books I started but haven't managed to finish
Submitted by cmonster on Tue, 04/13/2004 - 10:29
Tags:
- Arabella - Georgette Heyer: Um, is it wrong to want to slap a story's heroine senseless?
- Humbug Mountain - Sid Fleischman: Now, I love me some Sid Fleischman, and I know the Old West was not the romantic showgirls and misunderstood-brokenhearted-gunmen picture many movies would have us believe, but just the first 30 pages of this book were so gritty, so downtrodden, so mean to animals that I don't think any of us would have benefited if I'd finished the other 110. Back to the library it goes.
- My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time - Liz Jensen: The parts set in 18th century Copenhagen are fantastic, so much so that I read the first 100 pages at lunch at work, a scant 10 minutes after checking this book out from the library. But then the time travel portions suck all joy from, not just the rest of the book, but surrounding books as well. That's some mighty suck.
- The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf: This was on my to-read list for years. I made it through the first 2 chapters and then went to bed for 6 months.
- Night Life of the Gods - Thorne Smith: Yipes.
- The Clandestine Circle
- Beyond Mammoth Cave: A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave - two cavers; look, I know it's cavalier, and maybe a little naive, but this book was just page after page of how rad these cavers are (written by the cavers in question) and all the wiggling around it takes to get through small passageways. And though you might think that's all you'd get with books about caving, I've read good caving stuff. This is not good caving stuff. Cue the Big Bucket O'Dislike (tm stooky).
- Angels and Demons - Dan Brown. My sister is insisting I try this one again.
- The Alpine Icon - Mary Daheim
- Yonder Stands Your Orphan - Barry Hannah
- The Devil Wears Prada - Lauren Weisberger
- House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski (I'm giving it one last college try)
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler encounters a book this bad, he or she might want to lie down in the snow.
Author Comments:
I go by the 50-page rule: if I can get 50 pages into a book I have to finish it. But I didn't even get half that far into these.
Cloned From:
You might want to give Neuromancer a try in it's BBC Radio audio drama form. I wasn't really impressed by the book when I first read it (well, more like "forced myself to finish"), but after listening to the radio play I actually want to give it a re-read and (maybe) hit up the sequels.
Unfortunately, I have an auditory issue that won't work with radio dramas or books on tape.
Do you like Angels and Demons, after all? I didn't like the two main heroes and found the beginning weak (the scientific blabla), but when they begin the race to found the murderer, I enter in the novel. At least, the end is less laughable than the Da Vinci Code... I like it in overall.
Oh I still haven't finished it. I tried it again and still didn't like it, so it's on the shelves, and I'll try it one last time at some point. After all, it took me a full five tries to get through Neuromancer.
Since it was strike I thought that you have finished it.
I perfectly know what you mean; I have tried LOTR and Utopia trillion times.
Since lastly I mostly borrow my books from the library, it helps me to finish them before bring them back. At first, I didn't want to read She Who Must Be Obeyed, but in the end I read it and it was great!