Which book has defeated you?

[xsquared]

Inspired by the top 100 thread, I thought I'd start a thread about books that you've tried reading, perhaps more than once, but given up on.

For me it's bloody Middlemarch! I'm 39 now and I started reading it around 15 hopefully in time to do an English essay about women's roles in 18th century literature, which was met with a "whoo" from my teacher at the time. She was right though.

Tried reading it again in my early 20s but was distracted with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
Tried again at least twice more, probably on holiday somewhere and I think I've got to admit defeat. I don't seem to get much further than shortly after Dorothea marries Casauban.

I got half way through War and Peace when it was televised but lost interest when the series finished. I may try it again this year!

Lord of the Rings defeated me. It has so much hyperbole and far too long passages of description and flowery bits that I just got bored. Who needs six pages to describe the road and a pub?

The Great Gatsby. Pretentious, dull pile of wank.

Oh no - it's a brilliant book! One of my all time faves!

Catch-22 is brilliant. I would recommend reading individual chapters and forget trying to decipher the time-line! Another one here fainting at the thought of Jane Austen being boring
The book I regularly start but can't get through the first few chapters is Tom Jones. Maybe it's just a boring book! And Wolf Hall defeated me on page 2

The Frog Report, a children's book I read at secondary school in 1982. I finished it but I just didn't get it. My book review reflected my honest opinion and I wasn't required to read it again. Utter rubbish.

My friend said to me, before I started Anna Karenina, to skim read the elections section as that had been her nemesis. I did and finished it - still a favourite (apart from the election bit)

White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Tried both several times and just couldn't get into them. Both raved about by critics but I didn't find them engaging at all.

I'm currently struggling with Outlander! I've been bought the entire series of like 10 books, so I really want to try and get into it! Can anyone encourage me? I'm finding it very slow going and not a fan of the writing style.

I'm currently working my way through various free kindle classics. Have given up on Robinson Crusoe halfway through - the first bit (not on the island) was fun but he's now been on the island for about a gazillion years and he's still not met man Friday and nothing else has happened either apart from 5 years to carve a boat out of a tree, which was then too heavy to move, and some goat care.

I can't ever get more than halfway through Vanity Fair either, which I don't understand as I think I should like it.

Love love love Dickens and Hardy.

I used to love Jane Austin when I was younger but now I've gone off them, all the love lives / gossip are a total yawn-fest now.

Tess of the D'ubervilles, God knows I've tried and tried. I find Tess so bloody annoying and Angel Clare is a sanctimonious dick.

Anything with bloody hobbits and elves and general fantasy/magic shit (and that goes for the films as well)

I read catch 22 when I was young and I loved it, must revisit it. I didn't finish Les Miserables but I will go back to it, I love the characters but find the history bits boring, although generally I like history. As I have got older I realized that I hate very descriptive prose, and I hate made up names or very long indecipherable ones. So the Hobbit defeated me, and I struggle with Russian classics. I love Jane Austen though, she never describes a scene, or a house or a person in more than a few words, bless her.

Robinson Crusoe, I absolutely HATE IT

Although I did manage to get through it. Never made it through Bleak House though.

Is there a sub category for Dickens? Bleak House is my nemesis.

A Christmas Carol, in stark contrast, is shorter and much funnier than you might expect. It's like the opposite of Bleak House.

My sister gave up on The Slap, but only after I gave her loud, drunken 'permission' to do so.

Midnights children. Yawn!

Like others above, Ulysses defeated me. I've never got beyond page 3 even on my most bored days with nothing else to do. Once the internet took off (yes, I'm so old that I was trying to read Ulysses before the internet existed) I realised I was never going to be bored enough to even attempt it again so gave it away to a charity shop.

War and Peace. I forget who's who. Restarted reading it three times and gave up.

I had trouble reading Fischers unabridged biography of Ghandi because it's hard to keep track of all those long indian names but I absolutely loved reading it. Apparantly I have trouble with foreign names.

Catcher in the Rye was my favourite book as a teen .

I love the Lord of the Rings and have read it many times, but realised when reading it to DS that I must just skip through chunks of journeying when I read it to myself. There's a lot of "they woke up. They walked a bit. It was stony. Then it was a bit less stony. The mountains seemed far away. They made camp. The next day they walked a bit, it was stony, then a bit marshy, then stony again. There were some rocks. The mountains seemed far away still but maybe a tad nearer than before."

Reading it aloud I found some actual action bits were quite new to me, when they were hidden between pages of this kind of thing.

There's a sci fi trilogy called Wool, Shift and Dust set in an underground silo civilization in which you also feel every bloody step the characters take in order to get to any action. "They needed to visit the engineer who lived 50 floors below. They went down some stairs. They passed some people. They went down some more stairs. It was tough going. They weren't there yet. They had a rest. They went down stairs again. Some plot stuff happened. Then they needed to go back to where they were so they started climbing the steps again."

Life of Pi. I persevered but I just couldn’t finish it.

Mrs. Dalloway. Just stream of consciousness bullshit. Boo hoo she’s got to throw a party and boo hoo she married a dull man.

Catch 22 yet again. I just couldn’t be bothered, which isn’t really like me.

I’ve been halfway through Anna Karenina since 2013. In my mind I’m going to pick it up any minute

I’m comforted by the fact that I’m not alone in my defeats.

Oh- and I stopped reading Shantaram halfway through. Not because it defeated me but because it is CRAP.

DH is the only person I have ever met who claims to love The Silmarillion. I end up having a crack at it every time I reread LOTR, and have never managed to finish it.

I'm pretty good at forcing myself to finish most books I start - like a pp I cracked War and Peace by reading it in short chunks (I was quite ill at the time and up several times a night so I read a few pages each time). I also read a lot of the wordier classics when I was young and full of angst - pretty much the only one I never managed to finish was Daniel Deronda.

Books I wish I hadn't bothered to finish are Moby Dick, The Alchemist and The Shadow of the Wind.

I think this quote (from Dickens!) sums up Dickens for me, although I have read a few as had to at school.

" “There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”

― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Life of Pi (and the film, which I loathed and was muttering “just eat him” throughout (I know it is an allegory, it doesn’t help)).
The Goldfinch, could not have been more tedious.
Everything by Dickens, why use one word when a paragraph will do?

Heart of Darkness. Ulysses. Both very tricky I thought.
But I'm a huge middlemarch fan!

Portrait of the artist as a Young Man was our set book for Higher at School, I read 4 Pages. Luckily we had a deeply eccentric teacher who thought the novel was a lower form of literature and forbade us from answering that part of the exam.