Irish Readers discussion

Haven't been in this situation in a long time... about 50 pages into a book and from a bad start it's geting progressively worse. So I'm calling it quits.
Interested to know what books you have started and abandoned as not worth the time.
Mine is John Connor's A Child's Game, just a mess of characters with nothing to inspire hope that it might improve.

About a year ago, I decided it was high time I read a few classics. Books that people are always talking about and some which in some circles it is just presumed you've read. :)

Well,it's hard!(sometimes) Don't get me wrong the majority are great stories but some of them are exhausting to read. The only book that I've read that I've put down in the last 5 years wasEmma by Jane Austen. I'm even hesitent to post it because some people hold her books in such high regard. But whether it was the book, my general attitude starting it or the fact that it really just wasn't for me, I quickly tired of the tooing and froing of this childish character who thinks she can manipulate people's feelings and lives to suit her own imaginings.

The only other was Lionboy: The Truth but that was a long time ago and a bit childish :) though I was a child at the time :D

My book is
American Godsread a third of the book and just could not connect with it, not my type of book at all and was gald to abandon it for something better.

I just abandoned A Game of Thrones... ugh! It reminds me of a whole host of fantasy books I read in my teens and it just does not compare... maybe it is just the crappy start and I should have given it longer but going by the reviews (written reviews not ratings) on here by people I trust... it doesn't get better!

Anna wrote: "A few...I read the first page of Moby-Dick or, The Whale before I was like feck this, I can't be arsed. I read a few chapters of Eat, Pray, Love before I literally threw ..." oh have to agree on
Eat, Pray, Love finished it but found it such self indulgent nonsense.

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova-what a waste of my precious time!!finished it but seriously skimmed through the second half-mess of a book!!

Vicki wrote: "I've more or less abandoned American Gods, Im gonna give it a go at the weekend to try to finish before the end of April.
Another I've abandoned was Dawn french's book. I couldnt get into it. [..."

Vicki, I'm the same... Will try it again... But not holding out much hope of finishing it.

I try not to abandon but sometimes it's just not worth it... the last book I quit was that witch one with the blue cover, can't even think of it's name! What an impact it made huh??
LOL

ps just remembered, it was A Discovery of Witches

For me it is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. More so because i have exams and dont have the time and patience right now. But i do plan on getting back to it.

Same goes for Murphy by Beckett.

I leant Archangel to my mam when I was done 'cause she's into all them crime mystery whatever they're called type novels. she couldn't even get through the first 100pgs before giving up. haha. i thought she'd have liked it.

God, I came close with that one too, but I had it on Audiobook, and I had nothing else to listen to.

Vicki wrote: "I hate to admit it, sorry Dave and Joanna but Catch-22 Got to page 100
"
Tbh, I didn't think you would enjoy it. I'll push you to continue just like every other Catch fan. I think the 2nd half is widely thought to be much better. Plus, Milo Minderbinder is my personal hero.

I'm just after packing in The Human Stain, just couldn't get any feelings for the characters. And his writing annoys me I suppose. Reminds me of an interview I saw with James Ellroy when he (Ellroy) was claiming to be one of the best writers of all time.. Roth's vocabulary is definitely admirable but, it's impossible to read at times. It doesn't flow with such elaborate structure imo. (Especially when you're stopping to look up words in the dictionary every 5 mins). There are some excellent and really beautiful passages but the bad parts really outweighed the good too much for me.

Vicki wrote: "I've more or less abandoned American Gods, Im gonna give it a go at the weekend to try to finish before the end of April.
Another I've abandoned was Dawn french's book. I couldnt get into it. [..."

Understandable Vicki. He writes well, but sometimes that's just not enough.

Moby Dick for me... tried half a dozen times on that book and never got past half way through. I completed One Hundred Years of Solitude but only because I was feeling rather masochistic at the time.

Vicki wrote: "I hate to admit it, sorry Dave and Joanna but Catch-22 Got to page 100 by shear determination not enjoyment. Im throwing in the towel for now. I'll come back to it again. I hate to gi..."

