Books you stopped reading (for whatever reason)

i've never even tried to read murakami, at first it was as a rebellion against trendiness/oversaturation but i guess i should give him a shot at some point.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is probably the best place to start, although I've heard very good things about Dance Dance Dance, too.

Brion Gysin, The Last Museum.

A man whose posts I followed remarked that he'd read Atlas Shrugged almost all the way through, but decided to abandon it with eight pages left to go.

i've stopped reading wind-up bird three times now, i dunno.

it was like page 300 and he was still sitting at the bottom of the fucking well. spoiler warning i guess.

I don't remember that part.

there are some writers...i feel like i'm always watching them do something. like i'm watching them make an elaborate meal and i just want to eat. i don't want to watch them cook. that's why i like good sci-fi. because good sci-fi is like watching a really good magician. i just get wrapped up in the story or i just follow them blindly because i want to know where they are going. and when i'm done with their book i say how'd they do that!?

i tried to read a paul auster book years ago and it was like watching someone cooking in their kitchen and i got SO hungry. like, great, you bought really good ingredients, just put it in the oven already. i have this problem with a lot of kinda magic realism types. they never whisk me away. i'm too busy noticing every little move they make.

i'm really bad at metaphor by the way.

― scott seward, Wednesday, July 25, 2012 11:49 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's a great metaphor, actually. Although with the first few Auster books I read felt more like I was watching a magician cook a meal, I guess. But I rarely have patience anymore for Great Writing that calls attention to itself. I prefer well-crafted but not overly assuming prose that leads the reader along the path of a good story. Some of my favorite writers are able to write capital P Prose and still spin a good yarn, e.g. E.L. Doctorow, but that's a rarity.

I stop books all the time though. Ones I remember stopping in recent years are Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea (just didn't want to be stuck listening to the narrator talk), The Razor's Edge (just didn't grab me), Augustus by John Williams (found the whole construction forced and painful), Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (enjoyable but fine to read in snippets - may pick it up again). I stop non-fiction all the time but I feel like there's no real need to finish certain non-fiction books

enjoyed charles yu's novel about time travel, so i bought his first book of short stories, 'third class superhero' (annoyingly has no hyphen), and it was, 1st story aside, dull sub-george saunders modern-life-is-so-commercialised stuff, all the stories much the same, so i gave up

I really, really, struggled with Robinson Davies. Everybody told me that I'd love him, but his books were so belabored and ... wordy. If I hadn't read John Fowles at an early age, I'd feel the same about him. I got sick to death of John Crowley, Dan Simmons, Stephen King (novels, not short stories), Richard Ford, late Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence and H.G. Wells.

What skot says is interesting w/r/t watching somebody cook. There are some writers I should really dig, and whom I respect, but whose prose or story never comes together and just ... lies, inert, on the page. A good question (and follow-up thread, maybe), is of the not-difficult writers that gave you the most trouble. Or the books that couldn't, for whatever reason, connect with you.

xp to hunter - I got about halfway through an Iris Murdoch book trying to impress a girl, although I don't know if I ever told her I was reading it. It was like a second-rate F.M. Ford novel.

Fowles and Davies also have that Jungian/psychoanalytic predilection in common. Kind of hard to take seriously.

I most recently took a hiatus from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War... it's great, but I was in need of something light.

"the not-difficult writers that gave you the most trouble."

i have a problem with really flat deadpan affectless stuff and for years i would try to read john rechy and jean genet cuz they were transgressive and cool and all that but that matter of fact dead thing would basically make me forget what i was reading on every page. i think i would actually start daydreaming while i was reading. every once in a while i will pick up some genet and try again. maybe this explains my problem with murakami a little bit. japanese fiction can be very deadpan and matter of fact (i always wonder what i'm missing in translation). i mean i love kobo abe for the deadpan thing he does but its the over the top situations that make it work so well (i think he does kafka just about as good as anyone ever has since kafka). i was really proud of myself for finishing a mishima book a couple years back because i've struggled with him before too even though he's not really difficult to read.

I think the *great* writer I gave up on most quickly was probably Henry James.

:o

so instead of rechy i fell for james purdy and there is always celine and a bunch of other people if i need some lunatic french people in my life. (i can't read de sade either and he's not hard to read but zzzzzz....)

try agsin later with james!

again

at a later date.

Agsinbite of inwit

What James should I start with?

James Morrison of course

I got about halfway through an Iris Murdoch book trying to impress a girl, although I don't know if I ever told her I was reading it. It was like a second-rate F.M. Ford novel.

― bamcquern, Thursday, 26 July 2012 02:39 (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FfoKY8W7b1w/0.jpg

Oh I've seen that Willy Wonka burn in like the last two or three days. Think of something new!

http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/4319_108119904198_3348685_n.jpg

start with some james short stories. ease on down that road. one yellow brick at a time.

It doesn't make me proud to admit that I've thrown out a book before finishing it but yeah, Murakami's "A wild sheep chase". I don't like his other books either. Or Ishiguro.

