Books you've never got around to finishing

I've never been able to understand or like Virginia Woolf, I struggled to the end of Mrs Dalloway but with Night & Day I just gave up and that's very rare for me.
Also, Last of the Mohicans, in my defence with that one it was given to me when I was very young and I just couldn't get in to it at all. I've returned to it several times in later life but as soon as I read the first line (something about "It was a feature peculiar to the Colonial wars....") the memories of that first attempt come back and I have to put it down again.

Got to be Gravity's Rainbow for me. I've started it approximately 4,317 times, and never managed to get more than about 150 pages in. I really love parts of it, but when he starts shifting perspective between all the people in the room within the same sentence, my fluffy little brain starts to fry. I see it's clever, but - GAH!

Never tried Gravity's Rainbow but someone on this board recommended Vineland so I tried it and really liked it. Then I read the Crying of Lot thingy and I really liked that so Gravity's Rainbow is on my list of things to read in the near future (as soon as I finish Wild Highway). I have heard it's pretty hard going though...

Gravity's Rainbow is hard work at times, but well worth persevering with. I found it best to read in short bursts, just a few pages at a time - tube journeys ideal.

I havn't finished "V" - I stopped a few months ago to take a break from it, ahvn't picked it up since but I will do soon.

Books I gave up on altogether: War & Peace (yawn) and The Magus.

I started V but I only had two weeks to read it (I'd borrowed it from Borders which is where I work) and then my girlfriend came up to stay so I only got a chance to read the first few pages, seemed pretty good from what I'd read so far.
I've never tried War & Peace but as far as I remember the Magus was pretty readable despite its length although when I finished it I wondered what the point of it had been (I understand there are different versions of this book with slightly different endings, is that right?). One man's meat is another man's poison I guess.

catch 22

My reading pile is usually 8 books deep but every so often i will remove books from the pile which have been sitting there for over a year - a sure sign i may well never read them, or they have been started and put aside for something newer, shinier and (invariably) easier.

With this in mind recent unfinished/ unreads include:

Powers - Time of our Singing
Fielding - Tom Jones
Conrad - Nostromo
Zola - Germinal

surely a parallel thread to this would be the great unreads, those books whose very reputation puts you off - Finnegans Wake for me, for example. i just don't know if i can be arsed with all of the hard work it seems to entail

It's interesting that War and Peace has been cited cos i loved it - used to read it commuting - an hour at a stretch and that is probably the best way to read it - 50+pages at a time, otherwise you can feel that you are never making any headway with it.

V is the only Pynchon i haven't read and i have no desire to read it.

i also gave up on Auto-de-fe and was actually thinking of bringing it off the shelves but i read a good review of a Borges biog in the LRB this week so I have brought Labyrinths off instead for a re-read (something i find i am doing more and more - finished re-reading Stendhal's Scarlett and Black last week)

(wonder if Agent provocateur have thought about a Stendhal range?)

I read Nostromo last year and I wouldn't have said it's too heavy. Germinal I read when I was about fourteen so it can't have been that difficult although I probably missed out on a lot of what was going on. In fact this is something that I think about a lot - how many of the books that I've read have I either forgotten or failed to understand, or in other words, what's the point? (I often think this with music as well - how many records is too many? - but that's another thread).
Tom Jones is very readable but it's so long you need to go in to it with quite a head of steam so that you don't conk out in the middle.
Dunno what The Time of Our Singing is to be honest.

The Two Towers - JRR Tolkein
How The Dead Live - Will Self
Men At Arms - Evelyn Waugh

Yet I somehow read the entirety of Michael Crichton's Timeline.

the white goddess-robert graves

i don't necessarily think any of those on my list are difficult per se, more that i try and read them at the wrong time - they just don't fit with my mood, my attention span, my needs and so are rejected for no really rational reason.

It might also be something to do with the actual book, the artefact itself - Tom Jones is almost certainly excellent but it's 700+ pages longand smells of something antiseptic, my copy of Germinal has horrid print and Nostromo seems to have been printed on loo paper. Whereas i am prepared to sit down every night to the huge Rembrandt's Eyes because it is such a lovely book in itself - nice smelling paper, plenty of white space and marvellous reproductions - as well as being a fascinating read.

it's something i often note when i pick up a book published in the states - the paperback binding seem better and there is a softness to the covers that Penguins and others lack over here - is this all a major projection or is tehre soem basis in fact?

That's interesting. I don't think that I ever really notice things like that unless the print is so ludicrously small such that I physically struggle to read it. I've read books that have been so badly bound that each page you turn falls out which can make things difficult (especially when you have to return it to the owner).
I wouldn't know about Penguin vs American equivalents - I've always thought Penguin had nice covers but I've never thought about how hard they are. I guess I just don't think about things like that, you and I must approach reading a book in very different way (that's not a criticism just an observation).
What's Rembrandt's Eyes?

jenks said:

- nice smelling paper

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aha! a book sniffer...

Finian's Wake (gave it a shot, went down swinging)

Infinite Jest (those footnotes!)

Gravity's Rainbow (has anybody ever finished this?)

The Lazy Man's Guide To Enlightenment (have to chuckle to myself about this one; it's not even that long!)

i've started auto da fe twice and only reached 50 pages or so!

for the same reasons, more or less

bruno said:

books that you are supposed to like, that you want to like, that went wrong halfway through, etc.

my blatant 'unfinished' is elias canetti's auto-da-fé, which is staring back at me now. i've had it for a good eight years, have tried on and off to read it but have been unable to beyond the part where kien meets a gambling hunchback (or something like that). the main character is impossible to like, but that hasn't stopped me before. there is just something nerve-wracking about it.. everything feels arthritic, lifeless. i know this is the point but it's unreadable!

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That's eerie...I've tried reading it twice and have gotten to exactly this same spot before hitting this brick wall. Must be something subliminal in the writing. Enjoyed the back-and-forth between the main character and his housekeeper, but right at the point where the hunchback is stacking and restacking books in their dingy hotel room I always pause, mean to go back, and can never work up to it again. It seems like everything afterwards takes place in an arid vacuum.

It's really too bad, Canetti's autobiography is one of the most colourful memoirs I've ever read and I loved the initial portions of Auto-Da-Fé.

The only other fictional book I remember giving up on in complete exasperation is Already Dead by Denis Johnson. Started off interestingly enough and turned into an absolute agony to slog through.

"my other nominee is de lillo's underworld. enter an artist who paints planes, see my interest evaporate. i suppose this qualifies as never got around to starting because it was fairly early on in the book. i may have missed out on a lot, apparently."

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This is (another) one that I read recently and at the end thought - "what was the point of that?" It was readable enough in parts and it passed the time but if there was supposed to be something great about it I just didn't get it. I guess that it's aiming to be this massive overview of the American psyche during the cold war and attempts to portray this by jumping between times, places and characters but whether or not it succeeded in this I certainly couldn't tell you.
Maybe I'm a philistine but a lot (not all) of books that people have mentioned on this list are things that I have perservered to the end with out of sheer bloody-mindedness but I couldn't really say that I'd got much more out of than if I'd never bothered.