The book I can't seem to finish

ClaremontPhoto said:
I have found Salman Rushdie difficult to finish. Especially Satanic Verses.

Right now I am about to try Andrea Camilleri's 'The Shape of Water' again. Tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday) I have four hours of dead time in another city. I often use those four hours for photography, but this week I am using the time for reading. The book is already in my bag.

If the book is too hard going I'll have a camera with me also, so photography is not out of the question.
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Jon,
Andrea Camilleri is one of my favourite italian living writers. I thinks his prose is a fine mix between italian language and sicilian dialact. In his books there are also brilliant hints of humor and fabulous food descriptions. So I'm curious to know what you think about translation (I suppose you're reading it in english) ...

About books I've been not able to read I remeber Alberto Arbasino's "Fratelli d'Italia" (1000 pages of pure boredom ... it's impossible to understand what he's writing about ... it's as long as boring) ... Herman Hesse's "Siddharta" (you know how it's going to end right after page 2 ...it's was difficult to write a book so short and so boring... btw, no offence for the many who like this book :angel:) ...

... anyway I read and eat a lot so when I'm not able to finish a book or a food I think it's not my fault :p ...

ciao :)
 
I've read Alighieri Dante's Divina Commedia all the way through in a Dutch translation.. not merely the Inferno, which is readily digestable, but also Purgatory and Paradise. The latter two took real dedication and loads of time, but I had set my mind on finishing the whole lot. Just to prove that I could do it.

In hindsight, I believe this merely proves that I'm as stubborn as a donkey..

I've since learned to not finish a book when it doesn't hold my interest..
 
James Joyce's Ulysses is my nemesis, just can't penetrate that book, I finally threw it away. Anything by Joseph Conrad is brilliant (English was not his native language either), Dickens is wonderful entertainment, War and Peace is taunting me, I think when I lose my job I'll have a go at that. Gotta agree with Nico about Hesse.
 
Joseph Conrad stops me cold. I try about once a year but can't do it. Dickens is a close second.
 
I have just given up half-way through Proust's Swann's Way.

I sweat reading this book. Really. And then I think of how far there is to go in the entire collection.... Having said that, if I ever get marooned I hope I will have all the books because they are excellent to escape into.

Give up Ron, there are too many books in the world and each is for a particular time, it is not time for this one at the moment. You will come back to it at some point.
 
Interesting since Conrad himself was a non-native speaker. One thing about reading books in a foreign language is I think that irony is the hardest thing to pick up while self-translating. Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is steeped in irony.

maddoc said:
It happened to me .... Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". It simply exceeded my language skills (not native speaker...) and even a dictionary didn't help anything. I really hope to finish this book some time ...
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kully said:
... there are too many books in the world and each is for a particular time, it is not time for this one at the moment. You will come back to it at some point.
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Good point Kully .. it happened to me to give up reading a book and then eagerly read it later in my life ...
 
VinceC said:
I did once read a wonderful essay by Sommerset Maugham on how to read great literature. He stressed that skipping is not only permissible but sometimes essential to appreciate the work from a modern viewpoint. Even the best writers let their guard down, and the older writers lived in an age was editing was less stringent and wordiness too often encouraged.
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Vince, I must find that essay!
It sounds like the answer to my prayers. :rolleyes: :bang:
 
visiondr said:
Vince, I must find that essay!
It sounds like the answer to my prayers. :rolleyes: :bang:
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French novelist Daniel Pennac wrote something similar about "reader's rights" ... interesting and brilliant essay ...
 
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Most of the time I don't finish a book it's not because I don't intend to. It's just because I stop for a while and then forget.

I remember one book, though, that I deliberately stopped reading halfway through. Ethan Hawke's (yes, the actor) "Ash Wednesday". It got some decent reviews when it came out so I thought I'd give it a try. Read half of it and then stopped because it was incredibly boring (both the plot and the language).


Currently I'm reading Descartes' "Meditations", Wittgensteins "Philosophical Investigations" and Plato's "Theaetetus". I have a test on them soon.
 
