I’m generally a Rand fan (not a disciple) but I’ve never had any interest is reading We the Living. Also while I love LOTR, ditto on The Silmarillion.
Also- while I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra & even That Hideous Strength many times, I’ve never made it through the first book in that series Out of the Silent Planet.
Finally, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
One of my dad’s favorite books. I’ve tried to read it at least 2 or 3 times and simply cannot get past the first 50 or so pages. Maybe I can get a running start, power through the beginning, and finally be richly rewarded for my efforts.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who found A Confederacy of Dunces boring beyond belief. I guess I missed the memo about flatulence and masturbation being outrageously hilarious.
For me it’s Hardy’s Return of the Native. I was first assigned this book to read in high school. I remember reading the first lumbering sentence, (…was approaching the time of twilight…embrowned itself…) and then tossing the book over my shoulder in frustration, and not opening it again for three days. Somehow, I skimmed over enough to get through the assignment.
Later when I was older, I had become more patient with that style of writing, so I tried again.
I got about three chapters into it and gave up. There’s only so much landscape description that I can stand.
Oh yes Lolita! I just finished it a few weeks ago. And by finish I mean I skimmed every fifth or sixth page until the end after around 30 pages.
I thought I was the only one who repeatedly subjected himself to Pynchon! I came in to post the same thing.
I’d rather poke out an eye – my own – than pick up Tolkien again. Ditto any Joyce. Put down the bottle, man!
I knew this would be one of the first answers. I’m the same way. I’ve tried umpteen times, but Tolkien’s prose is ridiculously rambly. He can spend three pages describing dirt.
Bonfire of the Vanities. I get to page 17 or so and just walk away. I don’t care what happens to the main character, in fact, I dislike him so am hoping something bad happens to him (if I think of him at all).
I have tried over the years to read MiddleMarch, but without success.
I can (and have) read LOTR several times. The last time I did so, I was so impatient with the meandering plot and Sam’s pot and pans obsession that I found myself skipping entire pages, looking for dialog or some change of scene. I still love* The Hobbit *and I enjoy the films, but I doubt I’ll ever reread LOTR again.
I used to feel incredibly guilty if I didn’t finish a book. Now I give a book about 50 pages and if I still don’t care: on to the next one. The glory is that there are so many good ones to choose from.
My solution to reading books I can’t get through is to find a cliffnotes version, synopsis, whatever, and read that. This allows me to skim through the book and not miss anything important.
My contribution to the OP is anything in the Twilight series. It was much easier to read the people who mock it nearly line by line.
I got bored with Atlas Shrugged halfway throught the title.
I ended up using “Bleak House” to raise my reading light beside my bed so I could read interesting books. 
And I adored that series.
Eggzackly. One of my books I couldn’t get through on multiple tries was “The Hobbit,” although after watching the movies I inhaled the “Lord of the Rings” series. What made it so enjoyable for me was simply skipping over the extremely long, tedious descriptions of every tree in the forest they were encountering.
I haven’t even started it yet, but I’ve had the sequel to “A Canticle For Liebowitz” (“Wild Horse Woman”) for years now without even cracking the cover. I didn’t like Canticle, and I can’t be bothered to read the sequel.
The Bible is on my list, too. I appreciate this thread; it’s apparent that my inability to get through certain books has less to do with intelligence and more to do with preference.
Someone is trying to rewrite Hitchhiker’s? Where are my pitchforks and torches? An angry mob is required.
The one book I was assigned to read that I could not finish, no matter what, was Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. I got about halfway through by dint of skipping every other chapter (which had nothing to do with the story and everything to do with Fielding’s sense of importance for writing the “first real novel”). I finally gave up and read the Cliff’s Notes. As a comparison, I even managed to get through Confederacy of Dunces, which I loathed, but Fielding defeated me.
The only other book I can recall quitting because I just couldn’t read it anymore was called Moonwise, by Greer Gilman. It’s the sort of book I like, and you’d think given my love of Tolkien and McKillip I’d have no trouble. Tried twice and finally gave it to a friend of mine, who reported back the same problem. Ah, well.
