Books you've never got around to finishing

[luka]

i read all of underworld then wondered why i bothered. its a badly written, poorly conceived, flabby, overreaching, portentous stinking piece of turd.

 

[bassnation]

i read all of underworld then wondered why i bothered. its a badly written, poorly conceived, flabby, overreaching, portentous stinking piece of turd.

the god of small things. call me a phillistine but sometimes flowery prose just gets on my tits. use of it seems so self-concious, like the author was thinking "booker prize" when they were writing.

 

[IdleRich]

"the god of small things."

That was another one that I finished and didn't get anything out of, not because it went over my head but because it was plain shit.

 

[Slothrop]

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

I took my forum name from it, and I haven't...

Also The Idiot, Ulysses and the Golden Bough (so - many - examples).

 

[tryptych]

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

After you get in to the swing of it, how can you not finish it? It's not easy, granted, but the last 1/4 or so of it is so great... don't you want to know the secrets of the rocket and Imipolex G? And what happens to Slothrop in the Zone?

As for the Magus, about halfway through I just got really pissed off with it, and thought "what's the point?". I just found it rather boring and the protagonist hard to like.

 

[luka]

yeah, i've never got past the first few pages of ulysses, i''m sure its great and everthing, just never found the time for it.

 

[OldRottenhat]

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 there some basis in fact?

No, this is absolutely on the money. The real supermarket blockbuster stuff is bound just as badly as it is in the UK but the more upmarket stuff is bound far more flexibly so that the book will actually sit open in your hands or on the table. It baffles me why the likes of Penguin and Picador can't match this in the UK - I'm reading the recent Verso edition of Minima Moralia right now and the binding is so stiff that it strains my hands to read it for an hour. I'm almost angry that pages are falling out of my copy of Rip It Up & Start Again - this is a book Faber prices at seventeen quid sterling and I'm going to have to start keeping it in a box like a mediaeval codex if I read it a couple more times. The older and crankier I get the more this annoys me, to the point where I will probably soon give up on buying paperbacks at all - if I can't find a book in hardback, I'll get it from the library.

Btw Jenks, if you really are a closet book sniffer and fondler, I direct your attention to the Folio Society - their edition of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is a thing of beauty.

 

[pokinatcha]

Hate to admit things like this, but...

Leslie Marmon Silko- Almanac of the Dead (1992)

Jonathan Franzen- The Corrections (2001)

Both for very, very different reasons. The Franzen is overhyped, period. Vapid characters, meandering storylines, insufferable dialogue, stilted action- the 600+ pgs felt like plodding through mud. Barely reached 300.

Silko, however, is a visionary (and worthy of her MacArthur 'Genius' title). It's not that I didn't finish Almanac because I thought it was "bad," but it's an extremely painful and difficult work to read (difficult conceptually, not formally). Silko retraumatizes the reader through nearly 800 pages of graphic accounts of violence/sex/death/revenge/corruption, and never, ever lets up (I got to about 700 pgs before sheer exhaustion set in). An almost complete indictment of the entire human race, with zero room for hope/redemption for humanity. An intensely heartbreaking, passionate work by an angry, brilliant woman- certainly not for the fainthearted (or those prone to nightmares!).

Essential reading, imho. I'll go back to it someday.

 

[Octopus?]

As for the Magus, about halfway through I just got really pissed off with it, and thought "what's the point?". I just found it rather boring and the protagonist hard to like.

Second The Magus as well, and I enjoy unlikable protagonists. The entire book seemed like one long, smug back-patting session with Fowles. The Collector was a good read, though.

 

[Ness Rowlah]

"One Hundred Years of Solitude"/Marquez.

Not because it's difficult. Just because the first two hundred pages
are a drag, that this whole magic realism just doesn't work,
that the male leads in the book have the same name and I thought
to myself - this is not really going anywhere.
How on earth could he win the Nobel-prize writing pap like this?

I've got Marquez' autobiography "Living to Tell the Tale".
Picked up after reading the serialisation
in the Grauniad, the man can obviously write.
But OHYoS just isn't my kind of reading.

 

[Slothrop]

Btw Jenks, if you really are a closet book sniffer and fondler, I direct your attention to the Folio Society - their edition of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is a thing of beauty.

Any edition of the Third Policeman is a thing of beauty.

As for Ulysses, I keep starting, slowing down a lot around the middle, and then getting something else that's quite a bit quicker and more fun, and getting distracted...

