“Recently it struck me that the list of books I’ve started and not finished has grown quite formidable. I ask myself what this ‘means,’ if it reflects some kind of moral devolution. It’s interesting how there does seem to be a kind of morality of reading, and people express their reading values quite passionately.”
Over at The Millions, Sonya Chung discusses books she’s never quite finished and why.
What say you, Rumpus readers? Any major books you’ve given up on halfway through?
4 responses
Ulysses–several times. I’m slowly working my way through it again, thanks to the small pages on my phone. Never finished The Crying of Lot 49 or White Noise either, or The Road. I only got about 50 pages into the last two before deciding they weren’t for me.
Of Human Bondage–gave up after about 20 pages, couldn’t stand the narrator. Don Quixote–made it through about 100 pages, but there were 800 more to go, and I didn’t have the patience for it.
I gave up on Wuthering Heights. I was working a temp job, so all I did was read novels (and hope that the phone didn’t ring, because I didn’t know how to answer it). Halfway through WH, I realized I didn’t care about any of the characters or their lives or Thrushcross Grange. None of it, whatsoever, appealed to me. I have yet to go back. That Heathcliff was such a Gloomy Gus, I hoped he’d die. And, apparently, from what others have told me, he eventually does.
I made it almost three-quarters through War and Peace before throwing in the towel. Could not make it more than 10 pages into Jude the Obscure, which is a shame, because it’s a great title. Also only got through 3 of the 8 books comprising Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is also a shame, because it’s really fascinating conceptually, but it just seemed to bog down in characters who were either boring or had totally unconvincing motivation. Otherwise, I have always had a very strong completion ethic when it comes to weighty novels–at least until recently, when I began to contemplate the brevity of life against the ample sufficiency of bad wordy fiction.
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