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scorch
Apr 12, 2006

la petite mort

Angrycel posted:

Crime and Punishment, Ive actually read about 2/3 of it just cannot finish it. Tried 3 times!

Me too on this one. Currently I'm attempting The Sound and the Fury for the second time.

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Dik Hz
Feb 22, 2004

Fun with Science

To all the people who couldn't finish Catch-22, go back and give it another go. I know it gets really bleak just after the half-way point, but its all for a point and it is resolved very well. Although its annoying at the time, finish the book and you'll see why it was necessary.

For the record, it took me two tries to get past that part and its now one of my favorite books.

Clarence Darrow
Dec 29, 2006

The Fate of Western Civilization depends on the Republic of Alaska asserting it's territorial rights.
I had trouble pushing through the last half of Naked Lunch. I thought the first half was amazing, then around A.J. the prankster I lost interest and never returned to it.

Icedrake
Nov 24, 2007

Aades posted:

City of Golden Shadows (Otherland book 1) by Tad Williams
I don't know why I can't finish this book. All of the storylines that I can remember sound interesting to me. The lady going into the virtual realty internet to find out what happened to her brother, the kid that sees something huge while playing in his vr mmorpg, some kind of secret society up to something, all of that interests me. Yet every time I pick up the book I get half way through and just lose interest.

You're not missing too much. The second and third books are huge swathes of nothing happening, and characters stumbling around in a confused manner doing things that don't really matter.

Naked Singularity
Jun 7, 2008

Like a black hole...
but without pants.
I have tried on three separate occasions to read Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" yet have failed no more than 200 pages in each time. It's not like I don't care for the writing of the period, but I just can't stomach the stupid book. There's something about the writing style that makes me go off track and lose interest.

The only other book that gave me similar trouble was W.E.B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk." There were interesting parts to the book and it gave me a whole new viewpoint from which to see the Civil War, but most of it was boring anecdotes written in such a way you'd swear the author was trying to put you to sleep.

galumphing lummox
Aug 30, 2006

Naked Singularity posted:

I have tried on three separate occasions to read Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" yet have failed no more than 200 pages in each time. It's not like I don't care for the writing of the period, but I just can't stomach the stupid book. There's something about the writing style that makes me go off track and lose interest.

Is that about the point when he decides to write absolutely everything he can think of about whaling? Because, yeah, that's when I started skimming myself...

Naked Singularity
Jun 7, 2008

Like a black hole...
but without pants.

leefy greans posted:

Is that about the point when he decides to write absolutely everything he can think of about whaling? Because, yeah, that's when I started skimming myself...

I believe so. It's been a couple of years since I've taken a crack at it and the book is so unremarkable in my mind that not much sticks out at me anymore. I have no clue how it has come to be considered an American classic.

Zealous Abattoir
Nov 27, 2005
I wonder if the hate for Jane Austen is because you guys are well, guys. Most of the men (not all) that I know have read Jane Austen have hated her and most of the women ( again, not all) who have talked to me about her have loved her.

I for one, love her.

big trivia FAIL
May 9, 2003

"Jorge wants to be hardcore,
but his mom won't let him"

Pompous Rhombus posted:

I just put down Valis by Philip K Dick for the second time last night. It reads like a philosophy student trying to write a term paper in novel form after dropping acid. If I was more versed in PKD (something I hope to correct in the near future, I'm a fan of Man in the High Castle and the short stories of his I've read) or philosophy I suppose I'd get more out of it, but as it was I just found it unbearable.

VALIS blew my mind when I was 14, especially realizing it was basically autobiographical and Horselover Fat = Philip Dick (they're the same person in the book as well as a representation). The EMPIRE NEVER ENDED repeating phrase comes from a dream he had that he claimed was the cause of his insanity, the title of a story that would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. Dick wrote VALIS while loving INSANE, and knowing he was insane at the time, but at the same time not caring that he was insane, but rather embracing it as a path toward enlightenment. The Gnosticism and philosophy are direct results of the fact that he was, personally, obsessed with them because he thought they would lead him to the secrets of the universe.

I haven't read it in 15 years, but from what I remember, it's loving awesome.

Total Meatlove
Jan 28, 2007

:japan:
Rangers died, shoujo Hitler cried ;_;
Will Self's Book of Dave

Bored the everlasting poo poo out of me, the characters were boring, and I can't believe I bought it.

Dr. Capco
May 21, 2007


Pillbug
I'll third or fourth Fellowship of the Ring. I don't mind a long book if it's necessary to the story, but ejaculating as many words onto a page as you can is irritating to try and follow along with. Same goes for any Faulkner novel.

