Dear Readers,


I now consider this blog to be my Juvenelia. Have fun perusing the archives, and find me at my new haunt, here.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Put Down That Book!

I was looking at my bookshelf the other night with friends who were over to watch the Phelps juggernaut win some gold medals (Wooohoo) and we started talking about books that we started but couldn't finish.

In the last year or so, I've read 100 pages or more of the following books, only to put them down in frustration:

  1. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (Good, but depressing)
  2. The Gathering, by Anne Enright (boring, depressing)
  3. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud (boring, too many descriptions of interior decoration)

and some others I can't quite recall, they were that memorable.

So yeah--we have a nobel prize winner, a booker prize winner, and a critically beloved winner. I'd be embarassed, except I'm not.

Which books have you guys started but never finished, and why?

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:42 PM

    I read Snow this spring for a class I was taking just for fun. (I finished my bachelor's about five years ago...eep!) I had heard so many great things about Pahmuk that I forced myself to keep reading and keep reading to see when it would get good. It never did. I was sorely disappointed.

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  2. I never did finish Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust. Despite warnings that I wouldn't finish it, I dove in anyway - mistake! I thought I was actually dying of boredom. That little experiment could have turned me off of reading forever!

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