I think part of my frustration was that I went through a heavy Oe/Mishima phase and everybody was like "oh you like that? You should read this completely terrible other thing!"

Haha, that's better. I don't like to see a smart person like you develop rote ilx gif zing habits.

i mean to be fair i've never read any of ford madox ford's second rate novels

i gave up on parade's end! i'll try again someday. just too much of a commitment at the time. i kept putting it down and reading other things and then forgetting what had happened.

I like Ford, I just didn't like Murdoch that much. I didn't DISLIKE her that much either. It was kind of a by-the-numbers infidelity/marriage thing.

i think murdoch was a very talented novelist who kind of viewed it more as a recreation than anything else? i don't know. the novels display an obsessive repetition of two or three narrative germs, but then philip dick remains one of my favorite novelists since forever so i feel like i can't really get away with that as grounds for dismissal

i have never read a novel by murdoch, drabble, or lessing. i know, right! i have looked at them a hundred times. held them in my hands. never pulled the trigger. i am never in the correct mood for their books.

drabble is awesome! 'the millstone' is one of my favorite books.

i'm super-picky about what i buy so when i put down a book it's generally more 'i'm not ready for this' than 'i can't stand this.' i've read the first 20 pages of so of 'anna karenina' about three times and came to the former conclusion every time.

seconding The Millstone. and The Ice Age is THE proto-yuppie 70s novel predicting the 80s. but I've read nothing else by Drabble.

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich..interesting then meh by page 65.

Ishiguro is a good one. I brute-forced my attention through all of Orphans, got to the end, and chucked the book across the room. I've said elsewhere that George Eliot (specifically Middlemarch) gave me no pleasure, either, but I think I owe it another try.

i think murdoch was a very talented novelist who kind of viewed it more as a recreation than anything else

Also, she famously refused to be edited

Loved Hickey's Air Guitar!

Reviving this, because it is interesting to see what people start, then stop, reading.

Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel. I started this one many months ago and laid it aside after about 150 pages (as I recall). The author was very interested in details that I thought slowed the pace to a crawl, so I finally lost patience and quit.

All in the past year: Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri (a gift), first few chapters consisted of nothing but backstory, awful translation. The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood, a playmobil dystopia. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, my first ever Hardy. Seemed like an overwritten potboiler, could not summon up any sympathy for Tess.

I also quit Wolf Hall. I just didn't find it a very pleasurable read, and then a burst of (what I perceived to be) clumsy alliteration just gave me an excuse to drop it altogether.

I'm just reading Northern Lights, which I quit twice and is a super fun, easy read. There's a subset for "books you stop reading for no particular reason and then lose the momentum to pick up again".

In the last year I've been good - only quit RL Stevenson's Kidnapped (dull) and Neuromancer (incomprehensible). And I'll cop to getting bored and skimming the last half of Things Fall Apart.

Moby Dick. About half a dozen times.

"Osama" by Lavie Tidhar. dude does not understand noir plot structure.

Ledge, I recall trying to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles as a senior in high school and managing to write a really long term paper based on the ~100 or so pages I actually made it through. I recall loving The Mayor of Casterbridge and thought I'd be into Tess. Wrong.

I abandoned 'Daddy Love' by Joyce Carol Oates after two pages, is this a record? Got it from the library purely because she is an author I wanted to investigate; got a bad feeling after those two pages, read some reviews, and noped out of there so fast.

Ha, first response here is The Glass Bead Game, a book I read in a single sitting (and I have abandoned plenty of books, believe me)

Recently have finished several bad jazz books, largely due to sunken cost fallacy and general crippling bloody-mindedness.

I think mainly its been me reading several books at the same time and not being very tidy. So I can pick up and focus on one book and let others drift out of focus and into the background/piles of stuff. So may return to a lot of things at a later date.
I did finish Mother of Invention last week which may be the closest thing to one I half thought of giving up on. & Salsa by Sue Stewart this morning which has been neglected for too long and out of the library for about 6 months.
I think I did start reading Constance Garnett translations of Dostoevsky and possibly other titles and gave up because the style was more genteel than I was expecting from the original author's reputation but have heard things that would suggest her translation may be closer to the original feel than I would have expected. Still don't think I have finished anything she translated. Still need to read Crime & Punishment in some version which I should have done over the last couple of years.
I think I may have read opening pages of Ulysses at some point and not got much further. Did read an 100 page sentence by Beckett in my late teens and need to get back to reading Joyce. Went to Nora Barnacle's place in Galway a couple of weeks back has me in mind of that.
Do still hve some books from 20 odd years ago taht I never got into but I do still buy books regularly so am continually reading. & have read some things I bought way way back earlier this year. So I think most things I am thinking I will eventually get back to . & may read a lot of other stuff beforehand. Which might give me different perspectives on reading those things when it does happen.

I started Swann's Way for the first time recently and there was something about the way Proust writes about bedtime and scheming to get a goodnight kiss from his mommy that I found frankly repulsive. I'm currently reading and enjoying Either/Or by Elif Batuman and there's a part where she writes about having the same reaction.