Books you stopped reading . . .

i never finished 'haunted' either.

Dermaphoria. I think I'm probably the only person here who thought The Contortionist's Handbook was better.

I'm slowly making my way through House of Leaves, though I go for days without picking it up. I'm determined not to let it win, but I find 90% of it completely unnecessary.

I usually finish books, even if they're crappy, so I can at least explain to others why they wouldn't like it either.

i can remember quitting...
white noise (delilo) after about 15 pages... geek love (dunn) after about 20... don quiote (cervantes) about 200... fear and loathing on the campaign trail '72 (hs thompson) 147 pages... virtual light (gibson) about 50... simulacra and simulation (baudrillard) about 35... brothers karamazof (doestoevsky) about 10... great gatsby (fitzgerald) 3rd try, about 15 pages... moby dick (melville) about 70 pages... the curious incident of the dog [etc.] after about 2 pages... heart of darkness (conrad) about 5 pages...

i blame a combination of television and alcohol

oh and i stopped reading catch 22 after about 15 pages... but i picked it back up a while later after accepting the fact that life is full of pointless tragedy and most of the people in charge are incompetent blowhards... if and when you've come to that realization you will enjoy the book

diary is worth reading if you can accept a sense of hopeless causality

and i'm not really sure what to say about rant, accept that i enjoyed it in spite of the strangeness~ playing with time travel is usually a good way to piss me off

The last book I stopped reading was The Shipping News.

I never got through Walter Scott's Waverley. That was just really really painful. Also no fan of Dickens and Woolf. They almost shot me in my English seminar because I hate those two. I can't help it, they put me right to sleep. I also stopped reading The Good Terrorist by Lessing, because the main character annoyed me. Another very painful novel was Amour de Swan by Marcel Proust. That is torture on paper!

White Noise, The Crying of Lot 49, and Confederacy of Dunces were three that I just couldn't do. I usually HAVE to finish books. Not those. No way.

I wish i could quote the last thirty people that posted and tell them they're idiots. But, since i can't, i'll just say it here.

'haunted' is crap. i will carry it to my grave.

Yeah, HAUNTED is shit. I can see not finishing that. It's why i never picked Palahniuk up again. But when people say they can't read Woolf, Melville, Fitzgerald, Conrad [even though i don't like Heart of Darkness], Clevenger, O'Toole, or that they only read five pages of a book and put it down, that is something i can never and will never understand. It's not the book or the author's fault that you're a lazy fucking person who doesn't want to read.

I finished Haunted but put down Survivor with no intention of ever picking that piece up again...

I also stopped reading The Road.. couldn't get into it and this was close to the time I stopped reading The Stand. I'd had enough post-apocalyptic wandering for the year.

Heart of Darkness
...Some really great parts, but some really boring parts to be honest. Nautical tales don't initially interest me anyways.

Moby Dick
Faerie Queen
Dr. Faustus
Utopia
and almost anything in the 16/17th century. I really dug the concepts and such but to really sit and read them I wasn't feeling it.

Lunar Park

I gave up on Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker.

Pygmy, Atlas Shrugged (three times, fuck it), The Bible, The Lord Of The Rings, The DaVinci Code

Oh yeah, that one too.

The first two-thirds of American Psycho were phenomenal, in my opinion. I hate the ending, and not the last-page ending, but the the end parts.

I didn't finish Breakfast of Champions because my girlfriend lost it.
I had trouble getting through the heavy middle of Neverwhere.

Confederacy of Dunces

Just couldn't get into it. I started reading something else and just sort of forgot about it.

Heart of Darkness is one that I've started and put down like 2 or 3 times. It's just his weird, non-native English. Each time I got through a couple pages before deciding, "this will be my next book" and then I never got to it. The Sound and the Fury is another. I got about 30 pages deep before deciding to put it off until later. Other than that the only ones I can think of are Ulysses b/c of the formatting and On the Road b/c I was like 3/4 of the way through and felt like I was wasting my time. Of all these books On the Road is the only one I don't plan on completing sometime in the future.

Catch-22 is the most recent one that I can remember.

black box - nick walker
lullaby - chuck palahniuk
the great gatsby - fitzgerald
some wes craven book i lost in o'hare airport.

there are 2 diff categories for this topic:
books I put down because I got distracted and plan to return to (Atlas Shrugged, 3 Musketeers)
and books I abandoned once the "I feel like I'm wasting my life" feeling soaked in. These books fall into the latter category...

