I have discarded Heinlein for misogynist claptrap. I have gone back to him cautiously, because some of his stuff is really good.
I discarded the much-praised *Possession * by A.S. Byatt, after several valient attempts.
*Les Miserables * has been upstairs half-finished for years now, but I don’t consider it discarded.
I ditched China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station after getting halfway through it. Absolutely loathed all of the characters and wanted them all to die. Shame, really, because the setting was kinda neat.
I also put a Gene Wolf novel on indefinite hold–not a bad book, it was just depressing me all to hell. Eventually I will get back to it.
Oh, forgot about him. About six months ago I actually hurled (literally) Time Enough For Love across the room in disgust rather than finish it.
We’re supposed to accept a futuristic society where people live for centuries, society is totally rearranged, everyone’s liberated and at it (a popular Heinlein theme), yet where it really matters it’s still the 1950s down the all-male golf club, yucking it up about the little women and their peculiar little moods.
Ditched.
I enjoy Brookmyre, but my one problem with him is that he painstakingly fills in backstory at great length - usuallly about a quarter of the way into the book which slows the action right down. In “Be My Enemy”, he ingeniously puts the backstory right at the beginning. Ignore it - start the book from where Tim and Jack arrive at the hotel, and it’s a reasonable action/comedy romp. And certainly not a secret agent espionage thriller. In its own words, it’s more “Zulu meets Home Alone”.
The last book I stopped reading… unfortunately I tend not to stop, because I need to know how things finish. I would have stopped reading a James Patterson novel - whose title I forget - had I not been travelling in South America at the time and thus without any alternatives on long bus journeys. When a nun describes a young girl as “looking exactly like the Virgin Mary”, you know you’re in for some turgid, quasi-mystical soft-brained crap.
I used to read every word of every book I ever started.
Then I learned to skim novels by reading the dialogue and the first sentence of each paragraph once I had basically become tired of the writing. That way I found out how it ended with minimum time investment.
Now if I am not enjoying a book I put it down and start another.
Yeah, me too. I just gave up on it last week. I’ve never seen so much misanthropy crammed into so few pages.
I had a hard time with Quicksilver too, and read something like four other books during the course of wading through that one. At the time, I didn’t know that it was the first in a trilogy. I did finish it, and found the other two books MUCH more enjoyable. The people finally become real people and have realistic conversations. There are fewer diagrams (thank goodness) and the various plots finally cohere into something resembling an arc.
I used to think if a novelist had several books published they were pretty good and worth reading.
That’s what drew me into Jayne Krentz novels. Happily, I learned my lesson and backed away with minimal injury. I checked out two books, gave up on the first halfway and didn’t even bother with the second.
I also agree that life is too short to read bad books.
I’m another person that pretty much HAS to finish any book I start, however, Wicked by Gregory Maguire was so awful that my brain was threatening me with hysterical blindness if I picked it up again. I only got a little over halfway through that one. I honestly can’t think of another book I have failed to finish, and I have probably read over 2000 books.
Nick Tosches’ “In the Hand of Dante: A Novel”
Until that one, I’ve finished every book I ever started.
That one ended up in a hotel waste basket, but only because I didn’t have a fireplace to burn it in, and using the pages as toilet paper was too much of a personal sacrifice for the furtherance of the literary arts.
The author is quite impressed with himself, and tries to share that with you on pretty much every page. Why he would be so impressed is beyond me.
I’d call it derivative drivel, but the author doesn’t have even the skills to be derivative, instead he attempts to imitate what he thinks others have done before him - and drivel at least starts out as useful saliva, whereas this waste of trees never comes close to anything gratifying, edifying or interesting.
He tries to be clever by using the F bomb, gratuitous violence and misogyny as well as unflattering depictions of the RC church throughout the book, warning readers on the book flap that they might find the book offensive. I guess the idea is to bully readers into reading this crap for fear of being provincial or smallminded if they don’t read it. In fact, the offensive part is that the whole book is a waste of time, time that could’ve been spent reading something more worthwile, like the manufacturer’s information stamped on the bottom of plastic grocery bags.
This junk is currently to be had cheaply at booksellers, on the sales table. Since the jacket looks kinda cool, and the description reads like it has a decent premise, it is easy to be fooled. Don’t be fooled.
Life is far too short to waste on bad books.
I’m probably going to ditch The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. I would have liked it as a teenager, but I just no longer have the stamina to wade through that level of description. Which is why I no longer try to read Anne Rice or Frank Herbert.
The last book I gave up on half way read is this one: crusade of tears by C.D. Baker. I don’t know if Baker is evil or just severely undermedicated, but this book is deeply disturbing. But not in a dark way, no it’s 180 of that. If you know anything about the children’s crusade, you know it was a horrible grim experience. But not the way Baker writes it. Oh no, those plucky little crusaders have nothing on Pollyanna. They’re unrelentingly cheerful even as they bury five little kids hung for no good reason, or bury a five-year-old friend who was killed by a soldier for daring to speak to them. Happy little kids, starving, exchanging riddles with the happy happy priest who is tagging along, cheerfully stealing people blind…
I got about 1/2 way through the book. In that scene the kids are all gathered up and thrown in jail with a bunch of dirty men. The men are trying to touch the kids and coax them into dark corners…but it’s okay, because the priest leads them in a joyful hymn singing- screw that, I’m not reading any more of it.
