Bloody 'ell, Books is buzzing these days, and with some great threads too.

Tried and failed no less than four times with TE Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (I suppose I should try and fail seven times before I die, just to make the numbers correspond). Around the same number of times with Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. When I was younger I'd struggle on for weeks with stuff like this, either because I'd paid for the books or received them as presents and felt it was rude to not read them. Now I'll dump something I don't like after 30 pages - like Andrew Collins' terrible book about having a normal upbringing in the 70s.

I'm with GY on Diamond. He's of the "one long argument" school of nonfiction writing; his model is Darwin. I've never given up on one of his.

I did, though, fail to finish The Origin of Species. To be fair, I was convinced of the gist before I picked it up.

As mentioned on that other thread, I can't get anywhere with Catch 22. I also couldn't get anywhere with The Bell Jar or Henry Miller's stuff, even though they were assigned to me for a class. I just faked it. I recently stopped For Whom the Bell Tolls and haven't resumed yet.

Years ago, I bought It's You That I Want To Kiss by Maxim Jakubowski. (I didn't know who he was at the time). It was teeth-grindingly, rage-inducingly bad. Just unmitigated shit. The literary equivalent of getting sand blown into your eyes - painful and infuriating at the same time.

I'd never had a book make me physically annoyed before. It made me so angry that I'd spent money on it that, after hurling it across the room in disgust, I set it aside, with the firm intention of posting it back to him in his shop (I'd found out who he was by this point) with a letter asking him to never write anything, ever again. Then I just sort of never got round to it, and I'd forgotten all about it until I read this thread. I wish I still had it, now...

QUOTE:
Maxim Jakubowski

God, man: I've never read anything actually written by him, but he must be the worst translator from French in the history of literature. I read an anthology of French sci-fi translated by him when I was about 15. He did things like translating amateur, meaning "lover", as "amateur". I remember thinking he'd fail O-level.

Not an exhaustive list, but I've got about half way through all of the following without ever finishing them:

Cloud Atlas
A Brief History of Time
No Logo
Almost Like a Whale (by Steve Jones)

The stubborn part of me means I normally finish such books eventually, but I couldn't manage:

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo
The fourth book in the Dune series, and hence the rest of the series.

I could never get through the first book of the Dune series.

I don't do this very often at all. The examples I can think of:

Nostromo - Conrad
Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon (twice!)
60 Stories - Barthelme (although I'm telling myself that I'll dip in occasionally and knock off another few stories)

I'm with GY and Wyatt on Collapse and GG&S - while you get the gist of his theory from the beginning, it's pretty worthless without the wealth of evidence he churns out.

I get sidetracked in the middle of books all the time, generally because I either lose interest or find something else shiny that catches my attention.

Sometimes, though, I'm reading something I genuinely enjoy, lose track of it for awhile, and then don't pick it back up because I've lost the plot/characters a bit and don't have the will to start back up from the beginning. Two of the more painful examples of this were Moby Dick, which I didn't bring on a 2-day business trip to NY that turned into a 3-week trip, and War and Peace, which I accidentally left at my parent's house following winter break in college with 100 pages to go. I then screwed up the will to read it again eight years later, only to leave it at my brother's house in DC when I moved to Germany. Ah, War and Peace, my own literary Waterloo.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure I was genuinely enjoying Moby Dick (I was about 1/3 through). I think I appreciated it more than liked it.

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I bought and started 'The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy' when I was going through a mini 'must improve myself' phase, but just found it too difficult.

Was enjoying Peter Carey's 'Oscar and Lucinda' when I agreed to do some book reviews for a friend's local newspaper. As that took up all my available reading time, I had to lay down the Carey. Will return to it one day.


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I was once 250 pages into Bleak House when I went on holiday without it and picked up something else. When I got back to the Dickens job, I couldn't remember where I'd got to or what had really happened. Result: I gave it up. Luckily, I had the will to start it all over again a couple of years later, as it is one of the greatest books I've ever read.

I didn't have as much luck with the following, which I discarded with a "beh":

Life of Pi - Yann Martel
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence

QUOTE:
more fool me for trying a sci-fi novel in the first place

Maybe it's because I'm currently banging my head against the desk trying to write my Research Masters proposal on Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, and maybe it's because that and Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossesed are two of the four or five novels that have helped define who I am, but that kind of comment really narks me.

I've not got on with any of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez I've read- which is a bit of a shame as my parents bought me ten of his novels last Christmas (they did only cost a tenner, mind). I didn't particularly like Catch-22 either, but the weight of opinion telling me I had to like it dragged me through.

QUOTE:
I didn't particularly like Catch-22 either, but the weight of opinion telling me I had to like it dragged me through.

That was my exact experience when I first read Catch 22. About five years later, I picked it up again because I was in bed sick and bored, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have no idea why I had such distinctly different experiences of it, unless pre-existing expectations play a huge role. If that's the case, then I should probably give Madame Bovary another shot, because I despised that book despite the overwhelming praise it had been given by people who's taste I usually trust.

QUOTE:
Hunter S Thompson, apart from Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas.

The only one I've read, as well, aside from a lot of short stuff. Mischievously - knowing that my dad reads anything he sees laying around - I left this on top of the TV at their cottage. A week later, I got a phone call that began "What the hell was that you left me?"