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Retinend posted:I haven't read it yet, but isn't it just under pages? It must have been pretty bad. It's just under 100 pages, but it can be a tough read. I definitely wouldn't say it is bad - the story itself is very interesting, and there are some very thoughtful meditations on the human spirit and what happens to it in the wilderness. But the way sentences are composed, and the way things are told are just very different from most things I've read, and it's very easy to read a whole paragraph and realize you didn't understand anything in it because your mind drifted slightly. There's a lot of detail about the environments they are in, and there are random tangents where the narrative suddenly follows some unexpected route. These are all mixed into the same paragraphs (and sometimes sentences) as the main narrative. Conrad wrote this in English, which was not his first language, so maybe that had something to do with it. His grammar is perfectly fine, it's just that something feels off in the flow.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2008 15:16 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 13:08 |
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[WHOA bad post]
Phthalogreen fucked around with this message at May 17, 2011 around 20:35 |
| # ? Aug 16, 2008 23:54 |
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Funkadelic Behemoth posted:Stephen King's It. King works much better once you've learned when to skip. For example, Cujo is an awesome novel... once you've learned to jump ahead 4 pages whenever he starts prattling on about the ad agency. Neo_Reloaded posted:It's just under 100 pages, but it can be a tough read. I definitely wouldn't say it is bad - the story itself is very interesting, and there are some very thoughtful meditations on the human spirit and what happens to it in the wilderness. I never got forced to read Heart of Darkness in high school due to a quirk of scheduling, but I picked it up a couple of months ago and got through it readily. You're right on every point, but I think that if you just keep reading you'll be fine. As to myself, I've failed Finnegan's Wake twice. I'm about due to try again.
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| # ? Aug 17, 2008 03:46 |
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I failed in my first and second attempts to finish R. A. Lafferty's Arrive at Easterwine. I succeeded in the third one. Michel Houellebecq himself found the book almost illegible. (Great novel, though.)
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| # ? Aug 17, 2008 19:59 |
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Sono posted:King works much better once you've learned when to skip. For example, Cujo is an awesome novel... once you've learned to jump ahead 4 pages whenever he starts prattling on about the ad agency. Is there some general rule for this, or is it strictly author-by-author? The problem, of course, isn't knowing when to START skipping, it's knowing when to STOP. With Tolkein (an eminently skippable author) you know to stop because he switches back to prose. I can't read long-form Stephen King (and for the most part I don't want, to, really), or Tom Clancy, because if I start skipping, I think I'll miss something.
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| # ? Aug 17, 2008 20:01 |
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Phthalogreen posted:I've only had a few, but the last book I was unable to finish was Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. It was simple reading and all, but the plot was just Catcher in the Rye with heaps of coke, a truly robotic narrator, and not a single sympathetic character anywhere. I may finish it someday, but I'm convinced it was written before Ellis knew what the gently caress he was doing. I almost had this happen to me. It's definitely drier, slower and more boring than American Psycho or The Rules of Attraction.
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| # ? Aug 18, 2008 01:39 |
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Collapse, by Jared Diamond. I love the idea, it's interesting reading, and the fortieth time he makes his point that we're headed down the slippery slope to our own destruction, it seems to lose its punch. The funny thing is, I never seemed to get bored while actually reading it. It just seemed to get dustier and dustier each time I picked it up.
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| # ? Aug 18, 2008 07:29 |
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I haven't given up yet, but I'm seriously considering putting down The Satanic Verses by Rushdie. I'm not really sure what it is - maybe I'm just not in the mood for it - but for whatever reason I'm just finding it to be a real slog. I really enjoyed the first part of the novel, giving the backgrounds of both Gibreel and Chamcha, but now I'm into the fourth book and it's just not keeping my attention. Any big fans of the novel want to talk it up for me?
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| # ? Aug 18, 2008 17:09 |
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Updike's Rabbit Run. Very interesting style and flawless literature, except for the fact that the main character is an rear end in a top hat and I stopped caring about him after 150 pages, picked All the Pretty Horses, and decided to make the Border trilogy my summer reading instead. One of the few books I couldn't finish but would still recommend, since its so well written. Someday.
