/lit/ - Literature

Anna Karenina is pretty much the best novel of all time. Don't fucking put it down.

But yeah I do that. I recently stopped reading Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos because it was too scattered and uninteresting for me. Usually I try to power through a good chunk of the book before I judge it though.

>>3519238
i dropped contact by carl sagan after the fist few pages.
sagan went really out of his way to set this little girl as a megaultrasuper genius.
i don't know,it just rubbed me the wrong way.

>>3519242
i always have an aversion to movies/books that are longer than 2 hours or 500 pages. certain things just have a hard time holding my attention. i do plan on finishing karenina though, its just alexey karenin's chapters are so fucking lame compared to other characters. on that note, does anyone know why its "karenina" rather than "karenin"? is there some sort of twist that will explain this?

>>3519238
Fucking Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

>>3519252
lol smart women. yeah Right! am i rite?!

>>3519273
that's how Russian naming conventions work. It's an insane system that should have been reformed under the Soviets, but it never was.

A Storm of Swords

I don't feel bad about it

Lord of the Flies.

No regrets.

>>3519276
lol but that was such a short book though! by the time you knew you hated it you probably had to finish the book on inertia alone.

>>3519287
This.

Also, Wuthering Heights. I ought to have attempted to tackle that ridiculously boring book three or four times now.

>>3519294
It is short, except that nothing happens and there's no real motive to go on.

Brothers Karamazov

I read Crime and Punishment with no problem, but I got about 200 pages into Brothers K and just found myself bored as fuck. Call me a pleb if you want, I sure did feel like one at the time.

Maybe I'll pick it up again in the future sometime.

I got about 300 pages into Blood Meridian and I just had to stop. I liked All The Pretty Horses and The Road, but Blood Meridian was just too boring.

>>3519273
Karenina is the feminine form of Karenin; in Russian, a woman's last name must be in the feminine form. Typically, we don't maintain the distinction in English, but Anna Karenina is one of a handful of exceptions.

>>3519281
more like mary sue...

Wanted to quit The Stand so many times. That book is fucking terrible. Couldn't bring myself to do it though

>>3519284
Ha! Is that the 4th?
I stopped halfway thru the 4th and the read the 5th. No regrets.

Lord of the Flies. I tried to read it in my spare time during 11th grade and simply found it boring.

>>3519381
Funny thing is, it takes about 200 pages to get into Brothers, depending on the version of course.

I can promise you that you won't regret it if you make it to the end

>>3519238

No, but if they lose me Ill read less and less each day until I eventually stop reading it. Not really an immediate "drop" tho

Even though it was short I stopped reading Nausea by Sartre about half-way through. I just could not stand the incessant whining that pervaded the book. I'm also not a big fan of epistolaries in general so that got on my nerves (didn't know it was one beforehand).

I thought it would be a good way to lightly introduce me to his philosophical thought but nope! I still plan on reading Being and Nothingness at some point though.

Feast for Crows.

Not high literature by any means, but I swear to Christ the fuck-well ran dry.

>>3519762

I agree. I'm pretty casual and read it a couple summers ago for kicks and for a "classic" I was surprised how entertaining and paced it was.

All that priest shit at the beginning is pretty slow

I rarely intentionally drop books. I purchase every book that I read, so not finishing one feels like a waste of money to me. While I don't like reading things that I don't like, it's sometimes nice to analyze what exactly it is I don't like about certain books so that I can have a more critical approach to my taste.

If I were to ever drop a book though, it would've been The Life of Pi. What a piece of shit.

>>3519775
you're not supposed to enjoy nausea. that's the fucking point

the book actually does a splendid job of portraying the "nausea"

I'm with you OP, at XXI of part 3 and I've had trouble picking it up for days now.

>>3519313

Said the idiot.

Foucault's Pendulum
>Causabons gf felt so wrong

I'm currently reading the waves by Virginia Woolf. I stop even for weeks from time to time. I just don't see the point of any of it, nothing seems to happen.
I can't deny she's good at evoking images though

The Pale King, and to a degree Infinite Jest. The former just didn't work as a Wallace novel because no editor should be in complete creative control over the sequencing of a novel of that style. The latter because it's very indigestible at times and because I already know the ending will disappoint, in a way.

I don't feel that bad though, No Country For Old Men is a fantastic read that really stimulates my cinematic tendencies (film student)

Yeah I have that problem, that's why I generally stick to novellas, short stories and poems, if it's fiction.

Non fiction is different, that shit's always interest.

>>3519381
>>3519762

Same thing for me. Loved Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground and the Idiot, but Brothers made me fall asleep so many times. The first 100 pages of describing the family in the most literal dialogue is so hard to wade through.

What gets better, exactly?

>>3519381
>>3520195
This sounds ominous. I loved Notes From Underground and quite liked Crime and Punishment, however my copy of Brothers Karamazov is in another city and a bit low in the pile.

>>3519238

yeah
>book
fooling Houdini by Alex Stone
>good
It was cool at the start, him failing at the world magic championships, illuminati like secrecy over magic tricks and learning card tricks from old swindlers and underground masters
>why I stopped reading
then he starts raving on about fucking power of the mind science fool the audience tony robbins empower yourself everything is connected string theory bullshit. That starts about page 100.stopped at about 130
>epilogue
Disappointed I scrolled through my list of other pirated epubs (thank god for those NYTimesbestsellers torrents) and found Ghost in the wires by Kevin Mitnick. It's fucking awesome