ITT: Books you just couldn't finish reading because they

i don't remember dropping a book.
you can get a lot from a shitty book.

American Gods

Actually bought a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey off a homeless person in the street for a fiver, mostly to stop him from reading it.

Read a couple of pages. Awful beyond belief. Even the harshest of reviews simply do not do justice to the level of retardation required to pull off that prose. Difficult to believe that there is such a large subset of masochists out there who literally get off on writing that is that painfully awful.

>>7679183
patrician

I've never stopped reading a book part way through, just like I've never stopped watching a film part way through, even if I thought it was shit.

>>7679171
The name of the rose.

It was so dull and badly written that even >>7679183 barely applied to it.

Infinite jest

>>7679216
That was nice, man. Do you ever drop off old books for him?

>>7679171
Dostoyevsky - Devils
Verne - From Earth To The Moon
Palahalunokuorwhatever - Snuff

Bible. Atlas Shrugged. Infinite Jest. Gravity's Rainbow.

>>7679265
Wooahhh man! Epic meme XD
You have been updooted*, my good sir!

*doot is a funny new meme - google is your friend!

>>7679171
>Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
>Luna: New Moon, Ian McDonald
>Zero Point, Neal Asher

Inherent Vice cause the movie seemed cool, but the book was just so boring and badly written

Luna: New Moon is: 'What if i take Game of Thrones and Dune, and make my own shit universe where i use my own words for shit so readers have to flick to the back of the book to know what the fuck im talking about'

TBF, Zero Point is the second in a trilogy i believe and i only bought it at an airport.

Catcher in the rye, crime and punishment (I was 16, need start again) pendulum of Foucault, literally gave up half way,1984 took me 2 attempts to start, catch 22 2/3in, could have stopped without missing anything

>>7679397
the most embarrassing posts are also from the dfwfags. go figure.

>>7679183
this is the proper attitude. i hate seeing people around here admitting to dropping books. ludicrous.

>>7679171
Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow, both bored me.

Everything I've attempted by Huysmans and Kant. They are above me.

>>7679171

The Broom of the System

'a tour de force in pseudo-intellectual twaddle'

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>>7679171
The Devil Wears Prada

It was already badly written, but I made it a quarter of the way in because I thought the boss was based 100% on Anna Wintour. When I learned that she was just an amalgamation plus some fiction, I lost all interest in the book.

>>7679171
The Great Gatsby

>>7679216
That's the brilliance of the book - it's written so bad that you have to be a masochist to enjoy it

>>7679235
Well, I just couldn't keep watching Only God Forgives
worst tripe i've been a part of regardless of medium

>>7679171
infinte jest
gravity's rainbow
kite runner
i think that's it really

was not engaged by the meme duo. have read finnegans wake and over a thousand other books probably, im fairly certain those two are objectively bad and memeing about either is a telltale sign of pseudism

>>7679619
you know my feel

>>7679171
Catcher in the Rye, read a single page and then put the book away. Granted, I was 13 or 14 and will try it again someday.

>>7679171
What's the deal with murikan chicks and those butt-ugly boots?

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>>7679855
u wanna fight fgt?

>>7679950
being reminded of that pretentious piece of garbage's existence is enough of a beating for me

Been a while since I've been on /lit/.
Why do you guys hate pinecone now? Did he become meme'd to death?

>>7679183
I do this too. No matter on the length - if it's long and I hate it, I'll push through (albeit at a slower pace) because I don't know whether the book will pick up in quality and I don't know what it has to offer in what not to do as a writer.

>>7679935
its supposed to be some country thing but I don't like them either. Its not all American chicks either. 170 million women are a lot to generalize like that

A Confederacy of Plebs

>>7679183
Schopenhauer would beg to differ:

“One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.”

>>7679235
>>7679613
>>7679994

A bad book is like a bad movie, it's pretty easy to tell within the first few moments if it's bad or not.

Anyway, why continue reading something you despise? Because you think that somewhere down the road the book will surprise you with its perfectly profound message about the human condition that you 'just knew' it was gearing up and culminating towards? 9 times out of ten this is rubbish, no more than elaborate self-deluding in light of giving more clout to outside opinion and reputation than your own sense of taste. But let's say you do turn out to dislike a book that you know deep down, from countless academic and therefore trustworthy testimonials, is good like, say, Ulysses? Then its either legitimately a bad book, at least to you, giving way to subjective claims, or that the book is in fact good, but that you simply don't have the intelligence, cultural acumen, taste, or any other self-deigned important qualifier to properly enjoy it. So you finish it, pretend to understand, and say you loved it: cognitive dissonance at its finest.

The truth is: life is short, so don't spend time doing something you don't enjoy just to impress others, check it off the list, and go on, with improper restraint, to the next one. It's a waste.

I almost throw God's delusion by R.Dawkins to the trash. Read it all , tho.
Books like Post-Mortem by Patricia Cornwell or The alchemist by Coelho are on-hold.
I try to not drop the books, I always find in them some useful stuff regardless the level of shitiness it could be in them.