Also, when i saw the trailer for There Will be Blood I ran out and bought Oil! to read before the movie came out. I stopped reading halfway through when the story goes to absolute poo poo and gets incredibly predictable. If anyone's finished this I'd appreciate knowing whether the book is worth finishing soon or if leaving it to collect dust would be a better idea.

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!

leefy greans posted:

Is that about the point when he decides to write absolutely everything he can think of about whaling? Because, yeah, that's when I started skimming myself...
Unfortunately, I had to read the whole book because it was part of my American Literature course.

Whale foreskins. :argh:

Magic Hate Ball
May 6, 2007

ha ha ha!
you've already paid for this

Dr. Capco posted:

Also, when i saw the trailer for There Will be Blood I ran out and bought Oil! to read before the movie came out. I stopped reading halfway through when the story goes to absolute poo poo and gets incredibly predictable. If anyone's finished this I'd appreciate knowing whether the book is worth finishing soon or if leaving it to collect dust would be a better idea.

Upton Sinclair is a somewhat mediocre author who happened to cause a revolution in the meat-packing industry while trying to get everyone on the socialism train. It doesn't help that There Will Be Blood is a pretty loose adaptation of Oil!, either.

Camus
Dec 21, 2006
Faithfully yours.
Couldn't get through The Catcher in the Rye. It just felt overwhelmingly cliche and obnoxious.

anarchyrepublica
Apr 3, 2006
The most horrid flaw of humanity is our inability to comprehend our own experiences

Camus posted:

Couldn't get through The Catcher in the Rye. It just felt overwhelmingly cliche and obnoxious.

It isn't clichè, because it was the book that inspired the clichè.

stray
Jun 28, 2005

"It's a jet pack, Michael. What could possibly go wrong?"

Camus posted:

Couldn't get through The Catcher in the Rye. It just felt overwhelmingly cliche and obnoxious.

anarchyrepublica posted:

It isn't clichè, because it was the book that inspired the clichè.
This is the problem. I think we're so used to the themes and notions in The Catcher in the Rye (as well as Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces) that the book has not aged well. We're too used to the whole "Person X is a fake and a disingenuous person" thing to appreciate Salinger's work.

stray fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jun 11, 2008

snikkins
Jan 19, 2007

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
^^^^ I had that problem with Romeo and Juliet. I had to keep reminding myself that this was the original, so all the lovely remakes and over-doings of the story were not this one.

Molten Llama
Sep 20, 2006
Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables.

What the hell, Hawthorne, were they paying you by the letter? Classic or not, it's been the only novel so verbose and plodding I couldn't stand to read the whole thing. So many pages spent on so many insignificant things. Ugh. I didn't mind The Scarlet Letter, but The House of Seven Gables was simply unbearable. For every interesting morsel, you got to suffer through hundreds of words about the carpet.

Molten Llama fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jun 11, 2008

dubdrome711
Mar 10, 2007

by angerbeet
The Brothers Karamazov. It's simply above me at this point, especially when I don't have time to fully devote to understanding with a job and college and whatnot. I'll attempt a reread in a couple years.

Buck Lodestar
Jul 19, 2007



snikkins posted:

^^^^ I had that problem with Romeo and Juliet. I had to keep reminding myself that this was the original, so all the lovely remakes and over-doings of the story were not this one.

Yeah, but Shakespeare wasn't exactly the most original guy in terms of his plots - he borrowed heavily from various sources to come up with a lot of his stuff. The magic of Shakespeare is the presentation, the language, the poetry of it all. It doesn't matter if it's a story you've heard a million times before because Shakespeare is going to tell it better than anyone else.

gfarrell80
Aug 31, 2006

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang posted:

As much as I want to finish it, I can't make it through Heart of Darkness. As soon as it starts to promise to pick up, I peter out. I also failed to finish Nostromo but I only wanted to read that to get the "joke" about the ship in Alien, So I was pretty doomed from the start.

I managed to finish Nostromo, but I have never suffered so hard finishing a book as I did that one. Uuuugughgh. I loved Heart of Darkness, but Nostromo I only didn't put down for reasons of just 'sticking with it'.

Sr. Dumont
Jun 3, 2008

by Ozma

dubdrome711 posted:

The Brothers Karamazov. It's simply above me at this point, especially when I don't have time to fully devote to understanding with a job and college and whatnot. I'll attempt a reread in a couple years.

Don't bother. Anyone who claims to have enjoyed that book is a liar.

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord

Sr. Dumont posted:

Don't bother. Anyone who claims to have enjoyed that book is a liar.

