Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. After that book I gave myself permission to DNF though, so it was a maturing experience for me. I mostly wanted to know what happened to Stephen and that’s what drove me, along with the “No mere book shall defeat me” attitude.
I really enjoyed all of the Fae short stories actually. I’m not really a horror fan, but I found Fae, and mortals interaction with it, particularly gripping and memorable. I never put the book down when I was in Fae, trapping me along with the victims, perhaps that’s why I wanted Stephen to just be ok.
It was just everything else in the book I couldn’t enjoy. The titular characters I found uninteresting. The setting, fae excluded, I was apathetic about. The structure, the footnotes, dear god the footnotes.
But the Fae stuff? I’ll take 10 more of them in an anthology please.
I agree with you about Strange and Norrell. The pacing was poor and it was over-long.
But!
Susanna Clarke’s next book, Piranesi, is actually really good. Like, really, incredibly good. I recommend it to everyone and so far no one has said anything but positive things about it. I rarely re-read books but this is one that I’ve come back to.
As it happens, I read Piranesi first, so I found JS&MN a bit disappointing, but I’m glad I read them that way around otherwise I might have skipped Piranesi, and that would have been a mistake!
Blasphemy but you can always Google if you just wanna know one thing but can’t finish. I did to the WoT and don’t regret it.
I could have but for the other two reasons I wrote about. Namely, I wasn’t mature enough to DNF, and the Fae stories are really good.
I suppose in the end it did one better by causing me to grow as a person. Sure, books have taught me a bunch of stuff but not many I can describe as being “the” reason I “grew”.
Today I wouldn’t have read enough of JS&MrN to even hear about Stephen, let alone grow to care about him.
I’m sure I’m missing out on a great number of good books, great books even, possibly even formative books, by how willing I am to DNF. But, there’s so many good books out there that my calendar always seems to be full anyway.
The Robert Jordan Wheel of Time books. By book 7 I hated the main characters and really hated the writing style. The repetition. The repetition. The repetition…
The Sanderson books were ok, but they couldn’t rescue the series and I got no joy from finishing it. A lot of relief though to be done with it.
Agreed on the wheel of time. Every character has one and just one quirk and they repeat it in every occasion. Also it’s quite troubling, once you start thinking on it, this fixation on men/women relationship.
I think I made it to book 6 and just stopped. I was utterly bored by that point.
I rage quit after book 3. I’m sorry you had to suffer so much longer.
Read Sanderson’s own books though. They’re pretty good, IMO
Oh yes. I LOVE the Stormlight books.
So far I’ve only read Way of Kings. I found it too slow paced for me, especially the 1st half of the book. But… I’m reading Lost Metal now and will probably read Tress… and then back at it for the next Stormlight Archive
I rage quit after book 3. I’m sorry you had to suffer so much longer.
Read Sanderson’s own books though. They’re pretty good, IMO
Fucking “IT” by Stephen King. That book started so good, but it’s about 400 pages longer than it needed to be and the child orgy at the end really didn’t help me cross the finish line. That book became a chore to get through.
The Bible was a difficult read for me. I pushed through just because I wanted to have at least read it when using it’s words to contradict Supply-Side Christians.
Fahrenheit 451 but I wanted to put it down because of the bad translation. I switched to reading it in English and everything went smoothly after that.
Moby dick ( complete unabridged edition).
The parts where they go into detail about whale hunting was like reading a manual, I did not know there where other editions and just got the frost one I saw. Maybe it was my part for not investigating before.
Les Misérables. I love Hugo’s way of writing, and his descriptions of Jean grappling with his conflicting feelings or breaking down when he was finally shown love were breath taking. There were certain parts of the book in which I couldn’t put it down. But the chapters that described the battle of Waterloo and the layout of the Paris sewer system bored me to tears.
Malazan: Book of the Fallen.
Having no idea what’s going on and not really even being able to comprehend what I’m reading should not be a ‘feature’ of a fiction book.
I know exactly what you mean. It suffers from the very worst fantasy tropes of meaningless words. I did not finish.
I’m attempting a run of the wheel of time at the moment and it’s just so long winded. I’m taking a break with other books for now.
Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham.
I found the first part (the boys) very boring, and unnecessarily detailed. I could have skipped it without consequence. But the rest of the book was pretty good and enjoyable.
Gödel, Escher, Bach. Hofstader’s writing is quirky and there is certainly a lot of it, so I didn’t get more than 20 pages in on my first attempt. Perhaps needless to say, I’m very glad I came back and finished it. GEB’s vision is overpowering; these days, I have the idea that the only way Hofstader could approach that vision was to attack it from many different directions, which explains the book’s length and discursiveness. If you haven’t read GEB, or have tried it and gotten bogged down, I heartily recommend giving it another shot.
Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” - way too narcisstic for my liking.
Plato, Complete Works.
Now, it was required for a class, so there were external factors to why I finished it. However, it’s the only book I’ve ever wanted to burn and bring forced to read it likely exacerbated that feeling. I haven’t yet, but one of these years, it’s going to be ash.
The Count of Monte Cristo. I did like it, but I expect the abridged version would have been better for me. There were parts that were a struggle to get through. It just seems like the unabridged version is more recommended, so I felt compelled to get through it
There’s a reason behind it. When it was first published, it was serialised, so Dumas had an incentive to drag it along, also it romanticizes travels around Europe because it was fancy at the time.
The plot behind it is still one of the most compelling I have ever read and a revenge story that few modern works of art can match.
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack was really bad. It was meant to be ‘experimental’ but it was literally just a very boring story with, get this, no punctuation (an ‘experiment’ first conducted about a hundred years ago). There were literally pages and pages where the narrator complained about a building with poorly poured concrete foundations at one point (yes, really). It was quite short, so I got through it, but it was just totally pointless!