The number of the beast. I tried the first time in my mid-teens and was completely obsessed with SF and fantasy fiction… it sucked so bad I literally threw the book across the room shortly after they got to Mars.
Tried again a couple of years back when I hit 30… it was even worse. This time it went into the rubbish bin before they even got off Earth.
I loves me some Steinbeck. SOME. “Tortilla Flat” and “Cannery Row” are favorites. I find the flawed but well-intentioned poor folk charming. How the mundane becomes a big deal for them, and how they try to overcome their baser instincts and do good for those around them, even though they often fail. They read rather like a fable. I need to read them 2 or 90 more times, maybe then I’ll be able to understand what it is that makes his prose so warm and pleasant and inviting to me.
“The Grapes of Wrath” was just a’ight to me. I couldn’t read it with any kind of distance or impartiality, since the story has embedded itself into the culture to the point where I knew it without having seen the movie or read the book. When I got to the, "'Wherever there’s a. . . " lines, I laughed out loud, from surprise I suppose. I didn’t know they were from that book, but I sure knew them. “Travels with Charlie” was very enjoyable, though a travelogue and not fiction.
I’ll never pick up, “The Pearl” again. I didn’t finish it, and I don’t regret it. I know it was meant to illustrate how the very poor and uneducated are preyed upon from above, but it was almost like torture porn, the way the diver and his family suffered. Perhaps he perseveres and overcomes in the end, though I suspect not. I could look it up, but I don’t have the interest. Painful. I don’t know if that speaks well of Steinbeck’s ability to get me to sympathize with the characters, or if it’s just easy to set up an average person and beat on him to elicit sympathy.
I went on a ‘classic’ story binge one time when a local bookstore had a bunch of old stories available for a dollar a book. “Kidnapped” by Robert Louis Stevenson was enjoyable, “The Sea Wolf” by Jack London was a revelation, a joy. Before that, I thought he only wrote about dogs (the titular Sea Wolf is a ship). I could not get through “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. Dry, painful. About halfway through I hit another several page listing of all the sea creatures the narrator’s seen, and that’s where I quit. Several pages of Latin names with little to describe what each creature was, and nothing to connect it to the story, except that it was about as boring as the rest of it.
I did not get more than 25 pages into “Black House”, the sequel to “The Talisman”. I found the first book a bit tough to get through as well: the story grabbed me, but the style made it a struggle. Just last month, I started and gave up on “Lisey’s Story”. It didn’t interest me.
That’s probably every book I’ve ever started and not finished. I don’t count the ridiculous book my sister loaned me when I was bored. The character’s names seemed cribbed from MST3K riffs of the"Space Mutiny" episode, so after enough introductions to establish a pattern, I was out.
It took me a few tries to get through LotR and Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I can appreciate both now that I’m older, but they aren’t easy reads.
I have completely given up on the Twilight books. My wife buys them all, and I tried 3 times to get through the 2nd book, still no luck.
I picked up The Satanic Diaries (as I recall, this was about three weeks BEFORE the fatwa was issued), and didn’t get past the first couple of dozen pages.
Morgyn:
It’s not a re-write. It’s (intended as) a continuation. And it’s terrible. I haven’t been able to read much of it either.
I’ll add Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. The old guy and the kid just talking about random, nothing subjects (“do you like baseball? Let’s talk about baseball.”) is just not interesting to read.
Lord of the Rings. I had no problem with the Hobbit, but every tune I start LotR I move to something else before I hit the 200 page mark.
I’ll add the Old Man and the Sea. The only book assigned in school that I did not finish.
I got within a few pages of the end of Heart of Darkness and realized that no matter what happened, it wasn’t going to be enough to pay me back for the boredom and pain I’d already endured.
Oh! And Daisy Miller, Turn of the Screw, or anything else ever written by Henry James. I would pay good money to sock Mr. James in the balls.
Well, if he was alive, that is. Hardly seems worth it* now*…