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 08:20 |
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Hellequin posted:Atlas Shrugged, a friend recommended it to me (before I knew who Ayn Rand was), I got twenty pages in before I realized it was a massive pile of poo poo. Haha, I liked the book, but I completely get what you mean. As a "story," the book is extremely lovely...I NEVER recommend it to anyone looking for a good read...Too many speeches and rants and a pretty poorly delivered story...There is a 60 page rant near the end you would have been killing yourself at. The only point of reading that book is to get an idea of what Objectivism is, the philosophy...its neat to look into as a philosophy major, but I actually wasnt really convinced by it, to be honest. Pretty much, dont read the book unless you want to feel like you're in a philosophy class, because the story is not Rand's priority... And anyone who actually thinks its a good story clearly is a douche... There are a few books I've tried reading and couldnt finish...the one that stands out the most is The Scarlet Letter. Holy gently caress if I had to keep reading more of the old english format of that poo poo I was going to have to burn my school down...
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 09:57 |
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Buck Lodestar posted:I haven't given up yet, but I'm seriously considering putting down The Satanic Verses by Rushdie. I'm not really sure what it is - maybe I'm just not in the mood for it - but for whatever reason I'm just finding it to be a real slog. I really enjoyed the first part of the novel, giving the backgrounds of both Gibreel and Chamcha, but now I'm into the fourth book and it's just not keeping my attention. Any big fans of the novel want to talk it up for me? I'm in the same boat, albeit ahead of you. I don't think it's helped by a lack of well-defined chapters, I always find myself reading more than I can really cope with late at night and having to reread the last two pages the next time I pick it up. I've just got past chapter five, where it returns to Chamcha, and I enjoyed that more than the previous one, but I'm still not sold on it.
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 18:38 |
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Naxr posted:I'm in the same boat, albeit ahead of you. I don't think it's helped by a lack of well-defined chapters, I always find myself reading more than I can really cope with late at night and having to reread the last two pages the next time I pick it up. I've just got past chapter five, where it returns to Chamcha, and I enjoyed that more than the previous one, but I'm still not sold on it. It's a bit confusing at first, and some of the stories in it are better than other, but the way they're all riffing on the same theme of divine revelation is neat and does make a certain sense in the end. I loved the stuff with Mahound and Salman the Persian. And I found it picked up a lot towards the end when everything gets back to Gibreel and Chamcha.
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 19:18 |
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yrrebnarg posted:Collapse, by Jared Diamond. I love the idea, it's interesting reading, and the fortieth time he makes his point that we're headed down the slippery slope to our own destruction, it seems to lose its punch. The funny thing is, I never seemed to get bored while actually reading it. It just seemed to get dustier and dustier each time I picked it up. Agreed, I was reading this up until recently. Its a good book, but once you read a couple of his case-study's you begin to see a trend & it gets boring.
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 19:58 |
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Gay Captain Polesmoke posted:Blood Meridian TouretteDog posted:Dhalgren jessecore posted:Nineteen Eighty-four "The people who started this revolution on the auspices of 'making everyone equal' really were just in it for themselves. They don't give a poo poo about the populace at all. Ingsoc is a big loving lie." Good. Now that's done, go pick up after that part and experience an amazing ending. VideoTapir posted:Foucault's Pendulum
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 20:12 |
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stray posted:Exactly. I can't get through Foucault's Pendulum. It's so close to being awesome, but it's also so infuriating that I just can't make it through the book. I also think that if someone were serious, this could make for an incredible movie. I really pushed through the tough part, where it's like a textbook on the history of secret societies, and the rest of the book is barely interesting enough to justify all that. I agree, it'd make for a terrific movie. Just condense the ridiculous history passages. It's defenitely better than Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, though.
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 21:20 |
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I've tried twice, and I just can't finish Pynchon's Against The Day. It frustrates me because I've read and enjoyed every book he has written (except Mason & Dixon, which I haven't read). And I really enjoy the premise of ATD, but for some reason I just lose interest in it...