I have a few ironies in this department.....my only foray into Dickens was "Great Expectations" & I breezed through it. Then there was Kerouac's "On the Road" which should have been easy & I did love reading it; but it took me about 2 years to finish. I've recently discovered Bukowski- who could be considered similar in style to Kerouac- and put away "Factotum" in two sessions and loved reading "Women" at a friend's house but had to leave it there and alas my local library doesn't have it.

On the other side of all this is my ultimate litereary nemesis and one I think I've all but given up on: Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales".

I also keep wondering how tough Darwin's "Origin of Species" will be....

barry
 
I haven't finished too many to remember -- or to list.

In my youth, I forced myself. Once started, had to finish. This did not bring pleasure and, to my mind, reading ought to be pleasurable above all else.

Then I read (somewhere) about the "25 page rule" -- if a book hasn't grabbed you by page 25, give it up. There's just too much good stuff out there to bother with something you don't like.
 
I haven't read any Conrad in quite a while, but I remember being extremely impressed with the writing, and doubly so considering he's not a native speaker.

I haven't read Nabokov, but he's another non-native speaker of English who's renowned as one of the great masters of the language.

I can think of a couple of lengthy World War II histories that I just haven't been able to finish. I do hope to pick them back up.

One of these days I will try Moby Dick, but having read Billy Budd I have a feeling Melville's style won't work for me.

Bravo to the earlier poster who wrote the Dickensian sentence -- brilliant. I think it's a little exaggerated, but still, well done.
 
mfunnell said:
I must confess to "almost anything by Dickens":

His problem, should he be said to have a problem, is that in the matter of the deployment of words he tends to use an abundance so exceptional that those of us who are by training and predeliction more content with a rather greater degree of concision in the expression of ideas than he seemed to practice tend to be overcome with the sheer proliferation of his prose to the extent that we become frustrated by being subjected to the reading of single sentences that go on and on at lengths more appropriate to paragraphs without ever seeming to get around to expressing the idea that he is probably trying to convey encouraged, one imagines, by the then-common publishing practice of paying authors by the word, thus giving them an incentive to expend profound numbers of words in the conveyance of simple ideas that could be passed on in single, concise, sentences but which, if conveyed in that manner, might lead to the author receiving somewhat less recompense that he otherwise might and hence predisposing him to the penury he often described in the lives of the characters set out in his books for our edification and entertainment.

...Mike
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Mike, could you diagram that for me please? :D

I remember a student asking our highschool freshman Enlish teacher to do that for one of Dickens' achievements. He agreed, but just never seemed to get around to it.
 
I haven't read all answers so I don't know if anyone agreed or not, but for me it was Iberia by Mitchner. I had read several of his novels and enjoyed them, getting by the inevitable dull portions. But as time went by, or maybe just as he wrote more, it got harder and harder. I tried Iberia two or three times and just couldn't do it. My daughter just purchased it and remembered my comments on it. We are both interested to see it she can do better than me. The only book of his that I read that didn't have dead spots was Tale of the South Pacific. Mind you, the dead spots added to the story later, but jeesh!
 
Kerouac's "On the Road"

Great book - I read that while on a motorcycle trip and while staying with my buddy's nephew for several days in his university student rental house in Tennessee.
 
Dickens wasn't ever a problem for me. But some of the current novelists are. Don Delilo for one. My freinds and family seem to like his work very well, so I get the opportunity to read his latest fairly often. Sorry, but he just doesn't get my attention. Haven't been able to finish any of them.
Olaf Stapledon's novels took me a while, but were ultimately worth the time and effort. Might've been easier if I'd not been reading them in translation.
Carl Hiassen was one of my favorite authors and I still like what I've read but his particular brand of weirdness is starting to repeat itself. If you've not read any of his work, one is great, after that the plots become very similar.
Rob
 
For me the most troublesome has been Jack Kerouacs "On the Road"..
Yep thats true, his most famous and publicly appreciated novell. Strangely enough I cant get much longer then 150 pages, ive tried 3 times now.
His others novells I have enjoyed a lot but I cant seem to get trough this one.
Very strange.
 
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