Which book/books have you really tried hard to read,but failed ?

[Mirage]

Mine are;
Ulysses(sp)
Wild Swans

oh, i forgot Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon-incomprehensible!

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Justine by Laurence Durrel .. the only book in the world I have truly been unable to get past the first chapter

ha grouchoscar 'on the road'
i'm with you there...read it at uni because my first boyfriend was a huge Kerouac fan and kept going on about it. I thought it was terrifically boring but I think I pretended to like it!
I can say now it is DULL DULL DULL

The Mill On The Floss

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Yeah Cat...I felt it was a dook I should read and I manged so well with Catcher in the Rye

But

All on the road is, is whinging and his mate going bonkers (again)

Paint drying was more entertaining

I did persevere with The Alchemist - total dross...

people keep reminding me of books I didn't like!
doughnuts I thought the Alchemist was a pile of cack too...

oh..forgot Sophie's World....just couldn't do it

The human stain by Phillip Roth - i wanted to like it, but it was so dry and i just couldn't do it.

any of the original thomas the tank engine books.

i failed to finish one of the Mr Men books the other day...(think it was one of the more recent ones). It was very long and very dull. Most disappointing. Definitely not as good as Mr Tickle.

I liked most of the books people didn't like on here: Cloud Atlas, The Little Friend, Timetravellers Wife, Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, etc. etc.

I've never been able to read Proust's 'Rememberance of Things Past' And even thought I loved Cloud Atlas for some reason 'Ghost Written' totally bored me shitless. I did finish Ian McEwan's 'Saturday' but it was a real bore. Am currently wading through Sebastian Faulks 'Human Traces' and that's a bit of a drag.

Middlemarch.

Anna Karenina - yawn after page 2!!!
Sophie's World
Can't manage to get beyond page 150 of the 2nd book in Lord of the Rings trilogy!
Likewise can't bring myself to start the third book of Strange and Norrell! REad the first two whilst desperately trying to breast feed dd2!!

Loved TT's Wife although resisted it for quite a while as didn't think it was my thing - was wrong! Also loved Labryinth although unsatisfied at the end!

Catch 22 - tried and failed twice, as with Lorna Doone.

Middlemarch and The Rainbow.

Middlemarch is sublime when you get into it though. It's slow.

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The only books I have failed to finish are any by Dickens

Heart of Darkness (how I passed an exam paper on it, I now wonder....)
Captain Correlli's Mandolin
Lord of the Rings
War & Peace
A Brief History of Time

Some more I can't remember now - these are ones I actually bought.

Beginning to doubt my critical faculties now, like imaginaryfriend I really enjoyed a lot of these books (though found the middle section of Cloud Atlas hard going).

Paulo Coelho though - haven't attempted The Alchemist, and won't be doing so after my dad lent me The Zahir. If only I'd looked on Amazon at the list of his novel titles and their incredibly pretentious sub-titles, I wouldn't even have bothered.

To be fair, my dad did warn me (he didn't finish it either). He didn't warn me that The Timetraveller's Wife was liable to make me bawl my eyes out over a work lunchbreak.

FWIW Another Jostein Gardner fan here - I've got all of his books including Sophie's World.

Oh failed to read LOTS of those mentioned here...

The latest though was 'The Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld. I must have restarted it about 10 times and had to keep re-reading bits due to lack of interest and forgetting the plot. I did finally drag my way painfully to the end of the book but by then couldn't care who the hell had died/killed/shagged who. I can't really remember what it was about now and have no desire to find out. A painful experience.