 

[jenks]

No, this is absolutely on the money. The real supermarket blockbuster stuff is bound just as badly as it is in the UK but the more upmarket stuff is bound far more flexibly so that the book will actually sit open in your hands or on the table. It baffles me why the likes of Penguin and Picador can't match this in the UK - I'm reading the recent Verso edition of Minima Moralia right now and the binding is so stiff that it strains my hands to read it for an hour. I'm almost angry that pages are falling out of my copy of Rip It Up & Start Again - this is a book Faber prices at seventeen quid sterling and I'm going to have to start keeping it in a box like a mediaeval codex if I read it a couple more times. The older and crankier I get the more this annoys me, to the point where I will probably soon give up on buying paperbacks at all - if I can't find a book in hardback, I'll get it from the library.

Btw Jenks, if you really are a closet book sniffer and fondler, I direct your attention to the Folio Society - their edition of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is a thing of beauty.

i won a competition once and the prize was a £100 voucher for the Folio Society - i got a beautiful edition of Papradise Lost with high quality reproductions of Blake's illustrations and The Stones of Venice by Ruskin - £100 doesn't go far at all.

actually I recently gave up on Minima Moralia in the same edition - it's as if the print is smudged at times, also i realised i kept forgetting everything i had read half an hour after having read it

another unfinished is Don Quixote - i notice this has recently come out in a new translation - worth trying again, any one?

 

[IdleRich]

"One Hundred Years of Solitude"/Marquez.
Not because it's difficult. Just because the first two hundred pages
are a drag, that this whole magic realism just doesn't work,

I loved this. How do you mean that Magic Realism doesn't work? I wish more books had magic in them, it reminds me of the books that first got me interested in reading as a child.

"another unfinished is Don Quixote - i notice this has recently come out in a new translation - worth trying again, any one?"

I haven't read the new translation but the one I read was pretty funny - in parts. By the end I just wanted it to finish. One of my friends is a lecturer in Spanish and he said something to the effect that you ought to skim read it but there is no point in reading the whole thing.

 

[D84]

haven't read the new translation but the one I read was pretty funny - in parts. By the end I just wanted it to finish. One of my friends is a lecturer in Spanish and he said something to the effect that you ought to skim read it but there is no point in reading the whole thing.

No way! I read it pretty quickly - maybe a slow start but it pulls you in... Volume 2 is great. The ending is also crucial imo.

The first "modern novel" if you can believe people like JG Ballard or Borges. It changed the way I read books.

I read the Oxford Classic translation which did the job nicely for me (cheap too). I notice also that Barnes & Noble Classics have released Smollett's translation with all the Doré illustrations which might be nice.

 

[IdleRich]

Don't get me wrong I did enjoy it. And I certainly wouldn't condone what my friend said about just skim reading it (or any book for that matter).
What's the Borges story about re-writing it? That's really funny and I also like the part in Paul Auster's City of Glass where they are debating on who really wrote Don Quixote.

 

[Freakaholic]

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Foccoults Pendulum

Paradisio


The last two i intend to finish. I feel Dante should be read with others though, to discuss what the heck is going on.

I just could never seem to get into Joyce.

 

[Chef Napalm]

In Cold Blood

Given the HUGE deal made about it, I was amazed by how dry it is. The first 50 pages (as far as I got) are written like one horribly extended newspaper article.

 

[benjybars]

Under the volcano - malcolm lowery

My name is red - orhan pamuk

and, of course, Ulysses.

I'm gonna try again with the first two this summer...

 

[IdleRich]

"My name is red - orhan pamuk"

I read that quite recently and I can see why you say that you didn't finish it. I definitely found that there was something unengaging about it, I really wanted to like it, I liked the idea and the overall story but it was just so alien and repetitive that it was hard to get into properly. On the other hand it did have something and I think I would like to give his other books a go because there were some good ideas trying to get out.

 

[tryptych]

I read that quite recently and I can see why you say that you didn't finish it. I definitely found that there was something unengaging about it, I really wanted to like it, I liked the idea and the overall story but it was just so alien and repetitive that it was hard to get into properly. On the other hand it did have something and I think I would like to give his other books a go because there were some good ideas trying to get out.

I forgot about that - I started it and read the first few chapters before putting it down and reading something else. Not intentionally like, I just kind of forgot about it... it is quite unengaging, you're right.