Aaww, that's a shame :) I try not to be this annoying person telling you 'YOU HAVE GOT TO READ THIS!!' but when it comes to Catch-22 it takes all my self restraint not to ;)

Me? I very rarely abandon books, I'm masochistic that way... Sometimes I do it with the ones I suspect I might like if I read them in a different state of mind (e.g. Memoirs of a Survivor and I'll probably do the same with The Black Prince) but I come back to those eventually.

Sometimes I finish a book out of pure spite, so that I can feel justified in bitching about it afterwards (The Mysteries of Udolpho and the whole Twilight series are such examples).

A book that completely conquered me was this supposedly major Polish classic that none of you have ever heard about (and you're REALLY NOT missing out): Wladyslaw Reymont's 'Chlopi' (meaning 'The Peasants')... I had to read it in highschool and then in college again but I kept falling asleep every 30 pages or so :/ I gave up.

@Craig - try giving Moby-Dick or, The Whale a 7th go around, was worth the effort for me anyway. I can empathise on One Hundred Years of Solitude - just about got through it, think it was on a very wet weekend.
@Vicky - I think the first half of Catch-22 is the price you have to pay to get to enjoy the second half
@Paul - the exquisite attention to detail in the choice of vocabulary in The Human Stain was a positive for me, but the real joy was in the characters

Archangel is in danger of joining this list for me, very tempted to just read the spoilers thread here and call it a day

Funny to see One Hundred Years of Solitude get a few mentions. That's the first one I gave up on. It was the all the characters with the same name that really got me. I usually have enough trouble keeping up with characters with different names.

The first audiobook I got was The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolano. I should have known better when I heard it compared to Márquez. I finished it but didn't like it.

Few months ago I heard of another "best book ever", called Shadow of the Wind. Which I didn't find very good at all and gave up quickly.

Now if I hear of someone's favourite book, and it's a Spanish to English translation I avoid it like the plague.

To be honest - I'm more prone to try and finish a book if I've paid a good few quid for it - whereas if I happen to have got a book for free, one way or the other, I'll give up on it a lot quicker if it isn't cutting the mustard.

Hmm... One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books (though I prefer Love in the Time of Cholera by a very narrow margin)... And I really like Roberto Bolano too. And generally I've quite a few beloved authors from South America. I wonder why people find them unreadable? :)

Andy wrote: "@Craig - try giving Moby-Dick or, The Whale a 7th go around, was worth the effort for me anyway. I can empathise on One Hundred Years of Solitude - just about got through i..."

I'm going to get back to it eventually Andy. It's remembered as a great book for a reason.

Joanna wrote: "Hmm... One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books (though I prefer Love in the Time of Cholera by a very narrow margin)... And I really like Roberto Bolano too. And generally I've qu..."

I really enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera and read it several times over the years. An Evil Hour was also very much to my liking. Marquez' casual obsvervation on the nuances of human character and behavior is very penetrating and, even more important, very forgiving.

> I wonder why people find them unreadable? :)

It's quite specific for me and One Hundred Years, it was all about the confusing character names. Found that quite frustrating. Otherwise thought it a good book.

Though, as stupid and apolitical as this might make me sound, I tend to get a bit bored when books dwell on historical conflict and politics.

Craig wrote: I really enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera and read it several times over the years. An Evil Hour was also very much to my liking. Marquez' casual obsvervation on the nuances of human character and behavior is very penetrating and, even more important, very forgiving.

Absolutely! It's a while since I've read anything of his, but I am always touched by his understanding of human nature. And I love the quality of his prose (that goes for quite a bit of Latin American writers I read), I am never sure how to put it in words, but it seems to be at the same time so realistic and matter of fact but at the same time so dreamy and otherwordly. Love it! :)

John wrote: "> I wonder why people find them unreadable? :)

It's quite specific for me and One Hundred Years, it was all about the confusing character names. Found that quite frustrating. Otherwise thought it..."

Yeah, I can see how that can be an issue :) I find a lot of people struggling for simmilar reasons with Russian novels. I'm Polish and speak a bit of Russian so Russian names just never 'caused me much trouble but I can see how confusing they can be for a native English speakers.
As to the political-historical aspect, I don't mind in the slightest, but that's just matter of my personal interests. :)

Just speaking for myself, it was too abstract.

Possibly the author is just a singular human being who has the capacity to gaze upon others without judgement, and that's just something so few people do. I wish we were all so gifted. But as a man of letters, he has few equals and no superiors.

Agreement on Kerouac, Naoise and its appeal mystifies me too. "When you find yourself in agreement with the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." Mark Twain

Ok, I need to step in defense of Kerouac and 'On The Road' here. Craig, you say that his appeal mystifies you, well, I can only speak for myself but I'll give you my reasons.

It's one of the books that I absolutely adored in my late teenage years and early twenties. Every time I read it (and I read it a lot, I re-read books I love frequently) I would get 'itchy feet' myself and go off somewhere on a wander. It's funny you call it monotonous Naoise, I found it exhilarating, energetic, get-out-of-your-comfy-burrow-and-DO-something-SEE-something-carpe-diem sort of a book.

I haven't read it for a while though and only very recently got back to it, to see if my attitude to it hasn't changed, after some tosses and turns in my life and resulting from them changes in my understanding of the world and my sensibility.

And while I perhaps wasn't as blown away by it as previously, I still found it a wonderful read. I also perhaps started appreciating it a bit more on a stylistic level. The prose in it is at times chaotic, ruff on the edges, raw even, but that's intentional, part of Kerouac's philosophy of writing. Within this chaos though, he proves himself to be a surprisingly precise and disciplined writer. He wanted this book to take a 'form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz' and like in jazz the wild improvisation is still always subordinate to the precise and deliberate rhythm and melody.

Take this (my favorite, both for content and for its form) short quote:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

It's so perfect, the fireworks metaphor and then all the 's' sounds: 'exploding like spiders across the stars' you actually hear the hiss of a firework going off and the explosion. It's vivid, it's energetic even on the phonetics level. A sensibility to sound of that degree is usually a lot more evident with poets than prose writers. This is just one tiny example, I don't want to write a thesis here, but the book is filled with little jewels like that. I love him for his lyricism, for his unashamed and arrogant youth, for the energy of his prose.

I can only speak for myself, and of course Craig, one should be critical of what one's reading, not just follow others' opinion. But, sorry, that quote from Twain is in this context a bit of a cheap shot don't you think? What I mean is, it's absolutely fine for you guys not to like this book and, for all the enjoyment I find in it, I can see how it can be not everyone's cup of tea. But this quote insinuates that a person can only like it if they can't think critically and only follow the established reputation of the book/author. If you think about it, you could try and discredit every classic novel that way - everyone agrees this is a great book, therefore it cannot be. ? ;)

OOOOOH controversial. I have it on my shelf. Must read it now..

I don't know Joanna....I think that quote by Mark Twain is always appropriate, although Twain probably would have liked Keroauc, being a wanderer himself. But I've always been of the less-is-more persuasion. Keroauc just needs to incessantly hammer on your head, and that's not convincing to me. That kind of delivery makes me think the author is trying to convince himself as much as he's trying to convince his readers. I understand you like him, perhaps because you're one of the "mad ones," the fire-in-the-gut, run through the wall, never stop reaching for the horizon types. But I'm not, so Jack K.'s attempt to verbally inflame me sputters out pretty quick. You like a forest of imagery in which a leaf represents a thousand ideas, but I like those Zen stone gardens, where meaning is found in the empty space between the stones. I wouldn't call him "shiite," but I'm deaf to his music. But that's just me. It doesn't make me wrong, it just means I need a different composer. If I had to pick an alternative that would suit me, Cormac McCarthy's Border Triology would be my choice, especially the first two books. Not sure you'd like them, but that's you. That's all.

:) I like me a debate!

Fair enough. All good reasons, as I said I see how he would not suit everyone's tastes (who would?). I just wanted to give my reason for why I do like 'On The Road' and by extension maybe also why he is still widely read and appeals to many readers.

And I apologize Craig, I might have read a bit too much into the Mark Twain's quote.

Incidentally I really liked Border Trilogy. I don't like one particular style of writing or philosophy behind it. I think literature gives a unique opportunity to see through many eyes, experience and understand multiple points of view. 'On The Road' is one of my favorite books, but so is 'Glass Bead Game' which with its quiet, meditative prose would probably be closer to your Zen stone gardens (you might enjoy it actually). But I get your point. I have writers like that, objectively I can see that they're good writers, but they just don't speak to me.

