Ugh! Why did I read that book?!??!?!

hmm must be honest hated life of pi as a lot of you said earlier. Could never read terry pratchet (the disc world novels were big when i was in school) dunno why something in those books didn't agree with me.

Must say I have a strong aversion to anything resembling the Da vinci code so never read it. Would rather puke in my shoe then waste valuable time on reading that.

I normally finish what I read, even when I was young and i would try to be intellectual and read books way out of my league that i couldn't understand, I think one of them was "white Hotel" by D M Thomas, i read this when i was thirteen did not understand it at all but read it all the way through 'cos man i was clever!

I just read another book that started off like gangbusters and then fizzled, as if the author had no clue of how to finish it and no one took enough responsibility to try to help him out.

The book is "Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa" by Marc Estrin.

I just abandoned Nightlife by Rob Thurman. It was well reviewed in Locus as being an excellent first novel, but I wearied of the blood, guts and adolescent angst.

Until now.

I just threw Scott Smith's The Ruins, unfinished, against the wall.

Yuck.

(Sorry, Scott. Hated it)

So did I!!!!


The killer is, it was well written.


Wasting that writing on The Ruins?


pah.

Just found this thread.

Can't understand why some of you did not like Kafka or Wuthering Heights. De gustibus non disputandum.


But Bob Dylan's "Tarantula". I tried & tried & tried, 'til I gave up.
Anybody read "ZPG"? Crap.

I liked Kerouac's "On the Road", went on to "Visions of Cody". I tried at least twice, to no avail. Boring.

And I may be almost as philistine as Jespah, but the first time I tried to read James Joyce's "Ulisses", the book fell on me on page 46. The second time I tried, I did much better: the book fell on me on page 60. Not that I hated it, I just couldn't read it.
---

I do agree some books are for a certain age. Hesse, for instance. At 18, I found "Demian" boring and pretentious... at 15 I would have loved it. At age 30, I enjoyed "Narcissus and Goldmund" very much, I would not have understood it at 18.

And then, some books are sometimes a bit difficult to get started into, but then roll swiftly and marvelously: "The Name of the Rose". Somebody prevented me about the first 40-50 pages, so I was patient, and got my reward.

You're not alone there, fbaezer!

Everyone had it on their bookshelf, yet I don't know anyone who actually read it.

I tried, heaven knows I tried .... many times.

But then, I have a hunch that all those critics who declared it a masterpiece hadn't, either! :wink:

Ah, thanks for reviving this topic!

Another I could not slog through, might do better at this age: Pynchon. I did read The Crying of Lot 49 and thought it was weird. My brother, on the other hand, loved V, etc. pretty much anything by Pynchon.

I've always enjoyed Andy Rooney {Andy not Mickey, but I like Mick too} mainly from watching his little pieces on the tail-end of 60min, and I also like to read his column that runs in our local paper. One day I ran across a book of his, read it, thought it was entertaining, and then I happened across two more, so I scooped them up and read them as well.

Before I had finished them, I found a three volume collection, and bought it also...I was on a roll...I do that type of thing. But by the time I had finished the third book, I was seriously thinking about jumping off one of the local bridges that cross the Mississippi, or the Ohio, I wasn't partial about which river, just which ever bridge was closest at the time. I guess in small doses...80-100 pages...it wasn't so bad, but after three of those in a row...I was so depressed that the thought of picking up that massive Rooney trifecta that was warping my bookshelf...nearly pushed me over the edge.

I had my daughter place all four books in a box, we taped it shut, and then I wrote "Proctology Books" on it....in the hope that nobody will ever peer inside.

Andy Rooney...small doses folks...small doses.

I awakened as if from the fog at some late age to a fascination for Italy, possibly because it was the one place I landed on a long awaited vacation, and wherever I landed on that day, I would have imprinted like a duck. Oh, something like 15 years without more than 5 days off in a row, 2 years after passing boards I studied hard for, and then diving into million hour work weeks. I had given my husband an ultimatum, as in, I really want to go somewhere! London, Paris, Rome, Istanbul...

