Wuthering Heights. I had to read early in my senior year of High School and simply loathed it. Absolutely painful, and I'm not sure I made it 100 pages. Now that I'm twice the age of then, I may give it another go to see if it still warrants my vitriol.

Independent People by Halldór Laxness, despite the Susan Sontag recommendation, and quite liking its message.

Couldn't do Middlemarch either. I recognize its reputation, but it bored the tits off of me. Similarly, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some beautiful prose, but it just didn't click. I did read a great essay on Marquez a while ago and it helped me appreciate his vision and impact on Latin American literature. But reading him feels like nothing more than an exercise in florid style with little substance. Lastly, In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. Maybe I just don't give a fuck about magical realism, but what a pointless book about fucking Toronto of all places. I only remember the scene where the guy swallows his own cum from his girlfriend's mouth. That scene was alright.

I loved Middlemarch but Romola and Daniel Deronda are two Eliots I should have DNF'd instead of chewing though to the bitter end.

I DNF very rarely but a couple that come to mind are Les Miserables (at about 85%) and Dhalgren (about 2/3 in). Oh and The Woman in White, I think I got about 40% through that. Also Finnegans Wake, I managed about 10 pages a long long time ago but I'll revisit that someday.

10 years ago I gave up half way through Fahrenheit 451. Last year I was forced to read it for a book club. If it wasn't for the club, I'd give up even sooner the second time. What an awful book

Crime and Punishment and The Master and Margarita, both of which I stopped reading about halfway. I tried really hard to be patient with them but ultimately I was frustrated by their lack of verisimilitude. I always like to think of Nabokov calling C&P a "ghastly rigmarole". I did finish Middlemarch a few years ago and my initial response to it was tepid. I think I had the wrong expectation reading it: I thought it'd be a bildungsroman when it read more like a gossip column. Now that I've had some time to think about it I appreciate it more for its depiction of the pettiness of ordinary people through connected vignettes. I might reread it some time to see how I find it this time. If you're really not enjoying it, I recommend putting down Middlemarch and coming back to it some years later!

tokyodrifter

6 days ago

Yeah, dropped it last night and picked up American Pastoral for a reread (first in ten years).

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