Just Put It Down!

[Deleted member 133]

I don't know about you, but I've always been a bit of a book masochist.

You know. You get a book from a "favourite" or "popular" author and you start reading it. Ten pages in you fall asleep. Next day you start again and hit thirty pages when your eyes start clunking shut. You pick it up again and get to about page 100 when you flip to the last page to see how much is left. Then you spend several precious hours of your life finishing what you already knew was a very disappointing read.

Back when I bought every book I would read that's what I did.

Nowadays the library is my second home.

As well as saving money on book purchases (us retirees are a frugal lot) I'm also saving precious hours of my life (us retirees have, by definition, fewer of those left than most!)

I've not finished the last three books I've started. They were all dogs - by well-known authors (I won't name names.) But unlike my past self, I can now get a few, or a few dozen, pages in and call it quits. Nothing invested - nothing lost.

I should have adopted that approach years ago.

Here's a question: name that one book that you really wish you had never taken the time to finish reading.

I'll go first: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Ecco. I read the whole thing and still have no clue what it was about.

Jeff

 

[Haywood]

I'll go first: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Ecco. I read the whole thing and still have no clue what it was about.

Jeff

How did you even slog through that? The pretentious jackass who translated that book used so many genuinely obscur words that I had to read it with the book in one hand and my dictionary in the other. Considering that I'm a well read guy with an English degree and a huge vocabulary, that is a pretty sorry state of affairs. I threw in the towel after about three chapters. I can forgive a book for being dense. Some of my favorites are. I could not, however, forgive that book for being pointlessly convoluted, boring and pretentious. Someone owes some trees an apology, for they gave their lives in vain.

 

[Haywood]

Here's a question: name that one book that you really wish you had never taken the time to finish reading.

Anything by Piers Anthony. Mon Dieu, what a hack.

 

[Botch]

It took me over a year to get Shogun down, but I don't regret it.

Otherwise the only two books I haven't finished were Hawking's A Brief History of Time (over my head) and Margaret Thatcher's biography (boooring!)

Ten pages in you fall asleep.

That succinctly describes my college years.

 

[Deleted member 133]

Here's the latest book that I've had to put down.

I'm normally a pretty big Nelson DeMille fan, but his recent re-write of one of his own novels, The Quest, fell very flat for me.

I didn't get more than 100 pages in before I quit. I found nothing compelling (nor even remotely interesting) in any of the characters. It's basically yet another story about the search for The Holy Grail - set in wartorn Ethiopia decades ago. Maybe the last 350 or so pages were killer; but I couldn't hang around to find out.

And don't get me wrong: I like a Holy Grail story as much as the next guy. Just not this one.

Jeff