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/lit/ - Literature

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2958870 No.2958870 [Reply] [Original]

Books you couldn't finish?

Infinite Jest and Moby Dick

>> No.2958873

confederacy of dunces.

>> No.2958881

Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps I'll give it another shot in two years or so.

>> No.2958919

The Amber Spyglass, Hunger Games, 40 shades of gray.

I believe reading a simple novel from time to time is beneficial to my digestion, but the above three were too much even for me. I abandoned them and tried to erase them from my mind.

>> No.2958922

The Parallax View

Seriously by the end it's just Slavoj losing his mind. Maybe it's just 2deep4me :/

>> No.2958928

I have read the first 1/3 of Notes from the Underground at least 4 times. I just keep putting it down again. It's not even especially big, just kind of dense.

>> No.2958931

>>2958870
those happen to be two of my favourite books.

>> No.2958932

Thouand Years of Solitude.

>> No.2958934

The Fountainhead

>> No.2958941

Nausea and On the Road. On the Road was boring as shit. Nausea did a whole lot of nothing (existentialism seems so childish and bores me to tears) and came off as incessant whining.

>> No.2958942

Neuromancer

>> No.2958951

Outside of a 12 month period where I couldn't muster up the resolve to finish a single book, I've only disliked a book strongly enough not to finish it once- book was Pride & Prejudice.

I expect I'll read it at some point, I understand it's not the vapid and 'girly' book some people might interpret it to be and I liked the writing itself well enough, but it just didn't seem like something I'd have benefited from reading.

>> No.2958952

>>2958931

Oh, yea we can also talk about books that we didn't want to finish because they were so good. In that case, I can mention War and Peace.

I read it for four years, including a one year break recovering from illness.

>> No.2958957

Any work of fiction I try to read.

>> No.2958959

our mutual friend and the sun also rises

>> No.2958961

There's a LOT of books I haven't finished, either because I lose them or simply forget to finish them (school, work)

>> No.2958965

You gotta finish Moby Dick; totally worth it.

>> No.2958967

>>2958928
Same, except that I love big D, it is just that I find the character in Notes too repulsive to stomach and just stop.

>> No.2958980

>>2958928
> not even specially big

Dog, that shit is got less than 150 pages. And for any existentialist or coward it'll read with the pleasure of book of disquiet or portrait of the artist, but without their difficulty.

>> No.2958983

And now that I really think on it, Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead was cute, I liked it marginally well when I didn't understand what objectivism was, and went through a period (embarrassing in hindsight) of atheistic libertarianism. That lasted about two months, in which I'd reread The Fountainhead and learned more about Ayn Rand and her expansion of objectivism (homosexuality is immoral, Ed Gein's something of an admirable character, women are meant to admire and worship never to act), resulting in my disillusionment with objectivism. I approached Atlas Shrugged with a basic idea of the premise thinking still that it was going to be GREAT, with this odd and apocryphal character whose name's known to everyone, but no one can explain why. Then I started reading it, and it just went to shit really quickly.

Now what would Atlas Shrugged be like if Thomas Pynchon wrote it?

>> No.2958984

>>2958941

I, casually, stopped reading those two things, but recently I've read them. I ended liking On the Road, but Nausea was shit.

>> No.2958985

>>2958983
Can someone tell me if Leonard Peikoff's an okay guy? I'd like there to be at least one big objectivist that isn't an asshole.

>> No.2958997

I finish every book I start. If it's a book that's unimportant enough to me that I'd stop reading it part-way through, it's not important enough for me to spend time reading in the first place.

>> No.2959066

>>2958985
He disagrees with Rand's more bigoted/ignorant views, but it's kind of pointless and a bit like 'progressive' christians which really really are not christians at all if you get right down to it.

>> No.2959071

>>2958870
Moby Dick isn't even a difficult read if you only read the story bits, and skip of the historical jabber

>> No.2959075

>Anna Karenina

Too detailed and dry.The movie was better (inb4 shitstorm)

>The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Waiting for something exciting to happen for 50 pages.All you get is one big meh.

Loads more.

>> No.2959087

The Count of Monte Cristo

Stop fucking talking and do something.

How do the people have time to do anything when it takes 30 minutes to ask someone over for breakfast?

It's sad because the first 200 pages or so were really good.

>> No.2959099

I actually found Atlus Shrugged to be quite an easy read. The ongoing mystery, degradation and incoming apocalypse had me rather gripped. I just wish that was the main objective of the novel and not a bunch of people making a secret club where they all hate each other.

It's better if you imagine it being told from the perspective of super-villains.

>> No.2959135

The Trial, it was too fucking claustrophobic.

>> No.2959131

The God Delusion

It was marketed to me, mostly by elitists, like it was some revolutionary assertion against the absolute claims.

Turns out it was fairly banal jargon that sort of masturbated the atheist mind; not a revolutionary argument or must-read.

To be fair I probably expected too much. The way I actually expected new rebuttals to old tall-tales is a bit lulzy. Marketing oh my.

>> No.2959241

>>2958870
>not finishing Moby Dick

You filthy cur.

>> No.2959245

The Mysteries of Udolpho, and I'd love to talk to anyone who made it all the way through.

>> No.2959246

Mein Kampf

>> No.2959257

>>2959131
Same here. It's not even book in it's own right. Dawkins should have just stayed with writing pseudophilosophy books based on biology.

>> No.2959290

>>2959245
I almost made it to the end -- maybe 50 or 75 pages left. The thing is, I just threw the novel down in disgust when I realized that Radcliffe was going to redeem that faggoty-ass Valancourt so that everyone could live happily ever after .

I don't know why I expected anything different from a 18th c. gothic novel, but it just pissed the hell out of me.

>> No.2959299

>>2959246
this
mostly because it was so damn long, and in junior high i wasn't nearly as patient

>> No.2959298

The Recognitions. What I read I enjoyed but it's a demanding book.

>> No.2959307

>>2959087

Same. Everybody said, "you have to read the unabridged version! you'll be missing out if you don't!"

What exactly would I have missed if I read the abridged version instead? Fucking nothing, I'll bet. Same story, half the length.

>> No.2959308

i go to the last three pages of stranger in a strange land and kinda scrolled through the ending.
it was super disappointing, seriously the whole "let's crucify this guy who acts so weird" seemed like a cop out.
i was expecting good science fiction and all i got was a bunch of beatnik and hippy bullshit

>> No.2959310

The Da Vinci Code and Wuthering Heights

>> No.2959508

Dilemma, Jesus Christ that pacing was hubbible