Have you ever started reading a novel and suddenly decided it was crap?
Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer
This really thick book started out very well, but by the time I got to the middle, I thought, “What the hell am I doing reading this pile of crap?”
The Three in the Attic books by VC Andrews
I read the first one and the second one. By the time I got to the middle of the third one, I felt so sleazy and creepy I wanted no further commerce with this author.
Dune by Frank Herbert
I’ll be drummed out of nerds anonymous for this. I read the first one, pretty good. The second one, okay. Completely lost interest during the third. Too much spice I guess.
Other books like Einstein: The Life and Times were just too dang long. I lent it out with the expectation that I would never see it again.
The Lord of the Rings (started it three times, but it always took Gandalf so damn LONG to get into the mountain… I guess he did eventually )
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time - I tried, I really did… not brief enough, obviously!
Life: A User’s Manual - Perec - gorgeous looking book, never finished it.
Moby Dick - you know, to this day I still don’t know if he got the bloody whale
Ulysses - founder of modern fiction he is but if he is then why doesn’t he use punctuation and I’m uneducated and have never read the Odyssey and if you haven’t it doesn’t make any sense and I have never understood what the heck the appeal of this book is but thousands love it and so I throw up my hands in despair - ah!
Many others, but those are the ones I feel I really should have read, if only for the bragging rights.
I seldom abandon books unfinished, but of all the novels I’ve ever read, the one I made by far the least progress with was Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which I had to give up after reading only six or seven pages.
I read all the time and have read even bad books from cover to cover, but there were two books that were just too horrible to bother finishing (one heavily promoted here in Taipei) Birthday Girls which featured females at the ages of 10, 20, 30, and 40 on their birthdays. The author seemed out of touch with the lives of her characters. What drove me mad was how she made the 10-year-old talk like a 4-year-old. And The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller. It’s about mating choice and how it affected evolution, but I swear half the book was spent with the author polishing his own ego and bragging about things he had done. I like my non-fiction science with the author being invisible, thank you.
Of all the books I have on my shelf, those are the only two adult books (in the sense of not being geared toward children or young adults, not in the sense of being erotica) I have not finished reading.
Ulysses [Just gibberish to me.]
Dune [Beginning boring and hard to follow.]
Lord of the Rings [See above + uninteresting.]
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [The maintenance parts were good, but the zen part was total loser shit.]
A Taiwan Odyssey [Rambling, sections unrelated to Taiwan and not cohesive enough to keep my interest.]
The Bible [Too inconsistent.]
Of course you know the Bible is not one book, but many books, with different authors. Actually, the books of the bible are fairly consistent within themselves, it is only when you compare them to each other that the inconsistencies emerge. Major gap between Old and New Testaments, and New Testament’s Revelations reads like a drug-addled fantasy-turned-bad-trip. There’s lots of good bits, though.
Haha, I’m embarrassed to say I couldn’t get through War and Peace. All those frickin’ long names!!! In my defence, I was only in high school. I’ve been meaning to give it another go some day.
Also, a Tom Clancy novel I picked up in the airport. I can’t remember which one it was – that’s what a big impression it made on me I guess.
The Romance of 3 Kingdoms (English version). 2-D characters, lots of intrigue, not much else. Then again, what was I expecting? I just wanted to say I’d read it.
Oh, and last but not least, Sean Hannity’s Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism. I thought I’d give the other side an attempt at equal air-time, mentally speaking. Didn’t work. What a load of BS!!! My dogs enjoyed it though…
I had to put the book down about halfway through. Frenesi, who has lost her integrity, is sitting in an Oklahoma City hotel room surrounded by emptiness as a storm comes in.
It was all much too depressing for me. I didn’t pick it up again for a year. But it has a basically happy ending. I still didn’t like it nearly as much as Gravity’s Rainbow or V. The Crying of Lot 49 is a muddle. Still haven’t made it through Mason & Dixon.
It’s a great book. I had a lot of trouble, too, with those names because it seems that every other person is a prince or a princess. Very confusing keeping track of everyone.
If you do pick it up again, don’t make the same mistake I made of reading it in a mass market paperback edition. My eyes have probably still not recovered from the strain of all that tiny type and narrow margins.
[quote]I do feel guilty about this, though, because I keep hearing that he’s someone I should like.
[/quote]
I find that a succinct “fuck that, its a load of crap” usually serves me well when confronted by pretentious gits trying to tell me what I should and shouldn’t like.
And as for Henry James – I presume you were trying to be polite when you described his writing as tedious?
[quote=“sandman”][quote]I do feel guilty about this, though, because I keep hearing that he’s someone I should like.
[/quote]
I find that a succinct “fuck that, its a load of crap” usually serves me well when confronted by pretentious gits trying to tell me what I should and shouldn’t like.[/quote]
Well, that’s certainly what I do whenever I read about people taking Joyce Carol Oates to be an important author.
Years ago I tried to read Shirley MacLaines’ “Out on a Limb” Hated it! I kept trying for a bit until I decided that it really was a load of crap. The problem though, is that it just keeps following me! Every time (it seems) that someone passes on a load of used paperbacks, it’s in there! Even in Taiwan it has struck again! The first time it was passed on to me, I passed it on to someone else. Twice now, it has been passed back! It haunts me!
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