>>7679171

One Dimensional Man

I did not understand what in the fuck he was talking about

>>7679397
Your post is infinitely worse than his

>>7679171
Atlas Shrugged

>>7679661
I always liked the movie as a shitty romcom filled with nice clothes and the dazzling aura of high fashion, but holy fuck the book was terrible.

Did you ever see the movie? What made it fun was Meryl Streep being a pain in the ass in frustrating but ultimately understandable ways, and she kind of redeems herself at the end. The boss in the book is just blindly being a total bitch, is distant and never gets fleshed out as a character, and stays horrible the whole time.

I was pretty bummed, but honestly not super surprised. And it makes the movie all the more impressive. I heard there's a sequel to the book, but holy shit I can't imagine it being good at all.

>>7679249
nah, that book was fun

>>7680036
okay mr austismus maximus, all white women in murika

Hmm... while I tend to never set books down, I recently had to set aside Foucault's entire History of Madness. I just didn't care anymore. It wasn't shit, I was just done with it.

I plan to return to it.

If you have good taste, you shouldn't be dropping books.

>>7679583
Wow.
>>7680102
>A bad book is like a bad movie, it's pretty easy to tell within the first few moments if it's bad or not.
This is simply not true with either medium. Unless the writing or acting is glaringly bad, nothing should be condemned at first glance.
>>7680440
BURN THE ALCHEMIST

>>7679406
>IV was badly written

>>7679950
This movie was so shitty

>>7679265
I battled through IJ, but generally found the book to be awfully dull most of the time. Really considered dropping it several times

>>7682512
thanks bro.
got any more good suggestions regarding psychiatry? I am reading garfinkel atm. basically I just like to argue with my psychiatrists.

>>7679171

Funny how I'm ready to drop Miserables after 500 pages past, but kept reading the shittiest shit such as Rabbit, Run.

>>7682517
found the pleb

>>7682547
Don't talk shit about updike, pleb

>>7682529
Must've gone over your head big time.
I've read the whole in 2 weeks with IJ wiki and general knowledge of DFW's influences and context and I got to say that the entire book has maybe 10 pages devoid of a single interesing and intriguing thing

I'm on the fence of dropping Infinite Jest, about 200 pages in. I started it immediately after Gravity's Rainbow a week ago. Maybe you can understand... These criticisms aren't anything new, but DFW's writing is overwrought and pretentious. Maybe I have Pynchon freshly in my mind, but DFW is a poor mockery in style and substance. DFW's writing wanders in the same way Pynchon's does, yet DFW's take on the style is by filling in turgid prose and pseudo-technical language. Where Pynchon's technical references show his true (and realistically defendable) understanding of science, DFW's usage is blatantly masturbatory and only seeks to create a wall of distance between himself and the reader. This, I think, is a large contributor to his status not as an author who is convoluted and overwrought but simply misunderstood. This, and of course his suicide, create an aura of detachedness that is difficult to separate from his work, creating the illusion that the work is difficult to comprehend whereas the reality is that its just poorly written.

On a more tangible note, I'm just not a fan of his rambling sentences that I can only assume are meant to be witty. Characters with idiosyncrasies so absurd they go unquestioned because the characters are described by and represent the very fantastical prose they are written in? I'm not really buying it.

>>7682516
>should be
I agree to not immediately judge, but in general cases: the smell matches the taste. If you're reading for prose, this holds true even stronger—it rarely suddenly starts to magically improve.

And now I must ask: pray, whatever else for is there to read than prose; for plot is ever prosaic?

To the lighthouse, though admittedly it was probably just over my head and I gave up trying to figure out if they were thinking about doing something, doing something, talking or thinking about talking and who the fuck's perspective or consciousness we're streaming from at any given time.

>>7679406

shoulda read literally anything else by ian mcdonald desu.

>>7682634
>read 200 pages out of total of around 28 000 that the author has written
>already able to post walls of text of special snowflake opinions

Jesus kid.

>>7679249
You're out of your mind.

>>7679667
This
Overrated as hell. It wasn't even popular when it first came out. It's only popular today cause of some hipster faggots.

>>7679216
I'm a grill whose friends insisted upon me reading 50 shades, I couldn't get past the first chapter. Absolutely terrible writing.

>they fell for the Infinite Jest meme

kek

>>7679171
The gunslinger, tbqh

>>7682813

It's great senpai.

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

>>7679406
>inherent vice
god yes. i was reading it in preparation of the movie (which i still haven't seen), but gave up on it a third of the way through. try-hard and desperate to be relaxed. made my eyes water with regret.

this thread is making me angry

The only two books I ever dropped in my life were '1984' (Dad gave it to me to read when I was 8 or 9 but I found it too complicated) and Yahtzee Crowshaw's 'Mogworld' (which I wasn't enjoying at all at the time), might pick them up again though.

>>7679667
Biggest waste of time reading that shit.

>>7679183
The last I remember is The Long Earth by Baxter and Pratchett

It was like the shittest parts of the two authors mixed together