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

Midnight's Children.

However, loads below I have really enjoyed: White Teeth, Brick lane, Corelli, The great Gatsby (what on earth was wrong with that??) The English Patient, Moby Dick (skimming some of the more tedious chunks, admittedly), The Dubliners, Somethng Might Happen, Atonement - all great novels!

Having attempted Lord of the Rings as a teenager I have never again opened a book with anything goblin-like in it. I can't bear all that goblinny fantasy.

But I did read Ulysees all the way through...can't remember much of it.

and Kevin - I did read it all the way thorugh, but resent the time I spent on it. Awful. Badly written, pointless, horrible..

wingedvictory glad I brightened up your day

prosecco I did manage to finish Tenderness of Wolves and wondered why I bothered!!

Wolf Hall I'm trying to read now...

But I loved Catch-22, LOTR & Time Traveller's Wife!

Someone mentioned Zen and the Art, that's sat on my bookshelf, still waiting to be read as it has done for the last, ooohh 3 years?!!

Another vote for We need to talk about Kevin (found it utterly unconvincing)
Oscar & Lucinda (wanted to like it, but just couldn't get into it)
Catch 22 (also couldn't get into it)
Zen & the Art (ditto)
The Monkey Wrench Gang (ditto again)

I do, however LOVE Three men in a Boat (and Three men on the Bummel, perhaps even more so).

I also find quite often that I start a book & can't get into it, then come back to it months or years later & really love it.

Another one here defeated by Catch 22. Tried several times.
Never again. Seriously.
NEVER

I had a couple of runs at Catch 22, but it was worth it when I did read it.

Didn't mind Kevin.

I'd totally forgotten Zen and the art - I've got it on my shelf unread, it gets handed from one family member to the other - like pass the bomb.

Sophie's World (several attempts, think i'll start at the end next time)
The Life of Pi
Midnight's Children

Catch 22 requires a bit of commitment at the beginning, but is so so worth it

Some of these are my favourite books - Kevin, Time Travelers Wife, Cloud Atlas, Oscar & Lucinda.

But I couldn't get through Zen/Motorcycle Maintenance, Moby Dick, anything by Dostoyevsky, and really struggle with anything by Eco although I got through enjoyed Name of the Rose.

I did finish the Alchemist but resented every single second I spent reading it as time I would not get back. Trite nonsense IMVHO.

I originally joined a book club because I was struggling to finish any fiction at all.

I do think part of me just feels 'none of this is real'. It has to be absorbing to get me under the surface and living in the world of the book. When it happens it's so amazing though

Thanks to book club I've finished lots of wonderful stuff that I would never in a million years have read solo. But I couldn't read more than a chapter of Women in Love. What absolute tosh. God the Bloomsbury Group were a pain. They seemed to have no idea how much their ideas were of the time, rather than universal truths.

Crime and Punishment is worth the effort IMO, just takes a while to get used to the names.

I couldn't understand captain corelli's mandolin either but I liked the memory keepers daughter.
Can't finish anything by Jodie Picault

I cheated with Crime and Punishment and bought the audio book for a long drive. Job done.

Lord of the Rings.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The god of small things.I have tried twice,but I can't get even half way.I DID finish We need to talk about Kev but out of compulsion rather than joy as it was so blooming awful.

As a bit of a joke gift, my friends bought me a Mills and Boon book for 40p at a car boot sale. I left it for a while, but curiosity got the better of me and I tried about 3 times to read it, but never got further than page 4.

I was well prepared for it to be awful, however I severely underestimated the dire awfulness of it.

Another vote here foe Sophie's World. I've tried several times and I can't remember anything about it now!

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

I love love love Sophie's World - or at least I did when I read it years ago. (Maybe I was younger and less demanding).

But Ulysses completely defeated me, and I am glad to see I am not the only one.

The only other book I couldn't bear to finish was Adam Bede - the conversation being written in dialect completely got on my nerves.

(Oh, and I never finished Hotel du Lac, but that was only because I left it on a train and I wasn't enjoying it enough to warrant buying another copy!)

I did finish Life of Pi but almost wish I hadn't because the ending was so odd and sort of disappointing.

Likewise Captain Corelli's Mandolin - the end was so pathetic and unrealistic.

Cloud Atlas - my eyes were bleeding with boredom

The Hobbit

Yes Secondcoming - I need to be able to say the name or my version of it, or I sort of mentally stumble every time it crops up.

Moby Dick
Catch 22 (another one! Have tried more than once...)
Great Expectations (and I love a lot of Dickens' other novels)
Zen and the Art of ... (I got through about 3/4 of this then realised I had no idea what I'd been reading for the last 50 pages or so...and gave up with relief)

There are more, but those are the ones that just made me want to bang my head against a brick wall.

That's true with Captain Corelli, liked the book but hated the ending, so implausible.

I find John Crace's Digested Reads in the Guardian (200 words or fewer, in the style of the original) an excellent antidote to any guilt about not reading some books.

It's amazing, how duff some plots themselves are, so that an author who seems absolutely brilliant in the book(s) s/he is known for, becomes a real trial in some other Tome. Sometimes, all right, the problem is that something is juvenilia (Charlotte Bronte's The Professor - ugh), but sometimes it just doesn't work: Paul Magrs wrote To the Devil- A Diva! - which was almost The Master and Margarita in Manchester (less many things, of course: Bulgakov is Great), but Aisles was sooo dull: Iris Murdoch still alive in an internet chatroom. I mean no offence to Alzheimer's sufferers, but it was as though Magrs was losing it a bit, too, when he wrote this.

I guess it's just disappointing when form and content aren't properly aligned: have too thin a story and the style is visible - not something you want to be thinking about if you're reading for pleasure.