I haven’t slogged for years. The last one was The Bridge by Iain Banks, because I loved The Wasp Factory.
Wolves of the Calla was sloggy for awhile, so I took a break and picked it up after a couple of months. Slogless the second time. (Maybe it should have been two books.)
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - philosophy of science is not my bag but it’s for a class and thus I don’t have a choice. Mercifully, like some of your guys’, it was pretty short. I’ve also been reading Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream, and while the first 200 pages were sloggeriffic, it’s been getting better.
I’m not sure that it counts as slogging, but I’m currently trying to make my way through **Shake Hands with the Devil : The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda** by Lt. General Romeo Dallaire.
I think it’s a very good book, but the subject matter and the details are so utterly depressing that I can’t read too much at a time without wanting to write off humanity. 
I’m at about page 250 of 584.
Yay! 
I have to say, though, that having spent the last three months reading Spenser, I’m beginning to like it. Which will do wonders for my academic career, but it’s definitely not a feeling I’m used to!
(However, now that I’ve read The Faerie Queene I feel far less qualified to talk about it. ;))
I just recently slogged through Boyhood by JM Coetzee. I really didn’t think it was very good at all, but felt like I should finish it since I really enjoyed some of his other novels (Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians).
Last month I tried to slog through Foucault’s Pendulum because I liked Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I couldn’t get past the first few chapters. The stories of the Knights Templar made my eyes glaze over, which is odd because I usually like medieval histories (or pseudo-histories, as the case may be.)
A while back I posted a thread about a top 100 list. My goal was to read them in some reasonable amount of time. So far it’s going okay.
BUT!!!
Wuthering Heights - JESUSHFUCKINGCHRIST what a bore - but I made it. Hated every page but it was at least short.
Don Quixote - Or, as I prefer to think of it, Don Cornholey. Made about 200 pages. Alright already, we get the point - chivilery is dead, the whole thing was dumb, let the poor old geezer die.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Made it through without too much screaming and whining. But I’m putting of Ulysses and Finigans Wake utill the end of the list in the hope that I will die before I get there.
The Golden Bowl - Made about 25 pages in 4 days. I think I’ll read this one after I’m done with Joyce’s books - what a yawn.
Light in August, Absolam, Absolom, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury - A bit of a chore from time to time on account of he often never tells you what he’s talking about.
Women In Love - I’m glad there’s only one more D. H. Lawrence on the list. And this is their idea of almost porn in 1900ish.
Krakatoa. Parts of it were really fascinating and unforgettable. I loved about the first half to two thirds of it. But well after the fallout of the explosion and tsunamis, etc., he’s describing why certain termites live on the new island and other similar termite species don’t. I had to force myself to read the last couple of chapters.
I’ve given up on the classics. I read quickly and, I’d like to think, relatively widely, but ‘classic’ literature does nothing for me. I made it to about the last ten pages of Wuthering Heights before realising that I hated the characters, didn’t know what was happening and more importantly, didn’t care. So I cave up. I figure when I’m older and smarter, I’ll pick it up and curse myself for not having read it earlier, like when I read Gormenghast
I read As I Lay Dying for Busary English. Didn’t like it at first, but after a term of fairly intensive study, I loved it. I tried to read Light In August last year, but I dropped it in the bath and so far haven’t been motivated to buy a new copy.
Currently ‘on hold’ in my stack of books is Glue by Irving Welsh. He’s a writer I feel I ought to like, and I do, kinda, but I have no motivation to finish Glue. I picked up a copy of Keri Hulme’s latest offering, Stonefish, a collection of short stories. Given it’s the first thing she’s written in something like twenty years, I had high hopes. As it is, I’m hugely let down.
Faeriechic, I really enjoyed Fortress of Solitude, and I thought the weakest parts of the story were concerning the superpowers. This may make you give up all together, I don’t know.
The only book I’ve read recently that I really hated was Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. It had a kick-ass world premise, the author was compared to William Gibson and Philip K. Dick by a lot of reviewers (and won the PKD memorial award)… it had to be good. But it wasn’t good. Every line of dialogue was capped off by an adverb (my favorite was “he said superfluously”), the characters were totally inconsistent, and certain plotlines never got resolved. I only forced myself to finish it because I had bought it, and felt I’d be wasting my money to quit reading.
