Giving up on a book

I nearly always finish books I start unless they turn out to be complete trash. I just decided to quit The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All about 200 pages in. It's over 700 pages. It's not trash, but I just don't like it, and now I feel terribly guilty. Why is this? Do other people feel this way, or am I simply a hopeless neurotic?

I only ever didn't finish one book--Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed--and at the time it felt quite liberating but in fact I've never not finished another book since, so I guess whatever liberation I thought I'd achieved wasn't much. My suspicion is that we're hopeless neurotics.

This has nothing to do with neurosis. It has to do with the balance btw personal limitations and the desire to extract even a drop of honey from what appears to be a deserted, even desolate hive. I am more on the impatient side, and have even set-up a sub-collection called PHONIES: WALL OF SHAME, much of which includes works I should have abandoned. -- GCG

For all the things I'm compulsive about, I can walk away from a book without finishing it. I dropped one book on page 2 because the author couldn't handle restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, and another because I didn't like the main character's name. My record is the second sentence, which is where I ditched Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall for being written in the present tense.

I feel no guilt whatsoever when I do this. No book is going to be to everyone's taste. Sometimes I just make a wrong pick. Reading an entire novel or even just a short story takes a commitment of my time and attention, which are precious commodities not to be wasted on something that isn't going to reward my investment. I'll usually give a book a fair chance, like to the halfway mark; but if the signs are bad, I just cut my losses.

If I'm not sure whether to continue, I'll put a book aside for a couple of days and go on to something else. It's usually pretty clear whether I want to return to it or not.

Sometimes I'll come back and restart an abandoned book years or even decades later. Most of the time I just write them off, as I've done with four already this year. The truly memorable ones are the ones I purely hated. I won't ever accidentally buy or borrow them again.

Sometimes, I just don't finish. I think I may have ADH

>4 Meredy: I ditched Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall for being written in the present tense.

Ha! Me too!

I threw De Lillo's Libra into a creek, tore up a book on plutonium for fuel so I could sit on the balcony one cold night this winter, burnt one of mine at a book burning party...Just finished Goddard Graves' Harmony Junction--didn't harm it, but for pen marks within (I mention this so our Harry Mac feareth not a violent reaction--very positive review, I just have to DO IT)

I even have a tag I call "Attempted and Abandoned." I'm considering moving Anna Karenina from my "currently reading" to my abandoned list, because I've started that book a few times, and frankly I just can't seem to get into it.

I even went to the Met (NYC) to see the ballet interpretation, trying to get inspired (I'm ballet trained myself) and halfway through I was muttering, "Just DIE already."

Maybe I shouldn't feel guilty about not liking a supposed "classic." HM.

I once amazed a brother in law when I told him I could just stop reading a crime story (or stop watching a movie) and not even feel very curious about who did it. I don't read books for the ending, I do it to enjoy the ride. If I don't, I just stop.

But I may have become more tenacious over the years, and if I feel I should be reading it because it's a classic, I sometimes make a bigger effort. Or not. I dropped Moby Dick not because I hated it but I just wasn't very impressed. That's one of the very few books I didn't finish that I do intend to pick up again. Some day. Maybe.

>9 FlorenceArt: It may occur after a black bodysuit group of 15 or so masked people who seem somewhat familiar with you kidnap you and watch you in groups of three until you finish...

>1 IreneF: It's not trash, but I just don't like it, and now I feel terribly guilty. Why is this? Do other people feel this way, or am I simply a hopeless neurotic?

I don't give up, I just consign many books to an ever-growing pile of "I'm not done with that yet." It's all about how you rationalize it! :)

>8 HRHTish:

Give it a little bit. Tolstoy writes an amazing scene involving thousands of the cutest cats imaginable right before Anna gets run over by the train.

>12 DanMat: Cute kitties? Where! What page!? (LOL)

I just found this:

http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/424-what-makes-you-put-down-a-book

wait here's the whole list!

http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/abandoned-books

I couldn't make it through the list.

DanMat, thanks for ruining the book for me...hit by a train you say?

As with food, there are many books I don't bother to try. Others I taste and spit out. Some just sit on the shelf until they are past a mental "use by" date. Some are fun to ridicule--like people who drink instant coffee.

I think what bothers me is when the book is supposedly well-prepared but I just don't like it. I feel like I ought to be getting something out of it that I'm not.

There are books I will slog through because of the company they keep. The Iliad comes to mind. It was worth the misery because it's nutritious and sustaining.

She was trainspotting Rick. Killed instantly.

(lqarl) Just keep yer yap shut about Crime and Punishment.

a crime to have written it and a punishment to read it....

I loved it. When I was an adolescent, I was thrilled to discover all that dark literature among the celebrated (and therefore supposedly good for you) authors.

Of course, I read the Classics Illustrated version first.

Wow. It looks good:

http://picturesfromanoldbook.blogspot.com/2010/11/classics-illustrated-1-crime-a...

Wow, that's it. I found it utterly engrossing when I was about 12.

Those pages are way out of order.

>22 DanMat: Wow, there's a lot of pablum out there.

I guess I'll have to be careful with my selections.

For I am a dog (slow, persistent, loyal, stoic, tenacious, and only slightly dim-witted). All my rejected books are in the "To Be Finished" category.

But then again, I expect to live to be 100 years old.

In dog years that's 700.

17> When I first read the Iliad I must have been 18 or so and I found it boring (but I finished it) and much less exciting than the Odyssey. When I re-read them a few years ago I changed my mind and found the Iliad much deeper, and for the same reason I had despised it the first time: all those endless lists of people killing each other. Except that the first time I hadn't appreciated the flash biography that every single one of them gets. Just one phrase most of the time describing the man, and then he dies. Now that I'm older I found that very moving somehow.

>26 FlorenceArt: When I first read the Iliad I must have been 18 or so and I found it boring (but I finished it) and much less exciting than the Odyssey. When I re-read them a few years ago I changed my mind and found the Iliad much deeper, and for the same reason I had despised it the first time: all those endless lists of people killing each other.

Homer almost got me a speeding ticket once because I was listening to an audio version of the Iliad on a long drive, and I got so wrapped up in the battle scenes that I blew by a cop going 85 mph and never even saw him.

Luckily, the guy thought it was so funny when I explained that he let me off with a warning.

See, not all cops are illiterate.

I was first asked to read the Iliad I was reading selections of it in Latin, which kind of ruined it for me, since that language has been preserved and perfected, as best I can tell, solely for the purposes of tormenting children. And why the hell they translated a Greek book into Latin I'll never understand. The only thing I could say for it was that it was better than Virgil.

But then I got to read Lattimore's version, and it turned out to be a pretty darn good read. And in college, we did selections in Greek class, and I found out Homer could really sing it.

But though I'm sure I've read all of it multiple times, I'm not sure I've ever done it cover to cover fashion.

One of my lifelong regrets is that I never learned Latin. My mother insisted that I take Spanish instead because it was more useful. She was right, of course, but Latin still keeps cropping up in my life.

I thought the Romans read the Iliad in Greek, but what do I know.

I hated the violence of the Iliad and liked the fantasy elements of the Odyssey much better. I liked all the subplots and different characters.

My son and I were reading it (the Iliad) aloud, since it is Homer and we felt it should be read aloud. But we gave up after the introductions to every Greek ship and every Greek in those ships - because it went on to introduce the horses and we just looked at each other and said "Oh HELL no."

Later I looked ahead (we were reading the Lattimore version) and realized that the horse section is pretty short and then you get to the good stuff! But we have not picked it up since. I hope to get to that, at some point, and hope to talk him back into it.

ETA: My son read the Odyssey (a condensed, very prosy translation, and I don't remember the name of the translator) when he was a freshman in high school, and I had read a children's version when I was a kid, and read the Lattimore (I think?) when I was an adult. We both love the Odyssey and Greek mythology generally, but the Iliad defeated us.

I'm going to give up on Goddard C. Graves' Harmony Junction: A Polyphony of Love and Ideas in the Fullness of Time if my review gets only a single star after another full day. I figure the pro/con folk for begrudgers but where are my people? Salonisti unite in action.

Don't give up on the Iliad. The death of Hector at the hands of the childish, impetuos Achilles trumps the picaresque nonsense of the Odyssey.

It does sound weird to study Homer in a Latin translation.

I think I had to read Caesar when I was studying Latin, I might have enjoyed Homer better. I never studied Greek but my last Latin teacher really wanted to teach Greek (not enough students interested so she had to do Latin instead). We didn't learn much Latin in her class but I owe her the little I know about Greek philosophers. I remember Epicurus fondly.

The first Homer translation I read was written in a 6 syllable rythm similar to alexandrines, to echo the music of the original. I looked for it when I bought the books to re-read them but couldn't find it so I had to fall back on a more recent translation, which wasn't bad at all but wasn't in alexandrines.

>30 IreneF: I hated the violence of the Iliad and liked the fantasy elements of the Odyssey much better.

A good introduction to understanding the Iliad is Caroline Alexander's The War That Killed Achilles. She approaches the epic as a long commentary on the nature and costs of war, and in the process makes it feel very contemporary and relevant. She is fond of the Lattimore translation and most of the references in the book are from it.

another vote here for the Lattimore translation. Good old Lattimore.

I thumbed your review Rick. the book sounds intriguing, i'd probably like it.

I kept saying flag instead of thumb...

>1 IreneF: Back to the original question, don't feel bad, I gave up on Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All after about 50 pages. Frankly, if she ever got around to telling anything she should have kept it to herself.