Ever read a book so bad that you actaully stopped reading?

[Stephen Wo]

Christ Jesus in holy heaven. Dianetics, Atlas Shrugged... I'm pretty left wing, but I feel like I should at least know my enemy, right? God, couldn't even get past the first couple pages.

The Time Machine! Oh God! The Time Machine! I did actually finish it, because it was for school, but I hated that piece of pretentious shit.

 

[DiMono]

I've never stopped reading a book because it was bad, but I've read two that I should have stopped reading because they were bad. One was Absolom, Absolom by William Faulkner - absolutely horrendous. He spends four pages describing the house in which one character will tell the other characters a story that doesn't happen in that house. The house itself is never mentioned again, but he spends four pages making sure we know exactly what it looks like. Why is this man revered?

The other one I can't remember the title of, but it was about a woman who receives her father's ashes, and decides to mix them into her red paint and start painting with it, and the things she paints start coming to life. Because it wasn't really her father's ashes (though she absolutely thought they were), it was residue from an alien spaceship that landed in the African desert. And spoiler alert, she uses this power to be a total dick. I actually thought about keeping this one on my shelf rather than turning it in to a secondhand store, because then there would have been a chance that someone else might actually read it. Seriously, I feel like reading this book made me a worse author, that's how bad it was. Also it doesn't actually end, it just runs out of pages.

 

[Koroviev]

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov; it's about the devil coming to earth, but after a while the story just stops being interesting...

I'm going to guess that it may have had something to do with the chapters that travel back to Biblical times. They're not my favorite, but the book as a whole is easily in my top 10.

 

[repeating integers]

Christ Jesus in holy heaven. Dianetics, Atlas Shrugged... I'm pretty left wing, but I feel like I should at least know my enemy, right? God, couldn't even get past the first couple pages.

The Time Machine! Oh God! The Time Machine! I did actually finish it, because it was for school, but I hated that piece of pretentious shit.

Aww, I recently read that book and I loved it. Bit flowery though. "Expounding a recondite matter to us" indeed.

 

[Giest4life]

As far as I remember, I have finished, or I'm intending to finish, all the books that I've started. I usually read the back of the book, the introduction, and the first two chapters to see if I want to start the book.

 

[Neonbob]

Great Expectations. No other book has managed to put so much drivel on one page. There were insignificant details upon inconsequential observations upon the mind numbingly slow plot movement.
It felt like he put more useless information on one page than the entirety of the Guiness Record book.
I was assigned that book during High School, and it was the only book that I ever hated so much that I actually considered burning. I probably stopped at the third chapter, and just let myself fail that entire section of the class. Thankfully, there were enough other books to make up for me doing so.

Really?? I loved Great Expectations, I read it over the summer! Dickens' whimsical, almost musical writing style just tickles me I guess. probably why I'm such a fan of PG Wodehouse.

I found it more needlessly dense than whimsical, but to each his own.

 

[thejackyl]

Apart from The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird (I had to read both as a Freshman in High School) the only book I've started and haven't finished was the last Harry Potter book. I rather liked the series up until the sixth book. The seventh... I don't know, I just cant seem to get past Chapter 8 or so.

Perhaps I just grew out of Harry Potter. But it just doesn't interest me anymore.

 

[Danny91]

I might have a situation slightly different to a lot of you describing a genre of books more than anything; but being South African, with Apartheid having ended just under 20 years ago, there's a huge massive glut of literature both used in education and found in just random novels of a particular sort. These are novels written about people suffering at the hands of the cruel white man in a multitude of ways; and being a history major I respect the historical events that have happened, but when every single novel twists its' themes and plots to bring it up again, showing new ways the white man can be cruel, all it now does is make me feel like they're exploiting a market about a subject that's so painful as to be disrespectful, and ruining what could be perfectly good books and stories already. Maybe its just the zeitgeist of my society, oh well.

 

[Sonicron]

Only happened to me twice. First, there was Goethe's "Faust". No matter how appealing the concept of the content may be, to me Goethe's writing style is the biggest load of wank in the world of literature. And second, Tolkien's "Silmarillion". Screw you, book, and screw your obsession with sections about fictional lineages long enough I could wallpaper my apartment with them.

 

[Moc]

Atlas Shrugged. Still got it but I haven't really tried picking it up again for awhile.

It's not necessarily "bad" its just I got bored quickly.

Well this one, I got bored after some time and choose that I will read it another time, maybe when I must waste like 12 Hours straight

 

[Giest4life]

Lord of the Flies? I read that when I was 10. Adored it, by the way. I wonder what that says about my personality.

