This is why I read the books on my iPad, and switch between the book and a couple of websites for reference.
I am fully aware that the need to do this is ridiculous. Every criticism leveled against Jordan is dead on, but I like the books, and dammit I’m going to finish them!!!
The comedic books by Tom Sharp were lauded to me by virtually everyone I knew, they would literally be crying with laughter when they read them.
I tried to start a couple of them and found them contrived and unfunny.
As a mega S.F. fan when I was younger I tried and tried to get into the Dune series but couldn’t get interested, so after a good many years I had another attempt but still didn’t enjoy them.
Ironically i enjoyed the movie and the t.v. mini series.
Gave up on trying to watch Titanic, Liar Liar and Highlander 2.
Like others, I was proud of the fact that I had finished any movie or book that I started. But, also like others, I finally wondered why I was torturing myself and realized it doesn’t matter if I don’t finish a book.
Movies
City of Angels - First movie I walked out on and didn’t finish. (It was a rental and I went to do something else.) Something about it made me not care.
Napoleon Dynamite - 40 minutes into it and I asked my wife if she liked it. When she said no, we gladly turned it off.
LotR - While I did finish them all, I thought the first was the best, the second was too long and the third one I was watching my watch, not happy with the siege and hated the ending .
Books
Kim Harrison’s Hollows series. I read book one but didn’t go any further. My wife loved them so asked me to try again. I got halfway thru book three before I told her I didn’t like it and wanted to stop.
LotR - Neither the hobbit nor the other books do I find entertaining. I couldn’t even listen to the Hobbit with nothing else to do but drive. Boring.
Wheel of Time - Admittedly, I got through book ten or so before I gave up. I enjoyed through book six a lot. It was only when I felt he was padding things and not having much happen plot wise that I gave up. I came to it late, so I think this only took up ten years of my life!
Goodkind’s Sword of Truth? I read the first three, thought it was a trilogy and while it ended weird thought it was good. Years later I find more and did not like the next book so stopped after that.
R. A. Salvatore - Again, I read a lot of him, including his last Driz’zt novels but have finally given up on him. I can’t follow his fight scenes and his descriptions don’t work for me either but I do like the general ideas he has. This is the author that has spanned a LONG time for me, starting in (early) college and only ending earlier this year.
Ed Greenwood - Love his game books, hate his fiction. I have bought his books two or three times (not all of them) to try and finally read them and “appreciate” the person who gave me a game world I like a lot and I can’t do it. It’s a bad enough style to me that I could pick out what he did on a collaborative book and I didn’t like his chapters.
Paul S Kemp - Another DND writer. I liked the Cale trilogy for the newness of someone who was who they were and they were fine with it, even if they knew they weren’t “good.” But, I didn’t like his last trilogy. I have to admit, this might be the first one where I (unrealistically and with much hubris) thought I could do better because I really didn’t like where he went with it. Enough such that I am done reading him.
My wife didn’t like Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series but read them all. She threw them out rather than let me keep them! But, I did like the Gap series.
Kevin J Anderson - Unfortunately, this was in my “I will finish it stage” so I finished the books I started with him but hated them. I really hated his Jedi Academy trilogy and another of his Star Wars books. It’s like his stuff is slightly “out of phase” and off to me. Maybe it’s a surface understanding versus a deep understanding of the subject? I don’t know. I don’t know many who will admit they like him but someone must as he’s a top seller, iirc.
Simon Hawke - Again, DND books and I really didn’t like them. I finished the books I started but not the series and didn’t start a new series by him later.
Probably long enough.
Some Terry Prachett book set in pseudo-Australia. The girl I was with at the time was a big fan and kept on me to read his stuff so I grabbed that one off her collection and tried it. I could see where the amusement was supposed to be and I usually like that sort of thing but he was just missing all of his marks with me. I gave up after the second chapter or so.
*Dahlgren *by Samuel R. Delany.
After almost 300 pages, nothing much was happening besides lame poetry and lamer sex scenes, so I gave up.
I’m so glad to hear of another person who thought that movie (which was critically praised to the skies) stunk up a storm!
I’m pretty stubborn about not giving up on things once I start them, so I very slowly kept reading the Wheel of Time series even though I was pretty bored after even the first one. I gave up when I realized that I was reading the books slower then the pace at which the author was writing them, so that I was further from the end of the series then when I started, despite having made it through the first four or so.
I forced myself through the Tolkien books a couple of times, but couldn’t watch more than a few minutes of the first movie.
Years ago, I rented The Nightmare Before Christmas, and ten minutes in, even the kids were begging me to turn it off.
I’ll (what are we up to?) fifth the LoTR books. How the hell are you supposed to keep track of all those people with essentially the same name? Aragorn Eragon Barrowmir Moronman…
Gravities Rainbow. Tried to read that one several times. I just don’t care about the people.
Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. Picked that one up as it was recommended by many reviewers. Didn’t make it more than two chapters in.
And I read and really liked Infinite Jest.
A shame - you picked up one of his worst books.
Cryptonomicon. Stephenson must get paid by the pound. Mind-numbingly lousy.
Interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed that book. But I’ve picked up Quicksilver twice, without success.
[QUOTE=NetTrekker]
3) Shogun (novel)…a co-worker loved it and wanted everybody else to read it. I did a chapter or two but just couldn’t get involved in it.
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Funny, Shogun is one of my favorite novels of all time and I have read it about six times. I loved Shogun so much I thought I would enjoy the other books by James Clavell. Hated them all, Tai Pan, Gai-Jin, Whirlwind. It’s amazing, I could not get into any of those and gave up half way through each of them.
I know I saw The Departed but I can’t remember anything about it.
As usual when confronted with something one has only made a trivial investment in and doesn’t like, it’s probably the safest bet to assume that everybody else is only pretending a phenomenal work of art is a phenomenal work of art, because they’re sheep and they got tricked, don’t you know.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to say I had actually abandoned Infinite Jest, I really liked it. I just kind of petered out but always meant to go back.
That said, if you’re going to give up on it near the beginning, I totally can’t see why you’d pick the scene with Erdedy waiting for pot. That was an awesome scene.
The Wardine part, on the other hand… just don’t let that discourage you. Skip it if you have to. Ugh.
Too bad you weren’t at my garage sale – sold the whole set for $20, along with the Beatrice letters and the Snicket autobiography.
Most recently, I gave up early on Matterhorn, the much-praised Viet Nam novel by Karl Malantes, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, True Evil by Greg Iles, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, Paradise Alley by I Forget, and A Dark Matter by Peter Straub.
There are a couple of books I always pick up while waiting for something else – The Dwarf by some Scandinavian guy and The Worm Ourobouros – but they get set aside when a new book arrives.
Movies – The Fourth Kind – stupid concept, boring film.
How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Selected it from a list of books for an English assignment thinking I’d like it, got about halfway through and decided I would not subject myself to another paragraph of that crap. Had to brazen my way through the assignment by projecting the likely outcome of the book as gleaned through magazine articles I researched at the library (pre-Wikipedia days)
The World According to Garp. I got as far as
Garp has sex with the (iirc underage) babysitter.
I read a few more pages after that, but couldn’t get past the fact that every character in the book that I had yet encountered was rather sleazy and I no longer cared what happened to them.
The Hobbit. I wasn’t more than fourteen pages in before I gave up.
I just noticed that the subject is movies/books. I also gave up on Ghost World, not because it’s a bad movie, but because the leads played teenagers very, very well… and I don’t like teenagers.