# Books you didn't finish



## Violanthe (Jun 1, 2006)

Are there books sitting on your shelf that you started to read, but haven't finished? What books are they? Why didn't you read the whole thing? Where did you stop? Why? Do you hope to continue one day? Or are you glad to leave them to gather dust?


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## Halasían (Jun 1, 2006)

Well I hate to say it, but I have finally given up trying to read G.R.R. MArtin's Ice & Fire series. I did make it 7 chapters into The Game of Thrones, but I found the reading dry and un-gripping. they will gather dust until sold in a yard sale or someone else shows interest in reading them, in which I'll give them away.


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## Talierin (Jun 1, 2006)

The Neverending Story - I made it halfway through to about the point where the movie ends, and just never could finish it. Also, I've read just about everything else by him, but I can't seem to make it through CS Lewis' Mere Christianity. Same goes for Patricia McKillip's Od Magic


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## Ithrynluin (Jun 1, 2006)

Terry Goodking - _Wizard's First Rule_; Found it dull and uninteresting for the most part. I doubt I'll finish it, but never say never.

Douglas Adams' _Hitchhiker_ books; I got this collection in a very neat looking hardcover edition for my birthday, which only makes matters worse.  I read the first dozen or so pages several times, but could never get into it for some reason. I do plan to finish this one.


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## chrysophalax (Jun 1, 2006)

Anything by Charles Dickens or Stephen King. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....


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## Ithrynluin (Jun 1, 2006)

Dickens I can well understand, but King is King!


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## Shireman D (Jun 1, 2006)

I got really bored about forty pages into the first Harry Potter book and have never gone back to it. I went to the cinema with my two youngest for the films though and quite liked them.

Seems to me that Ms. Rowlings style is a bit laboured and that she needs her editor's help with fluidity: judging by the width of the latest volumes she is now beyond editorial assistance as being much too important a writer. Although, it might be noted that Dickens went on submitting to the editorial process right up to the last pages he wrote ... perhaps he was a more realistic author than some?


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## e.Blackstar (Jun 1, 2006)

Halasían said:


> Well I hate to say it, but I have finally given up trying to read G.R.R. MArtin's Ice & Fire series. I did make it 7 chapters into The Game of Thrones, but I found the reading dry and un-gripping. they will gather dust until sold in a yard sale or someone else shows interest in reading them, in which I'll give them away.



You could send them to meeeeeeeeee...


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## Arvedui (Jun 2, 2006)

_Ulysses_ - James Joyce.
I have tried a number of times, but have so far been unable to read past page 150 or so.


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## Ithrynluin (Jun 2, 2006)

James Joyce is another one of my 'favourites', what with the highly readable _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_.  Oh, how I dislike the stream-of-consciousness technique.


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## Varokhâr (Jun 2, 2006)

I put down Book Four of _The Wheel of Time_ due to personal problems and have yet to pick it back up. I've done a lot of non-fiction reading since; I find it easier to read non-fiction books than fiction anymore. I need to be in just the right mood to get into good fiction. Guess I'm getting old and cranky


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## Mike (Jun 3, 2006)

Never did finish "Dune Messiah"...or "Children of Dune"...or "Chapterhouse: Dune", for the matter.

It seems odd, considering the original "Dune" ranks on my list of greatest science-fiction novels of all time. While the first was fresh, original, well-written, gripping, I found the others to be dull, laboured, and frankly covering old ground. I suppose herbert "fizzled out" after writing his magnum Opus, and just couldn't follow up with anything quite the same in the Dune Universe.

I never finished "Tom Jones" by Fielding. That book made me almost sicken in digust and die on the spot.

"Robinson Crusoe" is another book I never actually got around to finishing. The lack of any significant plot may have contributed to this one.

One book I almost quit, but never quite did, was "Aztec" by Gary Jennings. I bought this a long time ago and picked it up every time there was a lull in reading anything else. It took two years to finish, simply because I read a lot of books in between, but I did finally reach the end--at which I gently laid the book to rest. (Strange, now that I think about it, I never finished "Raptor"--by the same author. The two transexual characters having sex with eachother near the middle was too much for me--though I nearly quit when a priest raped the main character as well. So much for historical fiction, move aside for Jenning's smut).

Oh yess...I'm forgetting another...ah--DRAGONLANCE! This book didn't make me almost keel over and die, but it did make me vomit. I believe it was the first book, whatever it was called.

Oh dear, I believe I've written more than I meant to write in the first place. I should stop now.


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## HLGStrider (Jun 4, 2006)

Two that come to mind, if you don't count books I picked up, read the first page of, and put down again at the library. 

Occasionally, too, I'll go on an "author rampage" where I'll like something a particular writer has written so I storm the library, grab everything off the shelf by that author, and attempt to read them all in a week. With non-prolific writers or writers who are simply not well-stocked in my rather pitifully stocked local library, no problem. Unfortunately, I once made the mistake of trying to do this with P. G. Wodehouse. I fell in love with that man's sense of humor and snatched up everything the library had by him, which considering the over all skimpiness of that institution was AMAZING. I must've had twenty books. About seven books later I sort of glazed over with one of his later Jeeves books which didn't have Wooster in it anyway, and I said, "Enough is enough" and I took the remaining thirteen or so back without finishing, including the one I was about a quarter through. I still love Wodehouse but now I take him in small doses.

