We were assigned Billy Budd in H.S. and I could not make myself read it. That is the only book that has ever put me to sleep. I conked out every time I picked it up. I love to read and that never happened before or since.
About every year or so I pick up Ulysses with the intention of reading it all the way through. Never happens. Next time I get the urge to do that I’ll try picking up one of Joyce’s more normal works, like Finnegan’s Wake.
I also didn’t finish Ellison’s Invisible Man for some reason. I was really enjoying it but I just stopped. By the time I looked at it again it was due back at the library.
And this one probably isn’t literature, but I keep trying to read Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach. I think the furthest I’ve gotten is two hundred pages.
Same thing happens to me with Ulysses. I read the first couple dozen pages and then just quit for some bestsellers.
The Book of Lists (the first one) had a list of the most boring classics. The Pilgrim’s Progess ranked number one. Moby Dick was on the list as well.
I don’t know whether it classifies as a great work of literature but I just couldn’t finish TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY By John Le Carre. It was recommended to me but I just found it so tedious I didn’t bother to finish it.
A Tale of Two Cities at least 5 teachers have recommended it to me and when it was recommended reading for my grade level I thought “Why not?” so I bought it and started to read, I picked it up half a dozen times that summer and couldn’t read more than a few pages, and I tend to like reading. I read Jurrasic Park and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry that year.
Another book I just couldn’t finish was The great gatsby, I had no clue what the man was talking about, he went off for pages on the most trivial things and I just couldn’t follow the plot. Okay, I’ll stp ranting now.
Kitty
I won’t pretend that James Jpyce’s “Ulysses” is a piece of cake, but it CAN be read and enjoyed immensely. It takes time and a lot of effort, but there’s just enough of a conventional plot and conventional characterization to make reading, enjoying and finishing it possible.
Then there’s “Finnegans Wake.”
Never mind FINISHING it, I have tried maybe 6 times in my life (years apart) to START it, and have always given up in depsair after trying vainly to get through the first few sentences.
Nicholas Nicholby - don’t know how may times I’ve tried.
Anything by O’Brien (I know, heresy!) - too boring for words.
War & Peace - haven’t got through it on two attempts, but unlike Nicholby and O’Brien, I’m interested - just lack the time.
For 3 years now, I’ve been working my way through the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - faint but pursuing - part way through the First Crusade - the Empire is creaking!
Ulysses; many times started, always abandoned in pure boredom. Fervent agreement on Moby Dick. Hated it when forced to read it as a child, and it’s never improved.
This may be heresey, but most of Hemingway still strikes me as pretensious swill. And Dickens is still a labor to read. (Wuthering Heights bores me witless, too; too overblown.)
Love Thackerey, though.
Veb
Some have called Underworld by Don DeLillo a “great work”. They must be refering to the great work it takes to read beyond the wonderful opening. I have yet to do it.
I’ve never read anything by Henry James, in part because I came across this critical commentary on James, written by H.G. Wells:
“The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string…”
“[James] brings up every device of language to state and define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits his infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing… His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle…And all for tales of nothingness… It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea…”
After that, I didn’t have much interest in James.
Sublight wrote: For me, it’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It seems to keep getting interesting for a few pages, then wandering off into something that I just can’t follow. Have to give it another try, though.
Yup. I managed to get through V. and The Crying of Lot 49 in college-in class-so I thought I’d give Gravity’s Rainbow a try. Twice. I never got past the first 100 pages.
I’m not sure why I find Pynchon so difficult. I happen to love Faulkner and Joyce, so when I read about people getting stuck in Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury I want to implore them to give it another shot.
Wow, great OP. I never knew how many kindred spirits I had out there.
It took me three tries, many years apart, to finally read Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and when I finally did read it, I didn’t “get” it. Faulkner I find flat out unreadable. Got about halfway through As I Lay Dying (figuring since it was relatively short it would be an “easy” read. Hah!) before giving up in exasperation. I did get through Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, only to wonder, what the heck did I just read? Plot details, assuming I managed to extract any from that mass of verbosity, have long since vanished from my memory. Joseph Conrad is not far behind James in terms of linguistic excess, e.g., Lord Jim, though his densely psychological ramblings are somehow more palatable to me.