Next he’ll (yes he, it says so on the back cover) probably write a happy book about the Holocaust.
Mildly enjoyed them? Christopher Moore books are gold! Girl what is wrong with you?*
I loved Bloodsucking Fiends.
YMMV
*yes I uynderstand that different people have different tastes, Moore craks me up.
I used to finish every book I started when I was a kid but then I remember I got an Anne Rice novel for my 18th birthday and I read about 1/3 and suddenly realized it wasn’t necessary. Usually I stop because the book is all plot and character and I don’t like the characters or setting or plot, or if the book is literary I will give up if I don’t feel like it’s “speaking to me.” I’m also one of those people who reads 6 books at once and sometimes just forgets where she left one or flits on to another thing.
Last year I had a phase where I had to finish anything I took out from the library and finish it by the time it was due back. I thought it would be good for my attention span. It didn’t last because I started to get fancy by choosing books way outside my normal inclinations just to be perverse. I even wound up reading True Grit which was weird. I liked it though. But it was taking time away from starting lots of new books to see what was in them so I went back to my old ways.
elfkin477, a cheerful book about the Children’s Crusade?
<blinks>
<blinks>
Those words don’t make sense. Perhaps you meant tearjerking?
<blinks>
(I know it’s not your idea - just the very concept makes me shudder. The Children’s Crusade, as an idea, was a beautiful idea, whose reality bore none of the hopes or promise of the idea.)
Imagine a book about the crusades written in the style of Little Women and you’d get a good mental picture of this book.
I too have given up on Dhalgren, within 100 pages of the start. I loved the same author’s Einstein Intersection and Triton.
I’ve apparently given up on Plato’s Laws, but not admitted it to myself yet.
One poster gave up on The Silmarillion, which is a big mistake. It’s JRR Tolkien’s background legends for Lord of the Rings, and while quite densely written, it’s in my opinion superior to Lord of the Rings or Milton’s Paradise Lost, which covers some of the same ground. Tolkien explains why the devil is evil, and why the devil’s leutinent, Sauron, is even more evil. It’s not an easy read, but it’s a work of pure unadulterated genuis, without a false note in it.
Socialism is a big theme of The Jungle. Although it’s famous for the meat-packing scenes which helped create the FDA, it’s really about the lives of the downtrodden and how they get taken advantage of. Sinclair Lewis said of it “I was aiming for the heart and hit the stomach.”
but I stopped reading for pleasure when I went to law school.
All my life I consumed books, whether fic or nonfic.
But, the amount of material we had to digest daily for YEARS took all the fun out of it, making reading literally an incredible chore – I’m not kidding, it made our heads hurt. I got a BA as an undergrad, and the reading required for my law degree put all those Shakespeare, poetry, history, etc. reading assignments to shame.
But, a few years ago, I was able to start reading again for pleasure, thank Og, with James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, for what its worth. 
I give a book 50 pages. If I don’t care what happens next after 50 pages, I feel no problem with taking it back to the library unfinished.
The last one was “Shalimar the Clown.” I don’t care that it’s a masterpiece of blah blah blah, I didn’t care about anything that was happening, so I quit.
What makes me stop reading a book-when I have to eat or sleep. I’m one of those people who once they have started a book don’t put it down until it’s finished. It’s why I only read for pleasure at weekends.
Seriously though, the only book I’ve failed to read after starting (I mean, after having made the decision to read it) was The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass.
I was 14, I’ve pondered going back to it, but don’t really think it’s worth it.
I’ve been punting Anne Rice and David Eddings for a while now–I keep suckering myself into trying each new stinker as it comes out, hoping one day they’ll pull themselves out of their own rectums and write something good, and they never do but I keep on plugging away. I must say, though, I’m now able to wait for a good long time before succumbing these days–it has to be right in front of me on the shelf during a slow trip to the library and even so I’ll avoid looking it right in the eyes for a while as I’m standing there.
I will dump a book which has excessive typos, lack of proofreading or demonstrable proof that no human goes over the text after the computer spellchecker.
I hate these &*%$#@!! camouflaged christian books that look for all the world like a real novel, but you start smelling a rat on page five when something happens that should elicit a hearty “FUCK!” from the character but all he says is “Bless it!” and pretty soon all the whitewash peels off and it’s a hamhanded Chick tract in drag and you’ve wasted your time and have to go take a shower to clean the metaphorical stealth shirtlifter stains off your bum… These abominations ought to have great big warning signs on the front. I suppose the christians who are looking for these books probably feel the same way about getting waylaid by the camouflaged VERY GAY novels, I like to hope so because then I feel a little better about having been caught myself. Schadenfreude is our friend…
Really spineless, annoying characters are sometimes enough to make me dump a book, especially if I cheat and look ahead to the end and the character in question survives.
Klutzy, cowfooted, hackneyed prose is a good enough reason to abandon ship especially if the actual plot is just as hackneyed. Writers who rely on derivative plots and don’t even try to file off the serial numbers first should not be encouraged.