But seriously, if you don't count strange urges such as that, books I have put down are few and far between, simply because it is so much easier to push on through to find out what happened. 

The exceptions are (already mentioned by someone else) _Robinson Caruso_ and _Lorna Doone_. Mom bought me both of those as birthday presents (in seperate years) and the writing style in both turned me off some how. I don't usually mind antiquicated styles, but give me Ivanhoe over Caruso any day. 

Oh, and I did the same thing with Jules Verne that I did with Wodehouse, so I guess you can add _From the Earth to the Moon_ to the list. Though I may have eventually finished that but I'm not sure because I can't remember the ending even though I got a long ways into it . . . I remember they saw the dark side of the moon and were running out of oxygen but . . . gosh, I can't remember if I finished that or not. 

Also, a lot of times I put down a book I found dull and picked it up three years later and finished it without trouble. _A Connecticutt Yankee in King Arthur's Court_ and the Lewis Space Trillogy fall into this catagory. 

So, yeah, I'm an ecentric reader, but I do all right.


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## Halasían (Jun 4, 2006)

e.Blackstar said:


> You could send them to meeeeeeeeee...


You want them _(Ice & Fire)_? They're yours! PM me your shipping address and I'll get them boxed up and sent next week.

I have to say I tried and tried to get through these, but failed miserably. Then Vio suggested I try to skip parts and Locks sugested the same on another board, and I did try it but it didn't flow. Now I know some good books can start hard. When I read the Black Company, the first two chapters were hard to grasp, but it did drive me to keep reading. Chapter 3 redeemed the other two and the rest went well until about book 7 or so... but Game of Thrones I just cant get into. So yeah, if you want them.. let me know. They are rather worn paperbacks but are competely intact.


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## Lindir (Jun 5, 2006)

There are loads of books I've started but never finished, sometimes because they're boring and sometimes because I've gotten side tracked into reading something else. I have for example started on the Silmarillion any number of times but I find it impossible to finish. This would be one of the boring books and I doubt now that I will ever read it properly.
Just as HLG, I tend to overdo authors. Most notably this happened with Agatha Christie. When I was a teenager I devoured everything by her I could find, but I got really tired of the whole business and eventually got rid of every book I had by her. It's not the best way to read books.


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## Rhiannon (Jun 5, 2006)

There's a handful of books that I have dropped like hot potatoes, never to touch again, and many more books that I wanted to like and just didn't, or that I picked up during one of my reading dry spells, when nothing can hold my attention. More often, though, I'll force myself to finish a book, because I hate leaving thing incomplete. I don't like all of those loose threads dangling out of my psyche.

I gave _Anna Karenina_ 400 pages to get interesting, and it never did, so I stopped reading it.

I gave up on The Wheel of Time books sometime after they started to suck.

I gave up on Terry Goodkind for the same reason.

I gave up on the Song of Ice and Fire series because I couldn't handle the sheer number of POVs.

I gave up on _Fevre Dream_ by George R. R. Martin because it just wasn't holding my attention, but I may go back to it at some point.

I gave up on _Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming_ by Roger Zelazny and some other guy for the same reason (I would like to go back and read that one).

I've never managed to read all of the Chronicles of Amber, though I dearly want to--I've read the first three (I think) twice and something always came up to prevent me from focusing on the rest.

I stopped reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series after _Wolves of the Calla_--I love the series and I plan to re-read them and then go on to the rest, but at the time I just didn't feel like I would be able to handle some of the things that might happen in _Song of Susannah_. 

I've read the first half of _The Silmarillion_ three times now, and academic commitments keep preventing me from finishing it--and it's not like it's something I can put down and pick up again weeks later, because I forget names and details and can't follow what's going on.


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## Arvedui (Jun 6, 2006)

Sorry, I forgot to add _Mists of Avalon_ in my first post. I just kept falling asleep from boredom, so I had to put it down.



Elgee said:


> I still love Wodehouse but now I take him in small doses.


 Wodehouse is great, but I agree that reading more than two or three books in a row, is a bit too much. Ninety-nine books, and they are all more or less in the same manner. But I still laugh my behind off every second page or so.


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## Violanthe (Jun 12, 2006)

> I have to say I tried and tried to get through these, but failed miserably. Then Vio suggested I try to skip parts and Locks sugested the same on another board, and I did try it but it didn't flow. Now I know some good books can start hard. When I read the Black Company, the first two chapters were hard to grasp, but it did drive me to keep reading. Chapter 3 redeemed the other two and the rest went well until about book 7 or so... but Game of Thrones I just cant get into. So yeah, if you want them.. let me know. They are rather worn paperbacks but are competely intact.


 
Did you try listening to them on audiobook? This often helps for me, getting into a book that I wouldn't otherwise read.


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