I’ve tried a few Phillip K Dick books over the past year or so. I can never get into them. I get as far as about a tenth of the way into the book before I give up and pick up something else.
As far as I can tell the reason is that I can’t understand what’s going on. It’s like I’ve been thrown into a world without any background-setting (any preperation for my mind)
Every other author I’ve read (Asimov, Heinlein, Pratchett, Mitchell, Gaiman, Rowling, Pullman to name the main ones) I’ve had no trouble constructing the world they describe in my head. But with Phillip, I just can’t fathom what the hell is going on.
For the life of me, I couldn’t get into Jane Austen. I had to read her for a college course, and it was pure torture. I’m not sure why.
I also hate Henry James, but in his case I know why. The cman never met a subordinate clause he didn’t love. his sentences run on forever, and things move with glacial slowness in his books. I had to read him in high school as well as college.
I have a VDSC in my family - Voracious Danielle Steele Consumer - and I once picked up one of her more recent works, and I couldn’t get through the first chapter.
Shelby Foote. His Civil War series had rave reviews, but I found it almost unreadable. I’ll try again sometime but it reading it was more work than pleasure.
I’ll commit Straight Dope heresy and say I cannot get into Terry Pratchett at all.
I’ve read (with great effort) two of his works and I keep thinking that Douglas Adams did this already, and much better, so why am I bothering?
For a long time, mine was Spider Robinson. I couldn’t stand the fact that he always seemed to make you like a character, then kill him/her off in what seemed an arbitrary fashion. Sometimes as an almost side note. Not always, but often enough to annoy me. That and the fact that he seemed to have this fantasy of very young girls being knowledgeable/mature enough to have sex.
Come to that, I had a similar problem with Piers Anthony over the sex thing, too.
Stephen King. I’ve read several of his books, including the first few Dark Tower books when they were initially released, but none of them made me want to read any more of them, though I kept trying.
I enjoyed his shorter (Richard Bachman) stories better than his novels, but even then that wasn’t enough to make me like him.
My collegiate brushes with the works of Dickens, Melville, Steinbeck and Faulkner left me cold. YMMV, of course, but I found them all turgid and impenetrable.
I agree with James, though his earlier work (e.g., Daisy Miller) is much better. At a certain point he started dictating his work, so he tended to ramble, his mouth running on with clause and metaphor, and never quite getting to the point, but dancing around it as though actually saying what he meant would have caused his instantaneous death.
Also, he had an aversion to anything actually happening in his books.
I can’t get into Piers Anthony because he is such a jerk IRL. Also, his Apprentice Adept books are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo boring – almost as bad as the sequels to Dune, where Herbert couldn’t have a scene without people spending pages lecturing to each other.
Tolkein, Dick, Gibson, Adams, Rowling…all are a blur to me. I’ve read substantial portions of their output, and I can’t remember a thing about any of them. Whereas I can quote Heinlein, Pratchett and numerous others by the page-full.
(Seriously, I second what Lobsang said; the earlier books up until roughly Guards! Guards!–if you exclude Mort–are not Pratchett’s best work. The series really hits its stride with the City Watch, and Reaper Man further on.)
My own nomination: I keep trying and trying and trying, but I can’t get into Tolstoy or Kafka–I slogged valiantly through The Trial and The Metamorphosis, and War and Peace earlier on, but my eyes kept glazing over each time.
A couple years ago (okay, maybe more than a couple), they put out a 5 volume series of “Collected Stories of Phillip K. Dick”. And I loved them. You might try these as opposed to the full-on novels.
Most of the stories were like reading a good “Outer Limits” or “Twilight Zone” episode - a lot of fun. They’re a bit dated, so you kind of have to put yourself as a reader in the 50’s. But I thoroughly enjoyed these.
As to the OP: another vote for Tolkien. Easily the most recommended author to me, but I just…get…bored.
They have re-released these books recently without the numbering and added at least two more books. I love this series and am determined to read them all.
I can’t get into Stephen King horror. I liked the Gunslinger series (what I read of it) and The Eyes of the Dragon, but otherwise, blech. I much more enjoy to watch TV and movie adaptations of his work.
And…Mark Twain. I HATED that stupid Huckleberry Finn book. I hated Tom Sawyer.
