I’m another who gave up on Wheel of Time, for me I think I got through book 4.
Also Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell… it really slowed down at times. I may try it again someday.
The latest book I gave up on was Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk. After several chapters of the main character longing after his lost love, I realized the rest of the book was probably going to be like that, and I gave up. None of the characters was worth the effort, and while Pamuk’s writing is excellent, it wasn’t enough to keep me going.
Armageddon - the movie. One of the few I couldn’t languish through at the theater.
Another one who gave up on the Wheel of Time. Back in college. Do you know how old that book series is?! Back then we had no hope of it ever finishing up.
Yeah, there was a point where I opened the new book and had no idea who the hell any of those people were, and I wasn’t willing to go back and reread like I used to when I was younger. I started that shit in MIDDLE SCHOOL.
A friend recommended that book to me. I’m very glad I checked it out of the library instead of purchasing it. I didn’t even last until the end of the pot-smoker thingy in the very beginning of the book. Poorly defined characters without names delivered in SoC narration just isn’t going to interest me.
I’m with all the reviewers who felt the name of the book was referring to an act by the author with regard to his readership, rather than a reference to anything in the actual story.
ETA: Oh yeah, Oryx & Crake sucked ass. I don’t think I even made it thru 50 pages of that shit.
Thank Og I’m not the first to mention Confederacy of Dunces. I will try again sometime. A friend gave me Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath, and it did nothing for me. Another example of a work not aging well?
I wonder if Crossing Delancy works better for a straight guy, Sampiro. I enjoyed it mostly because I could fall in love with Amy Irving. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything else so good.
I made it 250 pages into the first Wheel of Time book, which everyone acted like was some kind of fantasy classic, and gave up. Robert Jordan is simply woeful at writing dialog, his descriptions of the world come off clunky and wooden, and I hated every female character.
Lessee…
Books:
[ul]
[li]Lisey’s Story[/li][li]The Passage[/li][li]The Talisman[/li][li]Dreamcatcher[/li][li]Lucifer’s Hammer (the writing in this is among the worst I’ve ever read)[/li][li]Eragon (ditto)[/li][li]A Game of Thrones[/li][li]Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone[/li][/ul]
Movies:
[ul]
[li]Napoleon Dynamite[/li][li]There Will Be Blood[/li][li]Forgetting Sarah Marshall[/li][li]Tropic Thunder[/li][/ul]
And a movie that I initially gave up on about twenty minutes into it, only to be talked into going back and watching the rest of it, and after doing so I now desperately wish I’d not given it another chance: Slumdog Millionaire.
Seconded.
See, I love most of Tarantino.
I WANTED to like Sin City, really, I did. Many of my friends who share the same taste as me in movies raved about it.
Snore.
Was that the one with them fighting a giant robot bear at the beginning? I know it’s either that one or Wizard and Glass. Whichever story features Roland and the legless woman fighting a mechanized bear, that’s the last one of the series I attempted to read. To this day, the image of the legless woman fighting a giant robot bear makes me giggle. And that’s why I’ve never attempted to resume the series.
You do know that Quentin Tarantino didn’t make Sin City, right?
I do, yes. I was responding to NetTrekker’s comment about not making it through Pulp Fiction.
*Dune *and *Dhalgren. *With both books, I found myself eventually just staring at the page in a glazed stupor.
I blame these books for the fact that I now have cataracts.
Books:
Left Hand of Darkness
Redemption of Althalus (I threw this one across the room eventually)
The Gulag Archipelago
David Copperfield
movies
Bad
Dances with Wolves
Under the dome
Happily ditched:
The Satanic Verses
Tree of Smoke
American Psycho
Sadly defeated by:
Swann’s Way
God and the New Physics
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Godel, Escher, Bach
Fascinated by Godel, enjoy Escher, love Bach, but I could not make it through this book. I don’t think it’s a bad book by any means, I just couldn’t understand it. Or, to use koeeoaddi’s phrasing, I was sadly defeated by it.
I’ve tried One Hundred Years of Solitude three times, no dice.
Also I couldn’t finish The Informant book or movie, snore city.
David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo
What a mess. Great ideas, and only a hundred pages of exposition between plot points. Think Logan’s Run vs. Dune vs. Shogun, with extra padding. Argh. Seriously, here’s the new definition of bloat:
The twenty books in the re-release schedule are planned to be published at regular intervals between April 2011 and June 2015.
- Son of Heaven
- Daylight on Iron Mountain
- The Middle Kingdom
- Ice and Fire
- The Art of War
- An Inch of Ashes
- The Broken Wheel
- The White Mountain
- Monsters of the Deep
- The Stone Within
- Upon a Wheel of Fire
- Beneath the Tree of Heaven
- Song of the Bronze Statue
- White Moon Red Dragon
- China on the Rhine
- Days of Bitter Strength
- The Father of Lies
- Blood and Iron
- King of Infinite Space
- The Marriage of the Living Dark
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz