I can count on the fingers of one hand the books I've abandoned after once beginning them. It takes the other hand and some toes to include books I've finished, then vowed never again to read that author.
See, I fall in love with books. I eat, sleep, breathe the protagonist's problems, imbibe his ideals, yearn for her desires, mourn their losses. I trust the author I have met and loved before to take me on an interesting journey. I'll make the connections, I'll put in the hours, just take me along!
So when I do encounter a novel that I just cannot finish, I don't think it's just me. Gregory Maguire let me down with Mirror, Mirror, after I tripped with Wicked, The Ugly Stepsister and Lost. I haven't thrown out the book—yet—but I can't get past page 46. The characters don't engage me, and this is one time the retelling of the fairy tale is not refreshing, but boring. I'll try again, perhaps some day when my reading well has gone dry. Meanwhile, it sits on my shelf, one prominent crease in the spine marking where it lay open on the coffee table for three weeks.
Richard Paul Russo is also on my wha' hoppen? list. Ship of Fools has a great concept (a generation-ship whose crew have forgotten their origins, and encountered something that may be evil), and the author had done wonderful things with the "cyberthriller" Carlucci novels. But somewhere in the middle of Ship, the story simply grinds to a halt. You don't care anymore, you just want OUT!
I "try before I buy" with books, by applying the Rule of 33, although usually I only do this with a new or untrusted author. But before I developed that rule, I read Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home. I devoured this book, because I had so enjoyed The Other. In fact, even my rule would not have helped me spot this one. The problem with Tryon's book, for me, was what I call the "unexpected gross-out." This is a shocking plot element that is unforeseen because the writer has carefully masked its approach, the authorial equivalent of burying a razor-blade in a sweet red apple.
Article comments
1 - Brooke Lee
I fall in love with books too and go to sleep with them at night. I literally cannot bring myself to part with a book I so dearly love. And woe be unto the person who's borrowed a beloved book and has yet to return it.
The Celestine Prophecy: My God that was so crappy I could squish it between my toes. I'm not even sure if I made past the third or fourth chapter. I'd go into bookstores and libraries and try to hide their entire stash of copies.
2 - Ken Dean
For me it's Clive Cussler. I picked up Raise the Titanic years ago and couldn't come close to finishing it.
Two scenes stand out in my mind. In the first, the hero (Dirk Pitt, I believe) is having his bona fides as a maverick naval officer established. This is done through the observation that he didn't receive a Good Conduct medal. Very little research was needed for Cussler to know that officers don't receive good conduct medals, only enlisted personnel. The second scene was far worse. Pitt is having dinner with a couple of other people. When another person joins them, someone about whom Pitt has his suspicions. Pitt begins to act flamboyantly gay in an effort to make this newcomer "underestimate him". Not only is this idiotic on its face, but the other people at the table don't appear to notice that Pitt has suddenly morphed into a drag queen!
Drag adequately expresses my opinion of Clive Cussler. He has since become a quote whore. Whenever one of his quotes can be found on a book jacket, I forgo that book every time.
3 - Nick Jones
Alas Shrugged. I must have read about fifty pages in when I realized that the characters did not even begin to correspond to any living, breathing people I had ever met. Bye bye.
The Celestine Prophecy. If you have read as much about different varieties of spirituality as I have, esoteric or otherwise, you will learn nothing new from it.
The first Peter Straub/Stephen King collaboration (I've forgotten the name: Yay!). I tossed the book after the scene where the boys were machine-gunning alligator-men from the back of a truck. (Has anyone besides me noticed that Straub's writing gets worse after he teams with King?)
War and Peace (sic). A great piece of literature, but after reading something like 300-400 pages in one day when I was home sick from school, I just never could get back into it again.
Remembrance of Things Past. Someday I'll get back into it and finish at least the first book. Today is not that day.
4 - Tan The Man
War and Peace for me too. I first tried to read it when I was 10. Read 50 pages and stopped. I picked it up again every two years or so and can never get past page 50. I've made it my life's passion to finish it before I die.
5 - Geek's Girl
The only book I've never finished is "Hellfire" by John Saul. Though I have read and enjoyed some of his other books since, this one I could just not finish. Too disturbing for me, but that was a good few years ago and if I ever manage to get hold of another copy I might just finish it.
I do like the sound of the Rule of 33 and might give that a try next time I'm out shopping for books.
6 - SFC SKI
I really enjoyed William Gibson's works, but I am really having a hard time getting into "Pattern Recognition"
Most of Dickens' works are ovrwritten and wordy, not surprising considering most of them were penny a word serializations. I have never finshed "David Copperfield", but not for lack of trying.
7 - JR
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard - what a bunch of self-indulgent crap. A tiresome distillation of what I hate about Humanities majors.
8 - DrPat
There are some names I never expected to see here: Dickens, Cussler...
On the other hand, Proust, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are almost type-authors for this kind of rejection. Who has not vowed to read War and Peace someday? (Or, like Monty Python, "summarize Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu"...)
Many ships have come to grief on the rocks of Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Nick - I suspect you'd have a similar problem with the equally homilectic Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.
As for Crime and Punishment, I had to reach my 40s before I could connect sufficiently to finish that novel. Perhaps I will manage to finish Mirror, Mirror or Ship of Fools with another decade's experience under my belt...
9 - Sunny
Ug...the worst books I've ever read are Desperation and The Regulators by Stephen King. Well, by Stephen King and Stephen King's pseudonym. I finished them but they were so far out there for me...I couldn't come close to even telling you what they are about. I usually love Stephen King's books; but those were just not my cup of tea.
10 - Dan
For me, it has to be _The Corrections_. I really wanted to like that book, but I just couldn't get into it. It struck me as very John Irving-esque with all its sexually dysfunctional characters--and that might have appealed to me more during my Irving phase, but not so much now.
11 - Lisa McKay
After having really enjoyed Anne Rice's earlier vampire books (and the Mayfair witch stories as well), I found myself disappointed enough with the last few of them to not be in such a hurry to read the next.
12 - Lisa McKay
Oh, and Mirror, Mirror is sitting in my to-be-read pile, so I'll check in with you when I'm done with it, DrPat, and we can compare notes.
13 - dietdoc
DrPat: Thanks for the link to Rule of 33. Excellent tip and one I will certainly try in the future. I am heartened to see that so many BC folks do actually still read books. Remember the days that hearalded the death of all print media in favor of "digital paper?" I think projections for that ever taking effect have been really laid to rest. Literacy lives! At least it lives at BC.
Cheers,
Ron
14 - Nick Jones
I hated Interview With the Vampire when I first read it, possibly because of the homoerotic subtext. Then I saw the movie, read it again, and liked it much better the second time around. I then went on to The Vampire Lestat. And after Lestat says for the UMPTEENTH TIME, after saving his mother from death by making her a vampire, that she was not the same person as she was when alive, I was like, "Enough, already!"
15 - DrPat
Thanks, Nick, for that reminder (need another foot, now) - After enjoying Rice's Vampire novels, I bought the New Orleans novel Cry to Heaven. It still sits on my shelf - I don't think I even made it to page 46 in that one!
16 - Rob
"The Clan of the Cave Bear" series started off okay. But by the 3rd book I found I was working to get through it. I read about 50 pages into the 4th book and gave up. I just didn't care anymore. Although, somebody likes them because she keeps publishing more sequels.
17 - alpha
There are too many unreadable books to even think about let alone list. And too many readable ones that have been or should be read as soon as I can.
But THE RULE OF 33 is a great idea to try on the ones that seem or seemed unreadable.
18 - Nancy
SFC Ski: don't bother w/David Copperfield - it's one long, self-pitying whine from a spoiled celebrity stuck in an extended midlife crisis, with the hots for a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Even the secondary characters like the Micawbers can't save it. Yeah, that's a good capsule summary. And I'm a Dickens maniac.
19 - SFC SKI
Thanks for the summary and the warning. (Sidenote, English Classical Literature in paperback form is one of the easier things to find outside the English speakng world, and some of the least expensive, as such, if I run out of trash fiction to read when abroad, I usually wind up buying a classic, and actually enjoyed more than a few of them.)
20 - miriam
I personally loathed Big Russ and Me. What I read of it was so banal, I thought he must have phoned it in--on a really cheap cell phone.
As Truman Capote (I think) once said: "That's not writing, it's typing."
I liked David copperfield, but both Dora and Agnes were a bit over the top.
21 - DrPat
Rob, you may have encountered the phenomenon Rachel called "Jumping the shark in fiction," in which later offerings in a series lose focus, power or quality.
I've experienced this in Harry Turtledove's many and diverse alternate history series, although that may be more due to being unable to keep the divergent events and charactors straight in my mind as I go from one series to another. In any case, I've learned to NOT rely on novels after #2 in Turtledove's multitude of series.
I loved Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear so much i actually (*gasp*) bought it in hardback, and the following three novels as well. But the last one I read was Valley of the Horses, so I know what you mean.