I read that when I was 12 and I thought "cool story bro." I read it again some five yeas later, and I shed a lonely tear when Simon died.

A lot of people are also mentioning Lord of the Rings as a book they couldn't finish, and I can see where they are coming from, but if you guys want to fully understand the roots of the modern fantasy genre, you absolutely have to read that book.

 

[Danny91]

I noticed a lot of people in this thread mentioning Tolkien and Dickens but I kinda think its unfair to those authors.

Dickens works such as Tale of Two Cities was not published as a book but a series of entries in newspapers. The reason he is so wordy is because people were reading his "book" over the span of weeks. Imagine if you watched a favorite T.V. series as a movie. You would probably consider is a long tedious affair as well.

Tolkien created the fantasy genre as we know it today, so his work is fairly extensive in creating the world. Many modern day fantasy books lift Tolkien's world (Elves=good, orcs=bad, dwarves=Scottish)and change few details. Consequently, most people already know the world Tolkien describes because it has been copied so many times and so his descriptions seem very long and boring.

A modern book I couldn't finish would be Wizards First Rule. Everyone is so bland and archetypal that you can tell what will happen three chapters away. I looked up the ending on wikipedia because I could not bring myself to finish the book.

Sorry, just a point I wanted to add on with your bit about Tolkien, the man was a linguist and linguistic historian; definitely not a novelist, but still a genius in his own right, for some of the reasons you said in your post. I find myself reading his novels with the same mindset I use when I study old history books, albeit these are ones that are fictional ha ha ..I also know far less people enjoy reading those sorts of books, so I'm usually fine with them saying they didn't enjoy it; because thats what it basically is.

 

[NaramSuen]

Moby Dick, it starts and ends well, but the middle is basically unreadable.

 

[blaize2010]

I will probably catch a lot of shit for this, but Lord of the Rings.

the first time i tried to read that series, i was 9. I attempted it once a year every year till i was fourteen

 

[Dan Steele]

Twilight, but I do have reasons for it. After my Ex-girlfriend forced me to read them(One very big reason why I left her) I have created a list of reasons why this putrid pile of writing discharge should be wiped off the face of the earth.

1) The whole story screams Angst,Angst,Angst
2) The characters have little to no emotion, I could not find myself emotionally attached to any of the main characters.
3) Do you know Stephanie Meyer is A Mormon? Now I'm not saying that's bad, but the Twilight books are PLASTERED with no sex before marriage subliminal messages.
4) Bella from description is the very idea of a soap opera main character. Let me sum this up in a matter of sentences. Edward leaves Bella, Bella tries to kill herself, By some feat of nature is saved, falls in love with Jacob, Edward comes back she falls in love with him again, Bella gets Pregorz, and offers to let Jacob raise the child. I have seen this in a soap opera before.

I have a list of dozins of reasons, but the 4 above are my biggest reasons.

 

[retyopy]

Lord of the Flies? I read that when I was 10. Adored it, by the way. I wonder what that says about my personality.

I read that when I was 12 and I thought "cool story bro." I read it again some five yeas later, and I shed a lonely tear when Simon died.

A lot of people are also mentioning Lord of the Rings as a book they couldn't finish, and I can see where they are coming from, but if you guys want to fully understand the roots of the modern fantasy genre, you absolutely have to read that book.

I keep meaning to read it again, but something else always comes out before. Oh, and the death of Simon was indeed sad.

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

Jane Eyre. This goes back all the way to high school, ladies and gents.

You all know the drill; if girls like a book, the guys are sure to hate it. I don't like books that deal with female drama (and by that I mean 19th century drama where the hardest decision a woman needed to make during that era is if she should get married to someone that will make her happy or someone that she loves, despite all the hardships that come with it).

I don't remember too much of the book, only that they movie wasn't any better. It takes the double-edged sword approach to adapting a book to film in that it follows it faithfully; as the double-edged sword implies, this could be good, as it lets viewers know about what the book is about, but if the material in the book is not favored by some, then the film will be hated as well.

 

[JordanHavoc]

I think that Walden is the only book I had to stop reading on account of boredom. Usually I can plow through anything, but that...it was dreadfully boring.

I've stopped reading plenty of good books due to time constrains created by school, but Walden is the only one I've had to stop reading because I just didn't enjoy it at all.

 

[CJMacM]

The Fellowship of the Ring and Pride and Prejudice. I found them both incredibly boring. I've tried reading The Fellowship of the Rings at least 3 times, but I just can't get through it.