He said Rome, which happened to be my choice since I liked learning about Italy in 4th grade, and we went for a month. I came back from that avid, at 46 finally getting to see some of the world, a very layered part at that. I came back and read and read and read, and some of that reading related to my occupation re land arch and site design. But, never mind that, I read anything about italy at first, from saccharine dreck to dusty tomes in the research library. Bought lots of books from certain near decrepit used book stores.

Which is where I ran into something by a guy named Corso. Not the beat poet, at least I'd be surprised to hear it was, but I don't remember much else, including whatever the subject of the book was. At that point I was finishing every book, because all of them informed me, in one way or another. I could later trace who got what from whom... for the most part, although I forget most of that now.

Anyway, Corso, I finished it. Major plod, a slog, and obviously a useless one since I can't remember the first thing about it.

I never got past the first sentence of Sound and the Fury, in at least a few attempts, which I understand was a failure on my own part.

Couldn't get past the rising of the island, whatever number of pages, in Hawaii.

Had Mill and the Floss on my bookshelf for years, gave it away before reading at all.

Was it The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, Osso?

Over the years there have inevitably been books that I've truly hated, and never finished. I've never finished Finnegan's Wake, but don't understand it well enough to tell if I love it or hate it. I may be one of the small number of Conservatives here at A2K, but absolutely hate Ayn Rand's writing. She's a shallow thinker who subordinates cardboard characters to silly plots in order to reach simplistic conclusions. I'm pretty forgiving of lackluster writing in most non-fiction writing, so long as they have something interesting to say, or they have an novel idea for me to consider.

Some author's write both stinkers and keepers. Paul Johnson wrote a wonderful history titled Birth of the Modern that I think highly of. When he published A History of the American People it went right to the head of my reading list. Unfortunately, that books was riddled with factual errors, the writing was muddled and I ended up returning the book to the library unfinished. We just checked out Ray Bradbury's From the Dust Returned. It looked like a promising Halloween read, and we've previously enjoyed Bradbury. This one was, like many of Bradbury's books, lyrical and almost poetical about strangeness. It was a babbling brook and I fell asleep continuously after several pages. Three pages and off to slumber land. Awake, read three or four pages and on the nod again. I had to give it up or I'd have slept away a week.

On the other hand there have been books that I started off hating, but came to appreciate after I had grown more mature and literate. It took at least three readings of War and Peace before I began to "get it", and now I can see why it has such a great reputation. I avoided Thackery's Pride and Prejudice for decades, and then discovered that I loved following the adventures of its characters lives. Oh well.

These days I avoid contemporary political "non-fiction" as the partisan ephemera that they mostly are. I love history, but history is usually best written after a few hundred years have passed and the passions have cooled. Time has a way of weeding out the inconsequential, and so as I've gotten older I more and more like to revisit those works that our culture has deemed "classic". At one time, years ago I set myself a project of reading the "best sellers" of the 19th and 20th centuries. There were some great reads in that project, and even more books that were totally unbearable. Some every good reads have been pretty much forgotten, like Frank Norris's McTeage. I loved Barth's Giles Goatboy, but I doubt that it will be remembered for long.

Now I enjoy reading a mix of fiction and non-fiction. Histories and biographies are often on my shelf. Mysteries, thrillers and techno-thrillers that keep me turning pages are nice. I'm also always of the look out for fiction with a touch of humor, or that somehow key into a topic that currently is of interest to me. Our preference is to borrow books from our local library, and that makes choosing books much easier. If the book doesn't grab me, then it just goes back into the book bag.

I was surprised that it bothered me to read James Michener. I enjoyed many television mini-series based on his books. When I actually tried to read the books themselves, I always fell into a coma when reading his long introductions. The beginning of his books seem to be loaded with dry detail. I always gave up trying to read them. Maybe the middle and endings were good.

Yes, Spider Gal, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Mill and the Floss is discussed a bit on some earlier page of this thread.