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| # ? Aug 19, 2008 23:31 |
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I don't really like the idea of posting in this thread because I don't like to leave books unfinished anymore if I can help it, but I just had to put down Twain's The Innocents Abroad. I feel guilty about it, but it seemed like it was too flippant to be wholly educational and sort of just degraded into him listing off things he'd seen. I think maybe that might have been the point, but it was just sucking all the urge to read out of me and I decided to move on. Don't get me wrong, there were moments where I honestly laughed out loud but they were too sparse to maintain my interest. Perhaps that wasn't the best place to really start with Twain's work beyond Huck Finn. Where would be a better place? I really don't want to write him off because I know he's an excellent writer.
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| # ? Sep 6, 2008 05:57 |
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tonytheshoes posted:I've tried twice to read Pale Fire by Nabokov, but I don't think I "get" it. I loved Lolita, but this one just isn't clicking with me. I think I'm going to try one more time this summer, though, because I've come to the conclusion that I've sorta grown out of a lot of the Sci-Fi stuff I used to enjoy... Do it. Try it again. Sit down and just slog through it. I was in the same situation as you until 2 days ago when I finished it for the first time, and holy poo poo. Just read it. One of the best books I've ever read.
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| # ? Sep 6, 2008 23:47 |
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Gazhole posted:The most catastrophic failure to finish a book was "The Reality Dysfunction" by Peter F Hamilton. Peter Hamilton books take a long time to gain momentum, but they're awesome if you give them a chance. I tried to read Atlas Shrugged but had to give up maybe half way in, it was just loving boring. I also tried to read the Star Wars Legacy series but gave uo maybe 20 pages into the first book. Good thing too, that series is apparently a disaster.
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| # ? Sep 7, 2008 19:52 |
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War and Peace. I'm a terrible person  Virtual Light by William Gibson. I loved Neuromancer and Burning Chrome when I was 16, but I just can't take him seriously any more. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I really want to finish this book, but I can't get past the first 100 pages.
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| # ? Sep 16, 2008 09:48 |
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Dhamma Punk posted:Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I really want to finish this book, but I can't get past the first 100 pages. That one took me six months, but to be fair that was back in the day when I wasn't really serious about reading. I can tell you that if 100 pages is as far as you got, it doesn't get any better. Well, it does, but that's because he spends 5 pages discussing the best way to eat Cap'n Crunch. Best 5 pages of the book too.
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| # ? Sep 16, 2008 12:04 |
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I'm 2/3 of the way through Blood Meridian right now. It's just so... God, I love his writing style, but it (and the story) gets so loving boring after 200+ pages. I have The Road too. Maybe I'll start that and try to get through that and come back to BM.
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| # ? Sep 23, 2008 09:31 |
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Battle Cry of Freedom on the Civil War. Dry, [edit-800+ pages of dry] and I knew how it was going to end (victory by the yankees no less). When I was about 14 I tried Issac Asimov's stuff like Foundation and Empire, and never could finish any of it. I recall it being almost without story. Sten Freak fucked around with this message at Sep 23, 2008 around 19:06 |
| # ? Sep 23, 2008 19:04 |
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Spectral Exlie posted:When I was about 14 I tried Issac Asimov's stuff like Foundation and Empire, and never could finish any of it. I recall it being almost without story. I suppose I should admit that I'm a bit of an Asimov fanboy. I've ready all of the Foundation novels, and loved them all (to a greater or lesser degree).
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| # ? Sep 23, 2008 19:56 |
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syphon^2 posted:Do you remember specifically what you tried? The one you quoted is book 2 of a trilogy. I don't remember it in detail, but I could understand why you felt that way if that's the only title you read. Well I still had Foundation and Empire until last year when I did a lot of purging before a move which included most of my early-life stuff which was science fiction. I may have had the first (did it have a black cover?) in that series but don't recall for sure. The F&E I had was silver as I recall. It just seemed to crawl along and perhaps was too abstract and I did want to like it. Maybe I was too young; I loved short stories at that period above all else. I do know I never read "I Robot". Was it in the same style? I had a ton of sci-fi and probably made someone happy at the Goodwill store.
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| # ? Sep 23, 2008 20:29 |
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I thought I, Robot was fantastic. I guess yeah, roughly the same style. It was a series of short stories written all in a sort of 'mystery' format (the main characters of each story had to solve some puzzle of Robotic behavior caused by the 3 laws). If you've seen the movie, it's absolutely nothing like it. 
