mile of the marathon.
I do this with mysteries that are not holding my interest – dud ending, I’m outta there. Occasionally one will have an interesting-sounding resolution, and I will return to the officially sanctioned route.
Yes, they’re given permission to judge the book by its cover.