100 Years of Solitude
a friend gave it to me because he couldn't get through it. In a failed attempt to prove him wrong I decided midway through that I would def finish it. I said screw it 2 days later....

Helter Skelter
aside from the fact that no one should read something that upsetting right before bed, the writing was just terrible. Abandoned midway through again.

Death Comes for the Archbishop
boooooring.

Under the Banner of Heaven
boooooring

agreed - tried to read Order of the Phoenix twice and stopped in the same place both times

as for "I can't believe I'm still single" ... did you see the show he had on Showtime?? I think that answered that question pretty sufficiently

The Gunslinger, by Stephen King.
I bought it after several people recommended it. I stopped 20 pages in. All those goddamn adverbs: "He chewed thoughtfully." I was told that King wrote it when he was for all intents a kid. It shows.

A Little Yellow Dog, by Walter Mosely.

Not because it wasn't well written. On the contrary, it was too good. The problems the narrator had hit way to fucking close to home, and I got depressed.

Mosley did an outstanding job capturing the character, the atmosphere of a racialy charged Los Angeles, and the racial profiling practices of the LAPD. When I'm in the safety of my home, I want literature to help me escape the shit I live through every day. That book brought the strife right inside my bedroom--the one sanctuary I have in this world where I can have the illusion of safety. I will never touch that book again.

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King.

It was recommended to me by the man in my secondhand bookshop but I couldn't really get into it.

I stopped reading Flowers From Hell for now. There's a lot of old stories (aka "old language") in there and my brain hurts after reading several pages.

I tried Gunslinger and quit 3 times before I finally powered my way through it. Get to the second book by any means necessary. The Dark Tower series is awesome, and when you finish Wizard and Glass, those memories of the struggle with book 1 will be forgotten.

i never finished it either. it simply got boring. especially the present story. the one that linked all the characters and stories and poems. and some of the shorts in there were just mediocre.

The Catcher in the Rye, because Holden Caulfield is a whiny little brat. Moby-Dick, because I am not a whaler, and therefore, have no need for a whaling manual. Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, because silliness alone can only sustain a book for so long. Pygmy, because I have neither the skill nor the patience to decode the callow ramblings of superficial terrorists. Microserfs, because the only thing drier than reading about computer programming is reading about computer programmers. The Restraint of Beasts, because after a few chapters, I said, "I get it already."

Books I put down, but hope to pick up again: Blackbox, Only Revolutions, Love in the Time of Cholera, Journey to the End of the Night.

Books I almost put down, but fortunately didn't, as they are now among my favorites: American Psycho and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Well, then, things I'm also not, and therefore also have no need of manuals for:

-white whale
-obsessive white-whale hunter
-full-body tattooist
-aggressive hat-tipper
-Ishmael

But by your logic, you should have liked Catcher in the Rye...

LOLOLOLOL I'm funny.

i forget who but i don't understand why someone can't finish lord of the flies. it's barely 200 pages.

Bested by a cartoon monkey. Will the indignities ever cease?

Moby Dick isn't really about whaling.

I never finished Lulluby. Or Geek Love.

Yes, but you would admit that sandwiched amongst all the white whales, obsessive white-whale hunters, full-body tattoos, aggressive hat-tipping and Ishmaels, there is a sizable amount of whaling shop talk, yes?

You don't have to like it and i don't feel like trying to change your mind.

That whaling stuff was some of my favorite bits of the novel. But i realise it turns most people off of it. To me, though, it's probably one of the most perfect novels written.

Also, if it helps, let it be known that my attempt was on the unabridged version (a.k.a. Moby-Dick: The Director's Cut--Now (Whaling) With (Whaling) More (Whaling) Whaling!).

Wuthering Heights. It hit a part where I just couldn't continue on, and I haven't picked it up in over a year. I'm almost positive it's the only one, but I don't read all that much. Also,

I, Elizabeth. I put that down because it was too flowery and didn't interest me as much as I thought it would. I hope to pick it back up at some point.

I stopped reading The Raw Shark Texts after 30 pages or so.

Would you like a listen of my extensive Huey Lewis collection?

I actually own the entire Oeuvre of Huey Lewis on CD. He was the first concert I ever went to back in the day, and I've been strangely loyal since then.

That's, what, six albums not counting collections?

I'd be impressed if you had any of the Clover records.

Fun Fact #64: Huey Lewis's first band, Clover, were the backup band on Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True.

Fun Fact #64b: Alfa_Romeo and the bold type guy are the same person.

Alas, no Clover. But I even bought the shitty a capella album!