Do you stop reading books halfway through? I hate doing this, and can only think of three books I've stopped in the middle of:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Possessed (not that I disliked it, I just started reading something else and forgot about it.)

Nick Cave - And the Ass Saw the Angel (because it's really really really really really terrible.)

Tolkien - Lord of the Rings (I didn't have the patience as an 11 year-old, and have no desire to try again now.)

I'd say Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Millennium, but I'm actually reading it, just at a glacial pace. It sits by (actually, under) my bed, and I've been getting through about twenty pages a month for the last few years. Then I'll put it down for a few months, and dip back in at a random place and start again. So I'm learning all sorts about colonization, and Mwene Mutapa, but nothing about the twentieth century or the industrial age.

I gave up on Guns, Germs & Steel after the first few chapters. The first chapter felt like a thorough and detailed summary, but the remainder of the book seemed a fairly dry set of supporting information. After the first chapter explained his theory so well I didn't really see the point in the rest of it.

I can't even remember if I limped over the finish line with One Hundred Years of Solitude or not. I just thought it was a bit dull.

And although I want to like Murakami, after the 'meh' response I had to Norwegian Wood and After Dark, I put down The Wind Up Bird Chronicle after no time at all. I should've learned my lesson by now.

Hmm... I've not managed to get through to the end of any Hunter S Thompson, apart from Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. Which is brilliant, but maybe its only the fact that it's so much shorter than the other books, that makes it readable?

And I've had loads of attempts at Catch-22, but I just can't stand it.

The only ones I've given up on in the last few years have been Jeff Noon's 'Pollen' (more fool me for trying a sci-fi novel in the first place) and Justin Cartwright's 'In Every Face I Meet', which I only gave a punt because the first paragraph was about sun-dried tomatoes and it made me laugh when I read it in Waterstones.

I've been about halfway through Don Quixote for about a year now. I don't know why. I was really liking it and there was all sorts that I was getting excited about wrt my thesis. But somehow I got distracted. I deserve to be judged for that one.

But also, life's too short to read all the books you'll really love, so in general I think there's nothing wrong with abandoning one that isn't doing it for you. Either you'll try it again one day and realise that the time was wrong, or not, it doesn't really matter.

God, I'm forever doing this. It's shameful, really. I've never got right to the end of anything by Thackeray, for a start.

I dunno what it is: if something grabs me it grabs me. A lot of people struggle with Ulysses, for example, but I couldn't put the bastard down when I read that. Yet other books that people breeze through I can't seem to handle.

Why, for example, did I devour Middlemarch yet put down Silas Marner after a few pages?

I hate this about me.

I abandoned reading Don Quixote some distance into my first attempt because the paperback got rained on and fell apart.

The first two times I started the first Gormenghast book I only got about a third of the way through (I was probably too young to appreciate it properly). The third time, though, I was swept up by it, and read that one, and the other two, straight through. And I've reread them all a couple of times since (forgot about that in the rereading thread).

Generally speaking I always try and get through to the end of a book (I figure if someone's gone to all that trouble to write it, then the least I can do is read the bugger), but sometimes it is just too painful or laborious to continue. Hasn't happened for a number of years now (maybe I'm more discerning in my choices, as most of my reading these days is by way of a recommendation rather than picking something at random). I think the last book I failed to finish was The Bone People, by Keri Hulme - it was the most insipid, ghastly, cliché-ridden load of old bollocks I've ever come across. Highly unrecommended.

"Why, for example, did I devour Middlemarch yet put down Silas Marner after a few pages?"

Huh. I'm precisely the opposite - loved Silas Marner, couldn't slog through Middlemarch.

Collapse by Jared Diamond, for exactly the reasons Crusoe mentions anout GG&S (which I didn't mind so much).

The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon, because it's aggressively boring and I really wasn't in the mood.

The Decameron by Giovanni Bocaccio, because, you know, I kind of got the point after the first six books.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam because while his methodology is solid, his understanding of community and social capital is irritatingly two-dimensional.

But here's the thing. Those books are all on my shelf. I do intend to read them one day. I feel it a moral failure on my part that I didn't finish then, and they sit there, acting as a silent reproach each time I pass them.

Lots of familiar stuff here. Titus Groan, Don Quixote, both about 100 pages in because I just got bored and it felt like I wasn't getting anything new. Finnegan's Wake after a paragraph. Peter Ackroyd's Biography of London, about 450 pages in, expecting to go back to it and never having the patience.

And I finished Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, but I completely sympathise with AG and Crusoe. You read the opening chapter, and then the rest of the book tells you why it's right. You learn quite a lot of interesting trivia but really it's all supprting the opening thesis, over and over and over again, with nothing really new in the way of ideas, just more reinforcing data.

I wondered sometimes if Jared Diamond had written a lot of "executive summaries" in a past life as a report writer.

"You learn quite a lot of interesting trivia but really it's all supprting the opening thesis, over and over and over again, with nothing really new in the way of ideas, just more reinforcing data."

That's what I like about the book. It's a very controversial and ambitious hypothesis. It needs a lot of evidence to back it up.