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.

Comments

[doctor-squale.livejournal.com]

I haven' t finished "A la recherche du temps perdu", I stopped after the first thousand
pages ( after Marcel tried to kiss Albertine ). I'll read the next 5000 pages when I retire.
I am not sure anyone finished that book anyway. I'm not sure Proust himself did....

Lolita is a great book. A masterpiece of evilness.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

The only person I know who successfully managed to finish Proust was stuck in Siberia for nine months working on her PhD and had limited access to non-Russian literature. I think that's the only way to tackle it.

[silvershooter.livejournal.com]

Join the club, I also could not finish Simarilion. I think I stopped after about 50 pages, and wondered if the local phone book was maybe more interesting to read.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Given the way Tolkien adds all those extra umlauts and accents, I think you'd have to read the Helsinki phone book to get the full experience...