Mar 01, 2025
Confession thread: what classic novels have you DNF'd? Bonus points for multiple attempts. Currently bouncing off Middlemarch, and Absalom Absalom has defeated me three times despite my love of Faulkner.
mustardbreath1 year ago
The Tunnel & Dhalgren. Life got in the way. I realized I had forgotten where I had left off when I finally picked them up again.
baphimet1 year ago
Ulysses and GR lol I didn’t get that far into either, and didn’t find them overwhelmingly difficult or anything; just started them and said not fucking right now
larry1 year ago
Don Quixote The Brothers Karamazov (2 times) The Counte of Monte Cristo The Satanic Verses (DNF with only 50 pages left) - is this a classic? Cocaine Hawaii (2 times) - classic? The Confederacy of Dunces (3 times) Catcher in the Rye (3 times) American Psycho (2 times) - classic? War and Peace (lost count) Islands in the Stream (2 times) A Farewell to Arms (3 times) Player Piano
sylphetia1 year ago
Pride & Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Beautiful and the Damned, Inferno, and the list goes on. I think I have DNF'd nearly every English classic novel in existence. Poor me. I started reading them at a tender age while dealing with the fact that English is my third language. The amount of times I had to carry a dictionary and not understanding a single word, let alone the different nuances in their contexts, is embarrassing. I still want to read them, but now, I leave it up to time and my mood; if those books ever find me again, I would give them a shot.
Every book here has nothing on Pilgrim's Progress
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
jane1 year ago
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!
Yeah, dropped it last night and picked up American Pastoral for a reread (first in ten years).
The Iliad: boring, too many characters to keep track of Dante’s Inferno: had to keep track of too many references and I got busy and dropped it For Whom the Bell Tolls: I was reading it in high school and checked it out from the school library. I had to return it before the school year was out and I hadn’t finished it A Confederacy of Dunces: found some parts too gross and vulgar and I decided to take a pause, but I never returned to it Snow Crash: I didn’t like the style of the prose Crime and Punishment: my copy is in Spanish, and I got frustrated at how I’m slower at reading in it compared to English Capital: I was also reading it in Spanish, and apparently that’s a pretty bad translation. I was reading it under the guidance of my boyfriend, who later gifted me his original copy (in English), but we’ve both been too busy since then to devote to it the level of attention required. I think I’d like to go back to all of these books eventually, although some with more enthusiasm than others.