Failing to finish

[sawyl]

Today sees the publication of a list of top ten unfinished books. I'm usually pretty good at finishing novels, but here are a few failures that immediately spring to mind:

• Shikasta by Doris Lessing. I got halfway through before realising that it just didn't work for me. Given that the rest of my family are all big Lessing fans, this makes me feel deeply inadequate.
• The Simarilion by J.R.R Tolkien. Almost completely unreadable. Didn't stop me trying though.
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabukov. The plot sagged so badly in the middle that I lost the will to live.
• The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. Despite loving most of Murdoch's other novels, I just couldn't get on with this. Maybe I should retry — after all, it did win the Booker Prize, so there must be something to it.

In general, I find that if I can't read something, it's usually because I just can't get on with the author's writing style and not because I've chosen something that I think I should be reading — something that appears to be the case for most of the novels on the unfinished list.