What did you start and just couldn't force yourself to finish?

[grumpypants]

I was reading The Seven Secrets of Happiness and it was so dire I couldn't make myself finish (knew who wd end up with who/ 'messages' blindingly obvious etc) - what shd I avoid next

It's interesting to speculate exactly WHY many of these books are so crap. What do people think about their choices? Is it because the writer was too ambitious and just couldn't handle it (e.g. wrote something "sad" and couldn't make the reader cry or even care); or was the idea implausible; or was it too pretentious?

I did laugh at your comment, about Something Might Happen, tillyfernackerpants : "Yep, something might happen. Just not in that book apparently! "

Thinking about my own nomination, there is a real intellectual sniffiness about fantasy, which could be why Stephen Donaldson was trying so hard with the "style"! Mind you, his plot was pretty cliched, too (making it hard work to get through a plot which is not exactly new, and is not exactly moving swiftly on.... honestly!)

Ulysses and Catch 22.

Every Jasper Fforde I have ever picked up, I just feel worn out by the 2nd chapter

ditto Kathy Lette

Anything by Dickens
Anything my mum lends me
Martina Cole

Catch 22 here too. Have tried 3 times.

Lord of the Rings. Why do so many men rave about it? Why?

Watch the films - you get the story line AND Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen without having to wade through all that tedious prose.

And Ulysses - pretentious crap, IMVHO. Well, the four or five pages I read were.

anything by andy mcnab (I still feel aggrieved that someone recommended him to me lol!)

val mcdermid (have tried but just can't) and some pd james I love and some I loathe

I start a lot of books and don't finish them. They sit in a pile next to my bed and sometimes I go back to them, sometimes not!

The Memory Keepers Daughter.

Bored me rigid.

A couple here already, Ulysses, Catch 22, now trying Middlesex but struggling.

Have Midnight's Children to fall back on though!

Any Thomas Mann book or Salman Rushdie book. Just plain lost interest a quarter of the way through.

The Book Thief

I dont think it's a bad book. I was enjoying it when I stopped reading it but didnt feel compelled to finish it. Then I started reading something else and forgot about it.

Men like Lord of the Rings because it almost reads like a non-fiction (lots of backstory, lots of historical "facts", lots of side stories). Most men prefer non-fiction to fiction.

recently Wolf Hall
too bloody heavy to read in bed
may try again when desperate for something to read

Gormenghast and those Avalon ones - and I am of the 'you've started a book so you must finish it' school so they had to be really dire for me to stop!

The Debacle (Zola)

Not surprising really but I was disappointed in myself.

Winged - sometimes the writing is so rubbish - you can heatr the clunkingness of thought being put into the prose. Sometimes I pick up a slummymummy type book and then realise I can't bear to read such drivel. And sometimes I think I will relive my Eng Lit degree...and fail..

The time travellers wife.
Lovely Bones
Anything by Rory MacLean. I keep forgetting that I dislike his flowery style and have ended up buying two of his books. Shame as he has been to some really interesting places.

Moby Dick
Gulliver's Travels
The Silmarillion
Something by James Joyce that nearly put me in a coma, Dubliners I think.
The first time I tried Neverwhere I got Nowhere... Thankfully I tried a second time and loved it.

Sophie's World
I hate being defeated by a book but I started this in the mid 90s and still it laughs at me from the bookshelf. (I am one of these people who cannot get rid of books, even when it's obviously psychologically bad for me to keep them...)
And another vote for Gormenghast. I rather overenthusiastically bought all 3 at the same time.

PMSL re Ulysses.

I'm afraid I would be being rather disingenuous if I claimed "I just couldn't force myself to finish" it. I think I read about twelve pages before giving up.

I'll also vote for Sophie's World.
Icarus by Russell Andrews - I read it as a teen, when I hated the idea of unhappy endings. Too many people died half way through, and it depressed me. In the end I got someone to just tell me what happens.
Once by James Herbert - Ble. Just, ble.

This might just be me,but the books I can't finish seem to be books I've started because I think I should read them,rather than thinking,wow that looks good,I must read it NOW.So I'm not sure it's the authors fault!
(Middlemarch is the prime example of this -best english novel, someone said to me,and I triedto finish it..)
I've read the Gormenghast Trilogy though,but I'm not sure I could do it again...(and I like Stephen Donaldson)

Sophie's World for me too (even though DH has read it twice and I'm the one with the English degree )

Life of Pi was just awful. It keeps going off on rambly asides about animal behaviour and not in an interesting David Attenborough way either I gave up.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one defeated by Catch 22 - think I've tried it 4 or 5 times now, was determined to read it as it's "so good"..........nah

however

"Lord of the Rings. Why do so many men rave about it? Why?"

I like the Lord of the Rings, read almost all of it on one (extremely delayed) train journey home when I was a teenager.....then re-read it again a few years

Cloud Atlas nearly killed me it was so badly done!