Dune (I really want to finish this book so I can understand Harvard Lampoon’s ‘DOON’ - I get some of the obvious stuff, but I’m sure there’s more. I …just …can’t …get …into …this …book.)
Walden (Man in the woods with no electricity)
Magic Mountain
Anything by Jane Austin, even Northanger Abbey
Warning - slight topic diversion ahead…
Just bought and finished The Devils of Loudon - put it on the shelf and found I already had a copy. Ditto with The Decameron (loved that book!!!). Anybody else end up buying multiple copies of the same novel? And don’t you hate when that happens?
Now to start The Aeneid - only one copy of this, but never finished this in high school.
Yeah – I’ve got multile copies of the Argonautica by Apollonius.
No joke.
What really hurts is when you get the book that is the PERFECT gift for someone you know. And then you find that you gave it to them already, so now they6 hav TWO copies rom you.
Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, but I blame part of the problem on the fact that it’s an E-Text, and I have a very hard time reading a major novel in Netscape.
Or everyone else thinks it’s (a book is) ‘the perfect gift’. My next-door neighbor’s kid received FOUR copies of the latest Harry Potter book for his birthday, and each copy was inscribed (from Gramma/Uncle Milt/best friend Jerry/Mom and Dad) so he can’t exchange them or give them away without insulting someone.
CalMeacham - Don’t know the Argonautica or Apollonius. Tell you what, I’ll trade you surplus copies of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (good sections dog-eared :D) for the Argonautica.
Anyone maybe have a surplus copy of the 1001 Arabian Nights - the four-volume set? So I can finish it? Roommate accidently took the wrong box of books and sold this at a church bazaar. Just as I was getting into it again.
Most of my most significant DNFs have been mentioned:
[ul]
[li]Crime and Punishment[/li][li]The Sound and the Fury[/li][li]As I Lay Dying[/li][li]Absalom, Absalom[/li][li]Finnegans Wake[/li][/ul]
I allowed myself to become convinced that I really should like Faulkner, so I kept trying until I unconvinced myself. I do love Joyce, but I can’t claim to have made it through FW, despite having read Ulysses three or four times. I don’t know what it is about Crime and Punishment that puts me off – I don’t object to Russian novels and their attendant legion of names for each character, but in college I once dropped a class partially because I could not stomach another attempt on it.
I’m not sure whether it counts as a “great work of literature”, but I haven’t yet finished Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon, despite having devoured V, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Vineland (all except Vineland multiple times). I started it not long after it came out, got distracted by something else, and haven’t got back to it yet.
On the other hand, some of my all-time favorites have been mentioned as well:[ul]
[li]Ulysses[/li][li]Gravity’s Rainbow[/li][li]Moby-Dick[/li][/ul]
Tip for those of you who hated MOBY-DICK, or those of you who haven’t read it yet and are being frightened off by its fearsome reputation…
Try the University of California Press edition. It’s a trade paperback reprint of the famous Arion Press edition of 1980, for which a new typeface (very mid-19th century Americana, yet easy to read) was created, and features woodcut illustrations by genius woodcut-guy Barry Moser (he just did an illustrated Bible…the guy’s the Gustave Dore of our time!).
Reading about the forgotten lore and practical matters involved in capturing whales in 1850 is second nature to me, a lover of bathyspheres and zeppelins and other obsolete technology, so I never minded the sections other people think of as dull. And Moser will pop up with a clear and concise illustration of just how a whaleboat is laid out at the point where you become hopelessly confused by Melville’s description.
I have a miserable track record on important books…I’ve never finished ANYTHING by William Faulkner, either; anything Knut Hamsun wrote after PAN and VICTORIA; Conrad’s NOSTROMO; Carson McCullers’ THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER; Frank Norris’ THE OCTOPUS; the last two books in Mervyn Peake’s GORMENGHAST trilogy; Steinbeck’s EAST OF EDEN; H.G. Wells’ TONO-BUNGAY; Andrej Biely’s PETERSBURG; Djuna Barnes’ NIGHTWOOD; or Kingsley Amis’ LUCKY JIM.
I have tried and tried to get through “Madame Bovary,” but some trauma always comes up in my life and interrupts me. Now I figure starting again would just be asking for trouble.
In my high school English class, we all rebelled after several chapters of “An American Tragedy” and told our teacher we would rather be left behind a year than have to read one more word of Theodore Dreiser. I was happy to read, years later, Dorothy Parker’s opinion of him:
What writes worse than Theodore Dreiser?
TWO Theodore Dreisers!
Anybody else have a problem with “Look Homeward Angel?”
I got about halfway through where he had about 4 pages of lists of smells he remembered from his home town. Jeez, louise, what a BORE!
Lets see, I never finished Moby Dick, Dracula or Last of the Moheekens (sp?! ). I even did a 20 page paper on Dracula and only read about 100 pages of it. I never did finish the Invisble man, I read all but the last 10 pages and said screw it. nor could I ever get past a lot of Poe’s works.
