Books You've Never Been Able to Get into or Finish

[Caledfwlch]

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I couldn't get into it at all, and was bewildered it even got published. How do write a book with no dialogue? From what little i vaguely recall they just grunted and stared at each other. I didnt understand the hype over it, thankfully it was a library book so I hadn't wasted any cash on it. Even found the film unwatchable and boring, and I usually love post apocalyptic stories!

 

[David Doherty-Jebb]

I read the first two books of the Spiritwalker trilogy, loving the first one then finding she didn't maintain her tone in the second one. It's made me a bit cautious as to whether or not I want to read the last one :S

 

[Classic_SF]

Emergence by Palmer

The single most frustrating book I have ever read.
The abstract sentence structures were unlike anything I have ever seen before.
90 pages was all I could stand. Boring and just plain bunk!

 

[soulsinging]

On Tolkien, I like The Silmarillion a lot more than Lord of the Rings [I know that's a minority view]. They're pretty different, so you may like The Silmarillion, if you check the sample to see.

I'm in this club too, even did my university thesis on the Silmarillion. The Hobbit is entertaining but little more, LOTR always left me a bit cold, but Silmarillion seems like the work he wanted to produce. You can really see the influence of epic poems like Beowulf and the Ring cycle in this book, and it winds up with much more exciting actions scenes and better pacing. Even at only a few paragraphs, the fall of Gondolin was more vivid to me than Pelennor Fields ever was.

 

[wam]

There are still some I mean to get back to - restart really - some day. Not very many. Off hand there's Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) and Stealth (Caris Davis). There might be more but I've forgotten what.

 

[soulsinging]

King's characters are dated because he's always drawn on his own childhood and youth in the 50s, 60s and 70s for his characterizations. However, it's pretty unfair to call them conservative. King is brazenly and openly liberal in his sensibilities. Many of his protagonists are teachers and writers (unsurprising, as those are the jobs he has done in his life), and there's often a sympathetic female character who has been mistreated by an ex. His villains are often religious nuts or small-town bigots. Even some of his fans have gotten tired of King beating the drum about the same old stereotypical bogeyman of his counterculture college days (see the reviews for Under the Dome).

I'm only going by the Stand here really, because I haven't read much of him, but in the Stand there are:

- villian is literally Satan
- heroes all chasing a transparently Virgin Mary figure
- hero 1 is hedonistic hollywood liberal type who only becomes worth anything once he accepts his lord and savior
- hero 2 is a sympathetic woman... who does nothing other than cry and let men order her around and was knocked up by one of them dandy, effeminate college boys (who ran off) and then gets passed around the hero group until she latches on with...
- hero 3, the REAL man that played football and skipped all that fancy book-learnin to start a business to support his family

This is dystopia as written by Newt Gingrich. Which makes sense, given he wanted to write an American answer to Tolkien's UK-Christian allegory. I just find it makes for dull reading. If I'd read this in high school or college I think it would have blown me away, but now it just feels ham-handed and overly sentimental. King was really young when he wrote this, so there's an idealism and naivete to it that I just can't get past.

 

[MWagner]

I read The Stand when I was in high school, and thoroughly enjoyed it, though I and don't have any particular urge to re-read it.

And King may seem conservative from the perspective of 2015 UK, but at the time he wrote the Stand, only around 5 per cent of Americans identified as atheists. The U.S. Democratic party had (and still has) a lot of support among the small-town, working class people King writes about in his books (and who make up much of his readership). And King is absolutely a strident and unabashed Democrat, who hates Republicans and Tea Partiers.

 

[soulsinging]

I read The Stand when I was in high school, and thoroughly enjoyed it, though I and don't have any particular urge to re-read it.

And King may seem conservative from the perspective of 2015 UK, but at the time he wrote the Stand, only around 5 per cent of Americans identified as atheists. The U.S. Democratic party had (and still has) a lot of support among the small-town, working class people King writes about in his books (and who make up much of his readership). And King is absolutely a strident and unabashed Democrat, who hates Republicans and Tea Partiers.

What about from the perspective of 2015 US, where I'm coming from? Whatever his politics, it sure seems like he's playing to an anti-intellectual crowd. The scientists are all evil and recklessly out of control, the government is evil or inept, anyone with education is a trickster, and only the god-fearing, salt of the earth have anything to contribute to the post-apocalypse.

 

[MWagner]

The guy has sold about 3 billion books. You can't be that successful in the US of A without a deep populist streak. I just disagree that populist = conservative.

 

[BAYLOR]

The guy has sold about 3 billion books. You can't be that successful in the US of A without a deep populist streak. I just disagree that populist = conservative.

Stephen King can flat out write. He's terrific.

 

[soulsinging]

The guy has sold about 3 billion books. You can't be that successful in the US of A without a deep populist streak. I just disagree that populist = conservative.

I don't think I'm saying that, so fair enough. I've got no problem with King or his fans, I'm just saying the characters in the Stand didn't do it for me and struck me as too "aww shucks" Mary Sue-ish.

 

[kythe]

The latest book I really haven't finished is "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein. It's so famous I thought I should read it, and it started off strong. But over time the story sort of dwindled away and turned into an exposition on why free love/open sexual relationships is how humans are meant to be, and how spiritual this all is. I feel like I'm reading a manual for hippies, but I didn't live through that time and it doesn't resonate with me. I've lost interest.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Emergence by Palmer

The single most frustrating book I have ever read.
The abstract sentence structures were unlike anything I have ever seen before.
90 pages was all I could stand. Boring and just plain bunk!

Having thought, hey, I didn't write a book called Emergence, I was so intrigued I googled it, to discover Emergence by David R. Palmer.

Three reviews on amazon, all 5-star, including one titled 'The best book in the world' - which, in association with Classic_SF's post, kinda illustrates the pointlessness of 5-star reviews on amazon...

 

[Mark Ragland]

While I hate to say it, I haven't been able to finish The Hobbit books by Tokien.

 

[Vladd67]

While I hate to say it, I haven't been able to finish The Hobbit books by Tokien.

Books? There was only one Hobbit, and Lord of The Rings is really one book split into three.

 

[althea]

I couldn't finish The Silmarillion.
Like Boneman,I loved Shogun but not Noble House.
My sister and I loved Shogun so much,we learned a bit of Japanese so we could speak on the phone to each other in Japanese.
That was many years ago.

 

[althea]

The Name of The Wind was an odd book to me.
It started so well,but about two thirds of the way through,I thought it wasn't so good.
I have never bothered to read the sequel.

 

[galanx]

The first time I tried "Crime and Punishment" it was just too depressing- then I heard it had a happy ending,so I slogged through it, to discover it too was mldly depressing, appeared only in the last few pages, and was put in at the demand of the publisher.

Any of the Dune books past "Dune"

 

[althea]

Oh yes,I read Dune (it seems like eons ago),I started the second book but didn't finish it.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Galanx, I read all of Crime and Punishment. Wasn't taken with it.