Books you stopped reading (for whatever reason)

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

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

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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.

Xpost I refuse to believe you read Glass Bead Game in a single sitting, it's like 600 pages long or something!

I'm abandoning books far more often than I used to. Last one (just a few days ago) was a Benjamin Wood novel (The Young Accomplice), it was just a bit too relentlessly middle class English.

I generally don't quit reading books. The only one I can remember is 30 years ago I only made it about 1/3 into the first of three volumes of 1001 Arabian Nights.

I choose carefully and read slowly so I only read a handful of books a year.

I choose carefully and read slowly so I only read a handful of books a year.

xps to give some context, I was looking after a basically abandoned bookshop for a whole day and had nothing else to do

I'm currently reading and enjoying Either/Or by Elif Batuman and there's a part where she writes about having the same reaction.

― Chris L, Monday, 22 August 2022 11:40 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

On this note, I couldn't finish Either/Or by Kierkegaard. Volume 2, Or, is tedious as fuq.

She writes about that too!

Stevolende, I've enjoyed David Magarshack's translations of The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. They don't seem that genteel to me.
Swann's Waygoes through quite a few turns: maybe try skipping ahead. Lydia Davis's translation (and her explanations of why she took her approach) v. enjoyable.

one hundred years of solitude. all the names were the same and then it got ruined by a leak.

the famished road. too long.

i did go back and finished 'son of the circus' after about 20 years.

I've also got a chapter into Middlemarch, twice, before plumping for something else.

I'm also a Swann's Way fail - nothing wrong with it, but those long sentences just required too much concentration at the time I was reading it, I will return to it at some point I hope.

I like how the first line gets its own page on French Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtemps,_je_me_suis_couché_de_bonne_heure

NYRB are putting out a translation of the 1st vol and Charlotte Mandell is also working on another volume of Proust too.

Funnily enough I am halfway through a book I quit a couple of years ago (Laxness' Independent People) and finished Grossman's 'Life and Fate' earlier this year, which I had quit about five years ago.

One novel I didn't make it halfway through was Keith Gessen's ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN (2006?). It belongs in a thread like this as it's no MOBY-DICK, it's hard to say why it was unfinishable, but I kept bouncing off it and gave up. I suppose it irritated me.

The one novel I need to pick up again is Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. Really enjoyed the first vol but decided to take a break. A bad idea.

Aimless did you have any luck with Wolf Hall? It finally seems to have clicked with me and I have no idea why.

I haven’t quit Simon Gray’s Smoking Diary but it might be on an infinite pause.

I quit an excellent new amateur Kindle-only translation of Dumas’s 20 Years After because the formatting is so poor. Not sure if that’s a good reason; book itself is excellent

PG has 20 Years After. and i have a copy that i've improved (epub only at the moment, but i think i can run it through calibre...)

(here if you want it - http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/TwentyYearsAfter.bin - download it and rename to azw3 and let me know how it goes - first attempt at converting to azw3)