abandoned books

Dull, turgid, academic, smug, impenetrable.

I gave up on Justine by De Sade due to its repetitious nature. Will probably pick it up again. Never really finished anything by Beckett, either, he repulses me.

Oh I loved the Trial, probably because I found it so true to life. Anyone who's ever been involved in a protracted dispute with any government department will identify and sympathise with the novel's "hero". In these days of increasing red tape, faceless institutions and senseless bureaucracy it's more prescient and relevant than ever before.

I abandon about 70% of the books I start - too many to list. I plan to go back and finish most of them. I can't in all honesty see myself getting through Livy though.

poal is the only one i got to the speed-up moment: i've been reading wing of the dove for three years

I'm very careful when I start to read something now, as you can imagine.

F. Kafka - The Trial - I just couldn't get past the whole bleak unfairness of it all. Gave up half way through (read the end though).

That's life, my friend. You fight it every step of the way. Like I say, dealing with the Home Office is like dealing with the court system in the Trial. Both work according to a twisted system of logic known only to themselves. But it can be beaten. That's why I hated the ending in the Trial - it was so nihilistic and self-defeating.

From an optimistic point of view, I am simply extending the completion of many many books into the indefinite future.

Book I have most definitively abandoned: Invisible Man.

It was such a swift read that it was more or less impossible to be very bored by it anyway. One of the things which has led me to reading a lot more novels this year is that I finally gave in and recognised my own preference for short books. I need to *really* want to read some big fat shelfburster. A lot less self-discipline required to trudge to the end of a 150-pager you're not enjoying enormously than to deal with the *next* 400 sides filling you with dread.

I persevered in masochistic fashion with G.R. for 2 and a half years (don't ask me if it was worth it) - 100 Years... was a breeze in comparison.

My only other major abandonment is Naked Lunch. You can only take so much junk and spunk.

Thankfully I'm currently reading "What a carve up" by Jonathan Coe and finding it very hard to put down. Next "Pity the Nation" by Robert Fisk, which I'm sure will be a bawdy comic romp.

not true...the gay community hsa been listening to disco for almsot 30 yrs now.

on the topic, coratazar's hopscotch lies abandoned, i keep picking up, scanning, then putting down borges' complete fiction, wolfe's a man in full lies 30 pages in...and i have a couple of porn books that I'm supposed to review but i haven't got around to because i keep getting sidetracked by serious literature, wahtever that is.

A lot of Jeanette Winterson's books start to induce sleep about quarter of the way through. I recall throwing Art and Lies at the wall in a fit of frustration at its utter pretentiousness.

It took me a very, very long time to finish Nick Hornby's How To Be Good. It was not very far from being abandoned, and finished under suffrance.

Gerri Hirshey's We Gotta Get Out of this Place. I've tried to read it twice, but she just says nothing I haven't previously read about wimminz in rawk.
Candace Bushnell's Four Blondes. It was SO bad.

Recently: The Shipping News for not being interesting enough; Czars because I put off reading about the Romanovs; Walden because the repetitive self-righteousness, while wonderful at first, started to get dull; My Name Is Red because i wanted something really stupid and quick to read; Happily Ever After because you can only read so many pages of "fairy tales got to suck once they started oppressing women" before getting annoyed and throwing the book across the room. I intend to someday finish all of them but the last.

recently read the first cpl of chapters of Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. didn't hate it or anything, found the atmos p convincing and some of the writing quite lovely, but didn't really feel COMPELLED to continue, sorta thought i'd got the point of it by then - doomed drunkeness, autobiographical hallucination, modernist stream of consciousness plus tightly controlled symbolic scheme etc etc - should i carry on?

(recently read a gd garry giddins essay on the john houston movie, which i haven't seen, but which giddins, obv p familiar with the nov, seemed to approve of v much - so i picked out a nice £1 penguin modern classics non-movie-tie-in pbk from my fave 2nd bkshop, the last time i was there)

bill bryson's in a sunburned country because it was scaring the bejesus out of me. i lived in australia for 32 years and had no idea how close i was to death at any moment.

i mean, ive had a nightmare about snakes and at least 5 shark related nightmares since reading the first 1/3 of this book.

Should do more of this. In the 'I get it' zone with a couple of recent reads but always feel I'll miss you on that 1% extra that I didn't know about before. Abandoned one and not the other cause the writing didn't scan as well.

'Wuthering Heights' - dropped it after struggling through Volume 1 and the first chapter of Volume 2. The problem was that I just didn't care about any of the characters or what happened to them. Also I was starting to get that same annoyed feeling that I had when reading the last bit of 'Dune', that the author was just winging it plot-wise.

recently read the first cpl of chapters of Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. didn't hate it or anything, found the atmos p convincing and some of the writing quite lovely, but didn't really feel COMPELLED to continue, sorta thought i'd got the point of it by then - doomed drunkeness, autobiographical hallucination, modernist stream of consciousness plus tightly controlled symbolic scheme etc etc - should i carry on?

Yes. You definitely should.

'Under the Volcano' is the book I abandoned most. I think I must have tried it 6 or 7 times, but got 'stuck' 60, 70 pages in. Last holiday I decided this was ridiculous because I really did enjoy it, I just... I don't know, I couldn't get any further. But finally finished it and it's so, so fantastic. I already knew I would like very single thing about this book, I just couldn't read it before. But it pays off - especially once you're past the first 100 pages. For some reason I then, finally, couldn't have put it down even if I wanted to.

I had the opposite experience: the first time I read it I thought it was a triumphant masterwork. When I tried to revisit it and relive that past glory it just left me cold. Now I get all my Under the Volcano needs met by Albert Finney, who is so painstakingly and perhaps unintentionally amusing in the movie.

what do y'all do when you try to pick up these books again (sometimes much) later? do you start over from the beginning, or try to find the place where you left off?

i'm normally pretty compulsive about finishing books -- hell, i've reread books i didn't even like the first time just to see if i missed something. some books i've left off with:

white noise: i just find delillo's satire (at least in this book) obnoxiously bludgeoning and obvious, and i can't get the hang of slogging through dialogue like "did the men wear hacking jackets? what's a hacking jacket?"
under the volcano: yeah, read a chapter of this and set it aside, though i liked the prose enough that i'll probably come back to it someday and try again. seems like something that might be more fun if you actually read it in mexico, sitting in the back of a bar.
anna karenina: i've started this three times and every time wound up setting it aside to read shorter things. i'm sure i'll love it once i force myself to set aside a week or two to read nothing else.

i have abandoned 'great expectations' a number of times for no good reason

i always start at the beginning when i retry abandoned books -- the way my memory is these days, i could hardly not