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| # ? Sep 23, 2008 21:54 |
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Hedrigall posted:Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Hated every single character. Kovacs or whatever his name was, was obviously just a case of author's wish fulfilment. Yep. It was meant to be the best thing ever from a number of recommendations. But the few intriguing ideas did not manage to save me from the grinding nastiness of it all and the leaden prose
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| # ? Sep 24, 2008 08:34 |
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Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language by Don Watson. I agree with the author. The problem is, this is an essay stretched out into a book through repetition. After the introduction, he doesn't really have anything to add that I can see other than more examples. The title is pretty much a summary of the book...you can judge this one by its cover. In fact, the image on the cover (a parrot sitting at a desk wearing a headset) sums up a lot of his arguments and metaphors. edit: Thumbing through the conclusion, maybe I should read that part. Yeah. I'd recommend reading this book if you skip everything between the introduction and conclusion.
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| # ? Sep 24, 2008 22:39 |
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Beelzebulb's Tales to his Grandson by I.J. Gurdijieff I'm sure it was ground-breaking when it came out and it's not a bad concept to promote your philosophy but it was just tedious, boring, and ran in circles.
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| # ? Sep 25, 2008 00:39 |
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Just remembered another one: Hitler's Willing Executioners The point was made (German citizens were complicit in Germany's WWII genocide) about 50 pages in or so then repeated over and over again. At about the 4th pass I put the book away. edit: VideoTapir's example made me recall this one. Same problem.
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| # ? Sep 25, 2008 15:37 |
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VegaTheCat-Lover posted:Beelzebulb's Tales to his Grandson by I.J. Gurdijieff Gurdijieff, actually intended it to be tedious as a way of weeding out those unwilling to learn. Some of J.G Bennet's stuff is a little easier to swallow.
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| # ? Sep 25, 2008 16:25 |
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LooseChanj posted:That one took me six months, but to be fair that was back in the day when I wasn't really serious about reading. I can tell you that if 100 pages is as far as you got, it doesn't get any better. Well, it does, but that's because he spends 5 pages discussing the best way to eat Cap'n Crunch. Best 5 pages of the book too. I disagree; his diversions are one of my favorite things about his style. I will say that Stephenson's endings (all of them!) seem to be the result of his publisher calling up and telling him that novel he's been working on for the last eight years has to be turned in tomorrow morning at 8am. A 1200-page book and you close everything out in the last 5 pages?
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| # ? Sep 26, 2008 01:37 |
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I thought the Baroque Cycle's ending was reasonable. You're right though, Cryptonomicon's ending was terrible.
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| # ? Sep 26, 2008 10:19 |
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Midjack posted:I will say that Stephenson's endings His what?
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| # ? Sep 26, 2008 12:19 |
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Entropic posted:The book I've never manged to finish is Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. I loved it at first, but by the time you get a few hundred pages in, the endless digressions start to try your patience, and the "dialogues" between chapters start to seem a lot less clever and interesting. It might by partly due to the fact that a lot of what's in the book is old news to anyone with an education in computer science these days, and also that I personally have very little knowledge of or interest in music theory, so the "Bach" bits I find especially wearisome. I made it 100 pages into GEB and just couldn't go any further. I was really interested in the subject but it seems like all of the ideas could have been stated in a book half the size. I might check out I Am A Strange Loop as it sounds more like what I was looking for.
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| # ? Sep 29, 2008 00:23 |
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RitualConfuser posted:I made it 100 pages into GEB and just couldn't go any further. I was really interested in the subject but it seems like all of the ideas could have been stated in a book half the size. I might check out I Am A Strange Loop as it sounds more like what I was looking for. I Am A Strange Loop is totally worth reading. It basically winnows GEB down to the ideas that are actually fun to read about. I actually picked up GEB again recently and I'm like 150 pages from the end now. I'm determined to finish it this time just so I can get the drat thing out of the way and be able to say why it's so bad with the authority of having read whole bloody tome. There are a few sections (particularly Chapters XIII and XIV) that drop you abruptly into some really dense material that will either make your eyes glaze over if you don't have any prior knowledge of Number Theory and the maths of computational complexity, or will bore you with stuff you already know if you do have that background. The parts that really dragged for me though were the neurology and biology sections. Yes, it's kind of interesting to ponder whether formal systems of symbols exist in the brain, and at what level, but it's really nothing I hadn't heard before elsewhere. And it's interesting to see how self-replication actually works in DNA, but it's a huge long digression from the central ideas of the book. The amount of effort he asks you to put in to get a feel for the formal system in the DNA chapter really doesn't have a big enough payoff to be worthwhile. The most you get out of it is "huh, that is the same kind of strange loop self-reference I guess" which is something you probably would have been happy to take on faith for the sake of getting on with things anyway. GEB reads more like a the notes for graduate class on Cognitive Science than any sort of pop-science book introduction to the subject. And the trouble is that if you have the background knowledge required to stick with it through to the end, then you probably already know most of what Hofstadter's trying to tell you. I Am A Strange Loop is the book GEB should have been. It could still lose the whole section on video self-reference though, which isn't nearly as clever or interesting as Hofstadter thinks it is.
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| # ? Sep 29, 2008 01:13 |
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Thanks for the info. My background is mostly in CS and math so GEB seemed like a great choice. I understand what you're saying about that if you are already familiar the topics then some of it just bores you. I stopped partway through the ~20 page dialog that was explaining recursion; I really didn't need the explanation. I will have to check out I Am a Strange Loop though. And to try and not derail the thread too much, I tried to read The Vampire Chronicles a few years back but I just couldn't finish them. I would get through maybe 1/4 of a book, lose interest, move on to the next book, lose interest, and so on. I don't read very much fiction but I like vampire fiction in general so maybe I'll try them again.
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| # ? Sep 29, 2008 03:56 |
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RitualConfuser posted:And to try and not derail the thread too much, I tried to read The Vampire Chronicles a few years back but I just couldn't finish them. I would get through maybe 1/4 of a book, lose interest, move on to the next book, lose interest, and so on. I don't read very much fiction but I like vampire fiction in general so maybe I'll try them again. I thought the first four or five books of the Vampire Chronicles were great, but I was like 15 at the time and I bet I'd hate them now if went back and re-read them. I do remember The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned being the best of the bunch though. Interview was written like 10 years before the others, and was her first book, and it shows. If you really want to read them, start with Lestat, you won't really miss anything important. And sometime after the fourth book Anne Rice went crazy / found religion so proceed at your own risk.
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| # ? Sep 29, 2008 04:19 |
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Entropic posted:I thought the first four or five books of the Vampire Chronicles were great, but I was like 15 at the time and I bet I'd hate them now if went back and re-read them. I do remember The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned being the best of the bunch though. Interview was written like 10 years before the others, and was her first book, and it shows. If you really want to read them, start with Lestat, you won't really miss anything important. And sometime after the fourth book Anne Rice went crazy / found religion so proceed at your own risk. Ya, I was maybe 16 or 17 at the time when I tried to read them. I think I basically got burnt out on fiction at the time as I felt like I was "wasting time on fiction" when I should have been "learning new things" if that makes sense. I've read some posts in here about how after that Anne Rice kind of went off into writing about basically some hardcore BDSM type of stuff and then suddendly went to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and re-discovered catholicism. Seemed pretty bizarre.
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| # ? Sep 29, 2008 04:47 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 13:08 |
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Entropic posted:I thought the first four or five books of the Vampire Chronicles were great, but I was like 15 at the time and I bet I'd hate them now if went back and re-read them. I do remember The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned being the best of the bunch though. Interview was written like 10 years before the others, and was her first book, and it shows. If you really want to read them, start with Lestat, you won't really miss anything important. And sometime after the fourth book Anne Rice went crazy / found religion so proceed at your own risk. I just finished reading Interview for the first time because someone in my office gave it to me...I found myself avoiding reading it because it was so tedious. There are no likable characters in it whatsoever, and I'm just glad to be done with it. To contribute, I could not finish Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. I've gotten through some long and confusing books (Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, The Sound and the Fury, Tale of Two Cities, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) but I just could not get into or follow it. And by the way, I loved Blood Meridian. And All the Pretty Horses. I would say that McCarthy is probably near the literary level of Faulkner, which, of course, means that he's near the same level of difficulty to understand. It's definitely much easier to dismiss a book/author as terrible if you're just not understanding it properly.
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| # ? Oct 2, 2008 18:44 |
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