Quote:
Originally Posted by poohbear_nc
My latest miss is Anthony Trollope - He Knew He Was Right. It literally took me months to slog through it (over 100 chapters). A preposterous plot populated with improbable characters, with 3 equally inane subplots. Finishing it became a sort of personal endurance goal for me ... whew!  |
Say it ain't so! I've been rereading Trollope and have worked my way through the Parliamentary novels and have two of the Barsetshire novels left to go, and I was saving
He Knew He Was Right for a treat when I'm done. It's the favorite Trollope of a Goodreads friend.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Certainly, there are quite a few books that I slogged through thinking "it has to get better", but usually they are books that were recommended to me rather than books by favorite authors that weren't very good.
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Yup, this is the kind of book that occurs to me off the top of my head. Two loathsome examples are the
Ice and Fire books and the
Dragon Tattoo books (the ones written by Larsson). Why I finished them I'll never know; momentum, mostly. I'll certainly never pick up another in either series (assuming GRRM ever writes one).
As to the original question, I'll have to think some more. Mostly I bail when I don't like a book and I'm the more likely to bail the longer it is.
Little Dorrit is a fairly recent example; I had high hopes as I had just read
Barnaby Rudge and was enthralled, and no one likes
Barnaby Rudge! Still, I recognize the emotion, that of a forced march to get through a book out of a combination of pride and a sense, mostly a wish, that there's more there than is readily apparent, and an unwillingness to acknowledge time already wasted.