Suburban Guerrilla

Mar 20th, 2007 at 6:52 am by PSoTD

This raises the question:

What book could you just not finish reading?

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29 Responses to “Unfinishable Books”

on 20 Mar 2007 at 7:39 am1Susie

“Infinite Jest,” David Foster Wallace.
“Son of the Circus,” John Irving.
“War and Peace,” Dostoyevsky.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 7:52 am2astroworf

“Fanboys”, Mark Evanier
on 20 Mar 2007 at 7:55 am3PSoTD

“Truman,” David McCullough
“The Iliad,”, Homer
“The Silmarillion,” J.R.R. Tolkien
on 20 Mar 2007 at 8:35 am4lutton

“Heart of Darkness” J. Conrad

The horror, the horror!
on 20 Mar 2007 at 8:46 am5Maya

“A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley

Too desolate, too close to home.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 9:15 am6dwight Meredith

Without question, the best book I’ve never read is James Joyce’s Ulysses. I have tried to read it several times, but I just can’t do it. The man needs to learn to puntuate.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 9:28 am7Melanie

Suze, let me pile on the “Infinite Jest” bandwagon. What the hell was that about?
on 20 Mar 2007 at 9:36 am8madmatt

Oh thank god I thought it was just me with “Infinite Jest” , “A Confederacy of Dunces” wasn’t much better!
Currently trudging through “Sacred Games” by vikram chandra…it could be shorter!
on 20 Mar 2007 at 9:51 am9Susie

I actually like “Infinite Jest,” but it’s one of those books (for me, at least) that you need to sit down and read straight through. Every time I put it down, I lost the narrative thread.

If I ever have to stay in bed for a month, that’s the book I’ll read.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:04 am10Phydeaux

The Bible.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:30 am11larkspur

Confederacy of Dunces
Dhalgren (Samuel Delaney) - which I wanted desperately to love
The first Harry Potter book (and thus, I never read any of the subsequent books)
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:34 am12Patrick

Proust. Remembrance of Things Past. But I have decades left, I hope.

Joyce could punctuate just fine when he wanted to. Look at Dubliners.

I’m gonna start Infinite Jest as soon as I can.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:42 am13Maya

Oh yeah, Confederacy of Dunces! My dad gave me that as a birthday gift long ago. I so didn’t read it that I forgot I didn’t read it.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:43 am14dwight Meredith

Yes Patrick, I loved the Dubliners as well as Portrait of Artist as a Young Man. I just could not finish Ulysses.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:51 am15Melanie

I have to add “Gravity’s Rainbow.” I tried. Five times. Never made it past about the 40th page.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 11:05 am16agave

Brothers Karamozov
Tried twice.

The third LOTR.
Didn’t care anymore.

.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 11:56 am17just john

I’ve never gotten past page 60 of Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” but that’s a VERY special case, because each time, I’ve started from the beginning. And it’s the opposite of dull — I find I get so energized by it, I have to get up and DO something.

(”Ulysses,” I read in one sitting.)

I gave up on Nabokov’s “Ada” about half way through. It was just steam. Well-written steam, but steam.

I’m not up to page 700 in Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” which makes that one the slowest read of his, for me. I’ve read “Gravity’s Rainbow” a few times, and even have recorded versions of the Rocket Limericks.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 12:03 pm18Pandu

The first one that comes to mind was (I’m embarassed to say) _Earth in the Balance_, by Al Gore. It was assigned reading when I was in college for environmental studies in the early ’90’s, but the book was so dry that I was never able to finish it in spite of my persistence.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 12:38 pm19just john

(Okay, I didn’t finish Gary Hart’s “Strategies of Zeus,” come to think of it, but I count that as genre fiction.) (Seriously. It’s yer basic Washington spy thriller.)
on 20 Mar 2007 at 1:57 pm20Izquierdo

I have been struggling with “The Pet Goat”, frequently
but erroneously referred to as “My Pet Goat.”
But I have read a few Shakespeares, however.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 4:14 pm21Frank

Anything by Dickens. He shows what happens when an author is paid by the word.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 4:16 pm22k

Some book that some old boyfriend gave to me - “it reminded him of me”. When the dog got run over, I threw it in the trash.
Didn’t have the energy, or didn’t have the desire? Confederacy falls in the “desire” category, definitely.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 8:31 pm23Scorpio

“The Disposessed” by Ursula K. LeGuin Special notice: this was the first book in my life that I ever quit before the end … but not the last.

“The Silmarillion,” J.R.R. Tolkien — confirmed that sometimes life is too short to mess with certain books.

“The Jesus Incident” by Brian Herbert. I almost made it 30 pages into this one.

“Gravity’s Rainbow” Pynchon - no can do.

“Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Robbins
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:44 pm24Philip

“Centennial” - James Michenor

“The Gulag Archipelago” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Moby Dick” - Herman Melville

and a few more.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 10:55 pm25Philip

I forgot to add earlier that I actually read Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” cover to cover although I had to force myself to complete it.

Another book I just couldn’t even muster the stamina to finish was Mary Cheney’s book “Now It’s My Turn.” Halfway through, I realized it was killing many of the remaining brain cells I would need for my further adventures in self-enlightenment through better reading.
on 21 Mar 2007 at 12:25 am26mikefromtexas

A second on The Gulag……
on 21 Mar 2007 at 4:07 pm27Peter VE

The Bible, but I’ve decided to give it another try. I’m currently into Leviticus. What’s up with all the splashing of blood on the sides of the altar? Why not on top?

I took twenty years to finish Ulysses, (I finally set Bloomsday #101 as the deadline) and about ten for Proust(Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time or whatever it’s now called.) I managed the Satanic Verses, but Shalimar the Clown was much more edible.
on 21 Mar 2007 at 8:49 pm28Alan

Atlas Shrugged. I gave up around the time Dagny went on tv to announce she was schtupping Reardon. Years later, I learned that, had I kept going, I’d have been confronted with sixty pages of Galt’s Speech, so I consider myself lucky to have quit when I did.
on 22 Mar 2007 at 11:00 am29Henry

Ulysses–which I’ve started three or more times–but I swear I’ll finish it by June 16th this year!

One day when I was too tired to sleep, my wife suggested that I should read Remembrance of Things Past. The first chapter, however, is all about being tortured by the inability to sleep–which drove any possibility of sleeping that day out the window.

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Unfinishable Books

29 Responses to “Unfinishable Books”

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