I also really hated Slant by Greg Bear. I forced myself to keep going because Bear is considered one of the great modern SF writers and I don’t want to be a philistine, but it was pretty lousy.
Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln by Richard Slotkin was a grave disappointment to me.
It was poorly written book with almost no “flow” to it – and at times it was sleep inducingly boring.
It was an awesome concept (Lincoln’s early life about which little is specifically known) punctuated with well crafted, really alive and neat scenes that were immediately followed by boring, often unneccessary stuff.
On Amazon, afterward, I realized all the rave reviews it received were within a year of publication 99-00-- probably the prime target for the book. Almost all the reviews that came years later hated it - so from that I think you need to be a BIG Lincoln buff to love it – for everyone else … meh.
I “slogged” to the end because of the bright spots – and there were some – but I wouldn’t do it again.
Ten months. Page 930.
:: receives statue ::
Wow I have a lot of people to thank for making this the first thread I started to make it to page two. First I’d like to thank the little people…
I just don’t understand. Why would you force yourself to read a book you can’t stand? My current database shows about 1-1/2 million books in print, with God knows how many more out-of-print. If you can’t stand the one you’re reading, dump that sucker and read something else.
I read for two reasons: To learn something or to be entertained. There’s rarely only one book about a subject I want to learn about, and if I hate the book, I’m not being entertained. Usually, I can find books that accomplish both goals, but if I get a couple of hundred pages in and can’t stand it, that book is history.
I’ve been on page 30 of 1633 for about a week now. I liked 1632 well enough but can’t seem to get very far into its sequel at all.
Invisible Wombat, I really don’t know. Sometimes it’s because it’s a critically acclaimed book that every one else seems to like and I have hope that it gets better towards the end. The Hitchhiker’s Guide books fell into that category for me. I set the trilogy down a few years ago and never could pick it back up again. It’s gathering dust, but I’d heard so much about it and so many people seemed to love it that I made myself get all the way through to the last book before I gave up on it.
Sometimes it’s pure stubbornness. I started this book, damnit, I’m going to finish it! I don’t know why; it’s not like anyone cares or there’s some sort of award for finishing boring books. All of the Greg Bear books fell into that category for me. I haven’t met one that I really liked. I don’t know why I actually own more than one.
And maybe sometimes I’m just too dumb to remember that life is short and I should just move on to something better. Inertia is a terrible thing!
Stubborness? Hope? Sometimes they get better. I will risk some ridicule. I liked most of Tom Clancy’s books.
was deathly dull for about a third to a half of it. Then all the plot threads he set up started coming together and I wound up loving the book (much more than the movie). Doesn’t happen very often so its mostly stubborness.
And guess what book is on the top of the ‘read next’ pile? Eek!
Ok, my book o’ death was Tom Jones by Fielding. I was so relieved when I finished the last page that I wanted to celebrate by flinging it out of the car window. Oh hindsight, I wish I had set it ‘free’ as I find myself looking at it on the shelf thinking, “Hey, it’s been a few years. Maybe I’ll try it again.” I’m just a masochist.
I used to read every word of any book I started. Then I learned that if I wasn’t enjoying the book I could skim it - read the start of each paragraph and all the dialogue. You can race through books doing this. Then I discovered that you can put the book down and forget it. If I don’t enjoy a book now I just give up reading it.
I am currently 2/3 of the way through Lord Jim, which is at least a bit of a slog. There are parts which are thrilling. The writing is terrific, with lots and lots of images and sections that are brilliant. But overall it’s taking a bit of effort (this from a guy who thinks Nicholas Nickleby is a page-turner; I’m also partly through Great Expectations, which is tremendously enjoyable).
The Portrait of a Lady is another one I tried to get through a few years ago but abandoned. I figured Henry James was an author I had to read. About 150 pages into the book I was desperate for somebody to do something. Anything. Drop a teacup. Cut a fart. Something. Believe me, I am not a reader who needs car crashes and explosions to stay interested, but there is a category of writing so reflective and introspective that it is like listening to a know-it-all graduate student at a cocktail party–there may be nuggets of interest, but you still can’t wait to get away. Life is too short to read Henry James as far as I’m concerned.