I'm a Russian lit scholar and I even think it's overhyped.

gfarrell80
Aug 31, 2006

Sr. Dumont posted:

Don't bother. Anyone who claims to have enjoyed that book is a liar.

qpzil posted:

I'm a Russian lit scholar and I even think it's overhyped.

Aaargh, fake posts, I hope. I feel like everybody is entitled to an opinion, but if there are writers that you just don't say stuff like that about, Dostoyevsky is one of them. Einstein said something like "Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss."

And selectively quoting from Wikipedia:

quote:

Dostoevsky's influence has been acclaimed by a wide variety of writers, including Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel García Márquez, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Orhan Pamuk and Joseph Heller. American novelist Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoevsky as a major influence on his work in his autobiographical novella A Moveable Feast.

In a book of interviews with Arthur Power (Conversations with James Joyce), James Joyce praised Dostoevsky's influence:

...he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence.

...

With the publication of Crime and Punishment in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky became one of Russia's most prominent authors in the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky has also been called one of the founding fathers of the philosophical movement known as existentialism. In particular, his Notes from Underground, first published in 1864, has been depicted as a founding work of existentialism.

Nietzsche referred to Dostoevsky as "the only psychologist from whom I have something to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal." He said that Notes from the Underground "cried truth from the blood." According to Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The great catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian neo-Idealism", Nietzsche constantly refers to Dostoevsky in his notes and drafts through out the winter of 1886-1887. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoevsky's works.

Freud wrote an article entitled Dostoevsky and Parricide that asserts that the greatest works in world literature are all about parricide (though he is critical of Dostoevsky's work overall, the inclusion of The Brothers Karamazov in a set of the three greatest works of literature is remarkable).

Clearly though it is overhyped and unenjoyable. I would recommend again though at the very least that people having a hard time with it skip to the Grand Inquisitor and Pro and Contra chapters and at least read them.

(F.D. fanboy)

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord
I don't doubt for a second the influence that Dostoevsky had on not only Russian literature but also literature worldwide, I just feel that the Bros. are one of his weaker works. Aside from the Grand Inquisitor section, of course.

But sure, it's just personal opinion.

wlokos
Nov 12, 2007

...

Lackloss posted:

The Scarlet Letter- this is one book that I don't think I would have ever read if it was not mandatory in one of my classes, I still didn't finish it. It spend several pages talking about a rose bush in front of a prison. Come on.

I had to read Scarlet Letter for a class, and it was incredibly painful. So painful, in fact, that I managed to get within three chapters of the end, but by that point was so completely bored and tired of it that I pretty much refused to read a single page more and just gave up.

Skrill.exe
Oct 3, 2007

"Bitcoin is a new financial concept entirely without precedent."

discore posted:

Hate to admit it but God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Vonnegut is collecting dust on the nightstand with a bookmark about 2/3 through it. I normally love Vonnegut but I just can't find anything enjoyable to grasp in this book. I kind of like the main character but I'm not really feeling motivated to finish it. It's like Vonnegut's typical rambling style without any fun in it. It's all serious and depressing, or so it seems. Maybe it gets fun at the end? I may never know.

Where are you? I really think you should push through. I've read six of his most acclaimed books and I think it's the best. What I like most about it is the ending so if you have a good grasp of the situation you should skip ahead to the last twist. It's spectacular.

Bullio
May 11, 2004

Seriously...

The Gunslinger posted:

I'm struggling with the Martin "A Song of Fire and Ice" series mentioned above me. It seems like there are moments of brilliance speckled into the books but for the most part it just seems like fantasy reader-torture porn. No, I don't mean like Terry Goodkind. I mean he basically tortures the reader. It's like he set out beforehand and wrote an amazing back story for the material then decided to treat every single character like poo poo and see how long the reader will tolerate it. I get why people like it because there are spots where you forget the dreariness and dread of "Who will get raped, lose an arm or be savagely murdered for no reason?". To me those spots are too few and far between. I stopped on the second or third book I think, I don't know if I'll go back since I hear it just gets worse in terms of what I dislike about it.

I know this is a first page post, but I had to agree with you on this one. I did make it through the books and loved them, but I got the same vibe as you. He sets everyone up nicely just so they can get kicked in the balls. In fact, I got my brother, who enjoys heavier stuff like Dostoyevski and other non-fantasy fare, to read it and he brought that point up as well. He did like it, but he said the way Martin writes, it looks like Jon's in store for a HUGE rear end reaming the next book. After all, he's one of the few characters who has things going good for him at this point in the series.

I can't seem to make it through Jack Vance's Dying Earth. I know it's supposed to be just one of the greatest books ever, but the writing style is hard for me to get into. It seems like it's written like a greek epic. My reading experience and taste has broadened considerably since then, so I may give it another chance. The narrative just throws me off is all.

ArmoredBlue
Jul 1, 2007

Furthering the gay Mexican agenda.

Naked Singularity posted:

The only other book that gave me similar trouble was W.E.B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk." There were interesting parts to the book and it gave me a whole new viewpoint from which to see the Civil War, but most of it was boring anecdotes written in such a way you'd swear the author was trying to put you to sleep.

I had to read excerpts of this for a class and I honestly didn't like it. There were a couple interesting parts (about how they used church as an escape into song and passion), but I hated the writing for the most part.

pill for your ills
Mar 23, 2006

ghost rock.
Reading over this thread some, I'm not too ashamed to say I quit The Road about halfway through. The prose was great and all, but it just couldn't keep me moving with it. As wildly popular as it is, I can at least say "gently caress you" to Oprah's book club.

Shaztastic
Mar 29, 2008

Your cash is good at the bar.
Any book by Gore Vidal....which really makes me sad because I WANT to like him so much. Also, East of Eden

Shaztastic
Mar 29, 2008

Your cash is good at the bar.

Molten Llama posted:

Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables.

What the hell, Hawthorne, were they paying you by the letter? Classic or not, it's been the only novel so verbose and plodding I couldn't stand to read the whole thing. So many pages spent on so many insignificant things. Ugh. I didn't mind The Scarlet Letter, but The House of Seven Gables was simply unbearable. For every interesting morsel, you got to suffer through hundreds of words about the carpet.

Oh, yes, that one too. I love classics- but something about the descriptive narrative. Ugh.

Pocket Billiards
Aug 29, 2007
.

griliard posted:

Lord Jim This was years ago when I had to read it for a highschool english class. The only thing I remember is being bored out of my mind. This was at a time when I was reading a book or two a day, including finishing most of the required reading in no time flat because I wanted to see how they ended.

I tried Lord Jim and gave up on it. It definitely reads like it was written by someone who's first language wasn't English.

Such Great Heights
Jun 21, 2008
I feel a little relieved that there are others who had trouble plowing through Jane Austin novels. I had bad experiences with Pride and Prejudice, and especially Emma. Oh, Emma the bitch. The only thing that made that novel even slightly entertaining was the professor who taught it. I think it's inappropriate that that book was included in a "Great Works of Literature" class... but maybe I'm just missing the point.

Also, has anyone had a rough experience with a slightly obscure steam punk novel called "Fitzpatrick's War"?

Cerebral Wolf
Jun 20, 2008

pill for your ills posted:

Reading over this thread some, I'm not too ashamed to say I quit The Road about halfway through. The prose was great and all, but it just couldn't keep me moving with it....

I have to admit, i also gave up with The Road about half way into it. I just found it mind numbingly boring. Cormac McCarthy is definatly not for me it seems. The book just didn't grip me at all.

I've wasted my time on some terribly bad books in my time but i think this is the only thing i've never managed to finish.

tastysoup
Jun 7, 2004

Die screaming, you pig-spawned trollop.
A Game of Thrones.

I only made it to page 53. The way it's written is just so over the top and artificial and annoying. Here's the passage that pretty much killed it for me:
"Her loins still ached with the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a good ache. She could feel his seed within her. She prayed that it might quicken there."

...Seriously? Ugh. I have no idea why goons love this series so much. I wish I could push through it and find out but I don't think I can.

Kunzelman
Dec 26, 2007

Lord Shaper
The only book to date that I've simply given up on and never looked back was Bridget Jones's Diary. I have no idea why it was so hard to read. I got to page 30 and this emotion to remove all of my skin with a meathook overcame me so I stopped reading.

Haize
Jun 13, 2008

A Confederacy of Dunces is giving me a serious headache. I was wondering around the bookstore while waiting for a pharmacy to fill a scrip.

I bought it because it was on sale and it said "Pulitzer-Prize Winning" on the cover. A sucker is born everyday...

edit: I don't type very well

Lord Rupert
Dec 28, 2007

Neither seen, nor heard
Even though I can get through A House of Leaves I could not manage to get through A Clockwork Orange.

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Such Great Heights
Jun 21, 2008

quote:

Her loins still ached with the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a good ache. She could feel his seed within her. She prayed that it might quicken there.
Hahaha wow a STRING of simple sentences describing SEX of all things... that book sounds dreadful.

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