Books you stopped reading (for whatever reason)

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)

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)

This is one of the few I can remember not finishing. I don't even remember why. I picked it up because it was cited in another work which also now escapes me. It's going to bother me until I can remember.

i finally gave up on Ducks Newburyport after 400+ pages. this is ages ago already. so, almost halfway through the book. i felt it was still some sort of accomplishment. and i really did enjoy reading it during a time of plague. but i was starting to read five pages every month or so and that's when i knew i needed to call it quits. definitely keeping my copy. and if i ever need to read some Ulysses as written by Erma Bombeck again i will know where to turn.
the pandemic, in general, finally gave me the okay to not finish things. i always felt sorta bad not finishing a book, but not now! it turns out that life CAN be too short for some things. heck, i'll have 20 pages of a book left or 20 minutes of a movie left now and just go on to the next thing. i got the drift. no need to continue. thank you for the time we had together. i must be going now. its very liberating.

I gave up on The Corrections after 150 pages. Mainly I just found it annoying.

This year - Wolf Hall and Lonesome Dove because they’re both too effin’ long. I enjoyed LD and will go back to it next time I need a beach read — I just wanted something new after reading 300 pages and not being even a third of the way through.

I was impressed by Wolf Hall, found it easy enough to read, but I stopped after I realised I wasn’t enjoying it, just waiting for it to finish.

Oh and a book of Kelly Link’s short stories, after reading three that were merely okay.

I quit The Kindly Ones a few chapters in because it filled me with sickness and dread. I don’t think I’ve finished a novel since, for life reasons.

Funnily enough I have left the most books unfinished (about five out of fifty) than any other year I can remember. Don't think it's the pandemic, more to do with a lack of patience as I get older.

i'll have 20 pages of a book left or 20 minutes of a movie left now and just go on to the next thing

I couldn't stop at that point, I'd be too invested in seeing the gestalt (even it I hated it). Also, I feel like I can't comment in depth on a work I haven't completed other than to say "I didn't finish it, here's why".

I stopped reading The Winter King when I realized, despite it being reasonably well-written, I didn't need to further read a grimdark Arthurian tale.

L'Homme Qui Rit, Victor Hugo - my french was not up to a novel that seems to start with 50+ pages of technical information about sailing

The last books I left lying around in the last 12-18 months are Hopscotch (Cortázar), Auto-da-fé (Canetti), and Herzog (Bellow).

I wish I had smart things to say as reasons for each, but I guess I just didn't have the patience, or the atmosphere was wrong, or the characters morally unappealing, or it was dated. I'm usually persistent, something must really be wrong for me to stop.

Gave up on Zeno's Conscience earlier this year, just didn't care at all for the guy.

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.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 23 August 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Oh yes I finished it this year. V easy to get involved again once I picked it up

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Didn't realise it was fundamentally an architectural treatise before going in

> Gave up on Zeno's Conscience earlier this year

don't tell me, the first half took 4 days, the third quarter took 2 days, the seventh eighth took a day and it just felt like you'd never quite finish it

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!"

(eleven years ago)

I actually threw out Never Let Me Go, also. Not really "threw it out", just read half of it on a flight, dozed off, was packing up my stuff to deplane, saw it sitting there in the sleeve and elected to leave it. I did read and finish The Remains Of The Day and hated it also. Basically all I read these days is re-reads of Nabokov and the Irish classics, idk, I'm crotchety now.

xp well played

lol I don't know how anyone could get a rec for Ishiguro based on Mishima and Oe aside from racism

I guess it's inevitable that books I like (Remains of the Day) or love (Herzog) will show up.

Certain of my favourite books, like Naked Lunch, really don't have to be read in full to get it or not get it. I mean I like the book in its totality, but if anyone didn't like any random 30 pages of the book, I don't know that they would benefit from forging onward.

I bought The Country Will Bring Us No Peace by Matthieu Simard last night. Gave up after 30 pages. Luckily it only cost me 89p.

The Bible. Despite "we see through a glass darkly" and even "Take a little wine for thy stomach's sake," Paul/Ex-cop Saul can't help being a drag, and I know how it ends (thanks, spoilers).