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Do you ever struggle finishing a book?

Meminger said:
I think it would be interesting to know which books we struggled with finishing. It would be nice if we would not get our feelings hurt by knowing someone else didn't like a book we really enjoyed. After all, we all come from very different backgrounds and have different tastes. We don't hesitate to admit to really liking certain books.
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Yeah, taste is subjective after all.

Books I tend to struggle with are mid to late eighteenth century ones. Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure took me over a month. I really liked the story but I had to re-read bits because the language was quite difficult for me to get a handle on.
 
Just at the moment I am having trouble even starting the books I intended to read. Too much else going on in life. :sad: or :) depending on how one looks at it.
 
I think we all do that on occasion. Some books just wear you out, even though they may be good. I am a big James Michener fan but there were some books of his I had to try twice to finish. (Hawaii was one of them.So was Caribbean. )

However, I do admit that I don't like the feeling of abandoning a book halfway through. I like to try finishing anything that I start.
 
mtdmind said:
I think we all do that on occasion. Some books just wear you out, even though they may be good. I am a big James Michener fan but there were some books of his I had to try twice to finish. (Hawaii was one of them.So was Caribbean. )

However, I do admit that I don't like the feeling of abandoning a book halfway through. I like to try finishing anything that I start.
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More and more, I look for a reason to abandon a book part-way through -- sometimes after even only a few pages, if it offends me enough. It is the only way I know to trim my backlog quickly, apart from being completely ruthless and arbitrary. :D
 
Bad Books

:sad: This has only happened so far one time, where it was really hard for me to read this book. I had to put it down, and did not want to pick the book up again. Yet, I had started reading this book and did not want to leave it unfinished I read it, and turned out to be a good book, it was just the first couple of chapters that were slow. :cool:
 
The book I'm reading at the moment is awfully hard going for me. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (first published 1759). The library has so far reissued it to me twice.

I'm almost half way...
 
Will you feel that you've let yourself down if you don't continue? I've put away books that were hard slogging thinking that I might go back and finish them but they just sit gathering dust and then they're forgotten. Once forgotten I cease to feel guilty and if you're reading for entertainment rather than enlightenment I feel it's a waste of time if you're not enjoying what you're reading.
 
I have decided a long time ago that life is too short to waste time on bad books. Or on books that simply don't seem to be written for me, no matter how much critics or other readers love them. I don't feel guilty when I abandon a book that fails to capture me.

In some cases, though, I have gone back and given a certain book another chance at a later point because I felt I had tried to read it at the wrong time.
 
I do this, more than I'd like to admit really. It's usually books I wouldn't have necessarily sought out on my own but they got really hyped/popular and I wanted to see why. A couple examples: The Corrections, The Girl w/the Dragon Tattoo books (I did finish the first one, quit about 100 pages into the second), the Hunger Games books. They weren't bad, exactly, just failed to grab me. Like Hedwig said, life's too short.
 
canuck said:
Will you feel that you've let yourself down if you don't continue? I've put away books that were hard slogging thinking that I might go back and finish them but they just sit gathering dust and then they're forgotten. Once forgotten I cease to feel guilty and if you're reading for entertainment rather than enlightenment I feel it's a waste of time if you're not enjoying what you're reading.
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I'm enjoying the book but as I'm no scholar there is a considerable stop/start element to my style of reading. The language being eighteenth century English is very rich and the in-jokes being of the time require note dipping to be more fully appreciated. Hard work but very satisfying.
 
Congrats on your persistence. Do you stay with the one book until finished or do you hop around? :)
 
Great link SFG!
Funny, but I've read and finished a good number of the books mentioned there, and haven't (yet) started the others.
[private joke: even finished Ravelstein, which isn't mentioned there at all. :D]
But I do defer and abandon books. Mercilessly.
 
ChaosTheory said:
Ah yes, poor Moby Dick, that one is definitely a chore. LOTR, well, either you get caught up in its universe or you don't. I never read Atlas Shrugged, I got through The Fountainhead but just barely. But Catch-22? That one kind of surprises me.
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You don' hear much of it, but I'd love to hear argument asserting that The Fountainhead was the better book.
 
I did like that, at its core, Fountainhead is about a man struggling to keep his artistic integrity. It's pretty mean-spirited and nasty in parts though, which I guess you know you're going to get with Rand but anyway...I don't think it gets as bogged down in text as AS, but I've only seen snippets of AS.
 
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