02-16-2012, 11:13 PM | #31 |
Omnivorous
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As I said, there are many positive reviews (and a few less than positive). The first two chapters were readable, but it went downhill (for me) from there. Read it. You may be one of the positives.
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02-17-2012, 01:29 AM | #32 |
Bah, humbug!
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02-17-2012, 03:59 AM | #33 |
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Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth) although I did force myself to read it in one day because I had to read it for a literature course and IMHO these types of books are better to get over with quickly than drag the torture out. After finishing I literally threw it across my room.
Last year I gave up on In the Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco), it was too slow and too descriptive for my tastes. I also gave up on The Murder of King Tut (James Patterson) because I got annoyed with the unneccesary chapter breaks and general lack of quality. I also am another person that couldn't get through Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I tried several times and lose interest when reading the second book (I don't think I've finished it). |
02-17-2012, 05:57 AM | #34 |
Wizard
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George RR Martins, A dance with Dragons. I've bowed out of the series.
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02-17-2012, 07:07 AM | #35 | |
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I have had so many negative memories of that attempt that I have never had the least desire to go back and attempt to read it again. I could not get into The Dark Tower Series either. Apache |
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02-17-2012, 08:49 AM | #36 | |||
Nameless Being
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I don't get how anyone could have trouble with A Confederacy of Dunces. I found it hilarious from the first page on. Looking at this thread I am glad to see that I am not the only one that thinks The Lord of the Rings is vastly overrated. Don't get me wrong when I read it, probably at about the age of 13-14, I thought it was an enthralling fantasy tale. To me that is the optimum time of life for the read. To attempt it at a much younger age the reader would find it too difficult and incomprehensible. Very much older and much of it would begin to seem silly. What I just don't get is adults wanting to reread it over and over. |
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02-17-2012, 11:14 AM | #37 |
o saeclum infacetum
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I bailed during The Fellowship of the Ring during my adolescence and never looked back. Dreadful stuff. Aside from the turgid prose, I hate anthropomorphized furry things.
Otherwise, I see many of my very favorites mentioned here. Wuthering Heights, Jane Austen, The Scarlet Letter, Confederacy of Dunces, Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure has the most gut-wrenching ending of any book I've every read). Also some books I at least was in like with (Ulysses, Don Quixote) and which well rewarded the effort. I have an abandoned shelf at Goodreads, but it's books I couldn't finish because they exceeded my tolerance for trash and/or just plain badness, not because they were boring. That said, I have one book that's languished on my currently reading stack for the best part of a year and while I'd like to finish it, it's long on statistics and short on narrative and I find it a very hard slog. It's called The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, for the curious, so not a classic. It's the type of thing I'd expect to eat like ice cream, but not in this case. |
02-17-2012, 11:40 AM | #38 |
Bah, humbug!
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If you ever change your mind, I might recommend skipping that long, boring, and unnecessary introductory segment, "The Custom House", which comprises almost 20% of the book's length. Past that point, which is where the story of Hester Prynne really begins, it's quite fascinating.
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02-17-2012, 11:44 AM | #39 | |
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Apache |
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02-17-2012, 11:47 AM | #40 | |
Bah, humbug!
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The audiobook had me in stitches. Oh well, humor is subjective. Last edited by WT Sharpe; 02-17-2012 at 11:50 AM. |
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02-17-2012, 05:03 PM | #41 | |
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Frank Schätzings Limit was a close call for me, though I did make it eventually. A huge letdown after his other books which I enjoyed very much.
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Someone care to help me out here? |
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02-17-2012, 05:20 PM | #42 |
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02-17-2012, 05:32 PM | #43 |
o saeclum infacetum
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02-17-2012, 09:54 PM | #44 |
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"Skippy Dies At the End" - a bunch of navel-gazing silly people at a boys' boarding school in Scotland (or Ireland?). Just seemed to be leading nowhere. I forced myself to read to the end of the first part (about 250 pages) before bailing out.
"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" - best title ever, but couldn't get through even 20 pages. "Billy Budd" - I feel bad about this one. I am determined to get through it one day, but the last time I tried it was a dismal failure. Only plowed through about 7 pages. |
02-18-2012, 03:49 AM | #45 |
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Too many to list! Especially now that it's so easy to check out library ebooks. I pick something up and if it starts to annoy me for one reason or another (bad language, stereotype character descriptions, bad dialog...) , within the first 20 or so pages I put it down and move on.
A recent no-finish: Tender is the night, the MR Book Club selection. That one did grab me at first because of great descriptive writing. But the further I got into it the more I hated the characters and I honestly couldn't care less what happened to them! |
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