@Vicky - if it is any consolation, Catch-22 is one of the books most often shelved as unfinished

Heh, reading 'Little Brother' by Cory Doctorow and there's a bit where the main character talks about 'On the Road', it perfectly encaptulates how I felt about it as a teenager:

"I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind -- only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. He makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what I mean.

There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff."

I made it 10 pages, and gave up on it. Too many spelling and grammar mistakes, which I just can't tolerate unless it's a book about racial segregation. I had heard such good things about this, and was thouroughly disappointed.

Also Atonement I just could not stomach the over description. Briony spend a page and a half describing her hand...I, in turn, used my own hand to throw the book across the room and smash it into the wall.

Ulisses ... I just couldn't do it. I gave it a try, was not inspired, didn't find it particularly interesting or engaging, got a little bit sick of the style of English but more importantly, couldn't take it out with me in public because I'd look like one of those people who like to be seen to be reading Ulysses. I don't even keep it on my bookshelf, it's in a draw somewhere boring the hell out of some dust particles and old bottle caps

Lol.
At least you tried it though. I haven't even bothered to do that much.

I had to abandon The Slap... It was painfull to read. I mean, it had no good plot to it at all. It was more of a porno then anything.

Oh, I could not stomach The Butcher Boy.
I had to read it for college, and I couldn't make it past pg. 42.
Weirdly, I ended up writing an essay on it, and based on stuff I had heard in lectures, my own assumptions, and a plot breakdown from friends, I ended up acing it, so there was light at the end of the very bleak tunnel.
Disturbing book.

Mairead wrote: "Oh, I could not stomach The Butcher Boy.
I had to read it for college, and I couldn't make it past pg. 42.
Weirdly, I ended up writing an essay on it, and based on stuff I had heard ..."

I'd say it makes for uneasy reading all right. The film is hard enough to watch as it is!

Mairead wrote: "Oh, I could not stomach The Butcher Boy.
I had to read it for college, and I couldn't make it past pg. 42.
Weirdly, I ended up writing an essay on it, and based on stuff I had heard ..."

I LOVED the movie, just the kind of messed up I like ;P I haven't read the book yet though, it's on my TBR list. What are you studying Mairead?

The book is a lo worse, apparently. Sanitized. Plus, they changed the ending.

100 Years of Solitude might be my favourite book. Oh well, so it goes.

I threw "A Bend In the River" by VS Naipaul across the room a couple of weeks ago. It was so slow. Then I felt guilty, and thought about giving it another shot. Then I heard he was a misogynist. The book stayed where it was.

Oh and I liked the Butcher Boy. However, the one he wrote after, The Dead School was amazing.

@David, I've read a couple of his, A bend In the River and A House for Mr Biswas, I finished both but I really do not get the hype around him.

And he doesn't think there is one "woman writer" who is his equal!

Ugh, I heard about that.
"I'm better than Jane Austen"
What an ass-hat.
How can he fit his ego through doors, or keep it contained in that tiny head of his. Surely there has to be some pressure mounting in there. :P

Yeah, I was ranting about it there at some stage, how arrogant can you get?

I hate people who don't have an ounce of humility.

All publicity is good publicity some would say. He does sound like a clown though....

I remember a book I haven't finished. I dare someone to read it through! Gross Misconduct :P The shallowness of the author is unbelievable. Completely unaware of the anger of the masses re: scumbag banker types. Gave it about 80 pages I think. Sent it to Oxfams. Should have burned it though. :/

Dislike Naipul, we should have a cyber book burning-- just because he is a pompous writer and person. I guess I am definitively, inferior, I haven't been able even to finish an article in the New Yorker. And this was before he made his comments or tried to sell Theroux's gift. Don't get him, and I don't understand the hype about him.

I just wanted to say Im very close to abandoning Great Expectations Its very hard to get through but I want to get used to old books again as i am very soon starting a course in English Lit. I can only read about two pages at a time. Did anyone else ever finish it?