A couple of years back I was called for jury duty on a multiweek trial out of town, so I thought it would be a good time to read Kafka’s The Trial. I got about halfway through before I admitted to myself I was only reading it so that I could say that I’d read it, not because it provided any amusement or held even slight interest for me. Wish I’d had the same integrity before suffering through Kerouac’s On the Road. And I admit both these last examples probably were quite impactful when first published, but they have lost some of there relevance when read outside their original historical/cultural context.
I nominate Ayn Rand as the “modern author who went to the greatest lengths to keep his/her works from being widely read.” Literally. Atlas Shrugged is an endurance test as much as it is a novel. I got through it once, but I know a lot of people who gave up on it. And I can’t fault them one bit.
Encyclopedia of Chess Endings. Encylopedia of Chess Openings wss no piece of cake either.
I’m someone who usually reads books fairly quick, but I cannot get through Don Quixote. It’s more than a thousand pages long, and I’m only on two hundred or so (I started reading it in May 2000). Cervantes tended to be very long-winded and wrote all these different sub-plots. Keep to the story, man! I’m tempted to just throw it aside for good, but I read some of Don Quixote in Spanish class (in Spanish, of course) and it was a simple read, since it stuck to the plot and didn’t get too complicated. I’ve seen two versions of the movie (Man of La Mancha, the tv version starring John Lithgow) and they’re both excellent. Then I buy the book and it’s driving me nuts. It’s almost as much of a chore as Moby Dick to read.
It took me a few tries to finish The Swiss Family Robinson.
I have an unreasonable fear of my copy of Ulysses. I’m reading it with the a circle over on Fathom, and we’re supposed to regroup when we get to p. 400, but I’m stuck at p. 300 and am frightened to dig it out from under its pile of junk on the floor and get throught those hundred pages. I’m gonna do it soon, I swear. There are parts of it that I adore - the language is so beautiful - but I am not currently in one of those parts.
Gave up on Don Quixote and Crime and Punishment, although I have attempted those two only once each. I swear to god, I will read them eventually.
I can’t believe people have such trouble with Pride and Prejudice! It’s maybe a little hard to get used to the language, but the characters are so great, and once you do get into it, it’s hysterical. I swear, I laughed aloud reading that book.
Re. Barbitu8’s suggestion of the "Encyclopaedia of Chess Endings - I suppose this is not a very constructive notion, but I was quite taken with my own idiotic misreading of this title as one which related to “cheese endings”. Firstly, I thought that it had to be a winner, in terms of being unreadable and boring as shit, then it began to sound like a Monty Python thingy. Now I really want to read this non-existent book!
I’ve been able to read through Dante’s Inferno and Purgitorio (English translations, of course), but I cannot slog through Paradiso. They’re not particularly thick, either.
Actually, although my post was a rib, the book, Encylcopedia of Chess Endings, does exist – all 4 volumes, and I did start reading Vol.1 a couple of years ago. I put it aside sometime ago and haven’t picked it up since then. I can furnish you the author, if you want, but the books are at home and the only computer I have is this office computer. The other book, ECO, is 5 volumes and is not meant to be read, but are reference volumes.
War and Peace
Turn of the Screw
Remembrance of Things Past
I don’t believe anyone who says they have finished any of the above, but I cannot think of a way to tell.
Has anyone read “The Education of Henry Adams”? This was recently voted the best novel of the 20th century.
Is it any good?
I can remember the immense feeling of liberation I got in college when I realized that I was not enjoying one of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, and it was because it was a bad novel, not because I was stupid (or maybe not ONLY because of that). I just got a copy of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ yesterday, so that is the next Great Novel I will tackle.
I have a confession to make – I read War and Peace all the way through. Liked it, too.
Although I liked Moby Dick, I agree about the rst of Melville’s oeuvre. Can’t slog through it. And I agree that Joseph Conrad is a chore.
Just for the record, I Love Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. And Edgar Allen Poe.