Oh, also didn’t finish The Fire Next Time and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I read both of these for classes, but my inability to read the books didn’t seem to affect my grades. In fact, I got a 97 on the OFOTCN exam. (My teacher gave us five minutes before the test to review. I very quickly skimmed the ending and was completely startled to learn that McMurphy dies.) I credit this high score to my honed ability to BS my way through essays.
I got stumped by Catcher in the Rye. It’s such a short book, but I thought every character was phoney as hell. I was so disappointed, after the build-up it gets, but I’m sorry, I will not read any book just to reach the end if I’m not enjoying the front and middle.
I have slightly unusual taste in literature, but I know I’ll find a sympathetic audience here.
[list]
[li]Billy Budd – It took a great communal effort for my friends and I to finish this candidate for literary euthenasia. The only cure for its sanctimonious heavy-handedness was to find humor in everything.[/li][li]Bernice Bobs Her Hair – I’d rather endure thumb screwes than read this F. Scott Fitzgerald short story again. The alliteration in the title is sickening enough.[/li][li]Any work of American Naturalism, especially by Stephen Crane and Sherwood Anderson. I can’t be the only person nauseated by Winesburg, Ohio.[/li]
I suppose my junior year of high school utterly ruined me for American literature. Then again, I think the literature ruined me on its own merits.
However, for those barbaroi who don’t like the Argonautica…there’s a special place in Hades waiting for you. Read a good introduction first. That will help you to understand its literary context.
I tried to read Look Homeward Angel this summer because I had a crush on a guy who said it was his favorite book. He also slyly picked up a book I’d recommended, so it should have been love, right?
Lordy that book sucked.
I’m a fast and prolific reader - can knock off a 700-pager in a weekend, but there are some books that just kick my ass every time:
The Brothers Kamarazov
Madame Bovary
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Lets see, I don’t like to admit defeat when it comes to books, but here are 3 I couldn’t get through:
Walden - I really wanted too, I know this nature boy I wanted to impress with it. I think I’ll just stick to quoting him…
Vanity Fair - very funny, but I just can’t be bothered.
Is Paris Burning? - Too many characters!!! Thats war, I suppose.
I was planning to read Moby Dick, but now I’m not so sure. (Thanks, guys) I have a copy of War and Peace on my desk to read when I’m done the Gormanghast trilogy.
Some classic works I’ve started but never finished:
[ul]
[li]Plato’s The Republic: I’ve read whole chapters at times, out of order, but I’ve never been able to read it front to back. There are parts I find very interesting, and then there are parts I simply can’t get through.[/li][li]Thucydides’ A History of the Peloponsian War (or whatever the exact title is): Basically the same deal as The Republic.[/li][li]Sartre’s No Exit: I don’t remember why I stopped on this one, it certainly wasn’t very long. I think it just bored me; I read it for awhile, put it down, and never had any desire to pick it back up.[/li][li]Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer: I may actually have read this one fully back in high school when it was required, I really can’t remember. But about two years ago I purchased an edition of Heart of Darkness that was bound together with this, and after reading (and loving) HoD, I tried to (re)read this several times and couldn’t. I’m not exactly sure why, but the descriptive passages bore me in this, while they never do in its companion. It definetly pales in comparison to HoD, in my opinion.[/li][li]Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene: I can make it through the works of people like Marlowe and Shakespeare without too much trouble (though I never did finish Love’s Labours Lost), but if I go back any further in English Literature it simply becomes a chore to try and figure out what they mean, as evidenced by the works of these two. I have no doubt that both works are quite good, but after stopping every other sentence to puzzle over what various words are, I tend to give up. What’s odd to me is that while I don’t have the dates handy, I believe Spencer wrote his epic poem over 150 years after Chaucer and not all that long before Marlowe began writing, but if anything he’s even harder to understand than Chaucer (IMHO).[/li][li]Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel: Maybe I would have liked it better if I had tried a modern translation, but the copy I read translated his French into contemporary (for his time) English, and it was as difficult to read as the two guys in the previous point.[/li][li]Knut Hamsun’s Hunger: I got maybe a third of the way through this book before stopping. It was interesting at times, but Hamsun seemed to drag on about essentially nothing while the plot advanced hardly at all.[/li][/ul]
A lot of the more commonly cited works (Moby Dick, A Turn of the Screw, Ulysses, The Sound and The Fury, etc) I’ve never tried to read for one reason or another, so I can’t comment on them. I did read Joyce’s The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but that’s about as far I felt compelled to go. I’ve never tried to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, but I did read her A Member of the Wedding for a class. Eh. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t find it very interesting. I’ve never tried to read anything by Faulkner or Henry James, though apparently they are two of my mother’s favorite authors.
I got halfway through, then could go no more…I kept asking my best friend “it can’t get any worse/depressing/horrible/etc , can it?” and she would just look at me and smile each time LOL
I’m ashamed to admit I haven’tg even tried to read many of “the classics”, but one I tried and couldn’t finish was Moby Dick. I did read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea this summer! Woo-hoo! I mostly like to read popular fiction.