Why are you telling me all this?

[reddragdiva]

From katyha: What's the worst novel you've ever completely failed to finish?

We should exclude from this, I think, the famously awful. No-one seriously expects L. Ron Hubbard or Jeffrey Archer not to suck. To be truly awful, a work of art needs hope on the part of the reader.

My second prize winner: V. by Thomas Pynchon. Apparently it's l33t litritchoor. The writing and some of the scenes were okay, but I found myself underwhelmed and never went back.

All time prize winner: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. It's a thousand pages of unmitigated plotless toss. I could put up with the toss if it was going somewhere, but I battled through to page two hundred and something still waiting for the story to start. Apparently it's even l33t3r litritchoor and the plotless, circular eternal now is the point. I remain comprehensively unconvinced.

I barely read fiction any more. My last serious burst of fiction reading was fifteen years ago, when I was living in Perth, reading all the J.G. Ballard and similar British new-wave SF and being keenly aware I was in Vermillion Sands. I'm not sure Burroughs counts as "fiction," even when he claims to be; it's all his stand-up routine. Spoken-word Burroughs is amazing.

Comments

[kixie.livejournal.com]

Ugh, Thomas Pynchon really gets my goat, sheep...my whole flock. He's so bloody overrated and so unworthy of most of the praise he gets.

[reddragdiva]

The writing and some of the scenes were pretty good — he can manage a sentence or paragraph just fine — but they didn't string together at all. It was when I asked "why are you telling me all this?" one time too many.

[mangosteen]

"Atlas Shrugged". I tried to read it while still in university. I really did. I wanted to know what all the Randroids at school were going on about. That's the thing about Ivy-League schools. You get people who really are convinced that they will become the ruling elite of the country, and in a few cases, they might actually be right. And I suppose that as long as you're convinced you're at the top of the heap, and that you'll never ever fall, due to your current top-of-the-heapness, Objectivism looks pretty good.

There's only so much self-important wankery I can stand, though.

[reddragdiva]

Yep.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I finished Dhalgren. I remember women turning into trees, holding our for arbitrary thursdays, shagging, the shift to journal form part way through and the characters figuring out that they were in an SF novel.

[reddragdiva]

I'm glad I didn't make it that far. If I'd reached the self-referential bit, I'd have been forced to track down Delany and make him pay for his crimes, even thirty years after the fact.

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

The Mists of Avalon. bought for me by a misguided friend. OMG. never has anything sucked so hard. i can't describe how much it sucked very enticingly, because there was no redeeming anything.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Personally I thoroughly enjoyed Mists of Avalon. It's certainly a more original take on the whole Arthurian mythos.

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, on the other hand.... I'm surprised I persisted as long as I did. It doesn't so much crawl, as ooze imperceptibly towards some vague promise of plot.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The thing I can't stand is Isaac Asimov. Lots of other people like his novels, but I don't, so they can keep them all. In my perception the plots are very clever, but they're acted out by innumerable different appearances of the same character. They all respond to each other in exactly the same cynical, slightly quizzical way, and the women are either still this same person as the men, but with breasts! or vacant Barbie dolls who all respond the same in a different set of false and predictable ways to a different set of things. This is compounded by the bit where he spends a page talking about each bit of technology we encounter, but two sentences describing the people. Maybe I haven't read enough of it and it gets better, but to be honest I couldn't read any more of it. It took me six months to read halfway through the first Foundation book because I kept forgetting who the characters were, and then I got really stuck because I ran out of different skin colours to associate the names with, which was the only way I was so far managing to keep track of the plot because there were bugger all other distinguishing features. I decided I'd either have to start again and keep a running dossier of the characters with names, who they were friends with, what their role in which organisation was and what they'd already done and to whom, or I could give up and do something that was actually fun, and I chose the latter.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

And please post your letter bombs in response to this comment to... :)

[mr-e-cat.livejournal.com]

l33t litritchoor, it's sort of like the other war stories you get.
You know the stuff! A few blokes get together and try the one-upmanship game.

I've drunk so much piss I had to have my stomach pumped.
I once slept with a woman so ugly I chewed my arm off to get away.
I once read V and thought it was good

that sort of thing.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

*cough*

I think you'll find he's Delany, not Delaney. ie, one of the Prod branch.

[reddragdiva]

"I've heard of Black Irish, but this is ridiculous."

[seahorsemystic.livejournal.com]

I would have to say, A Once and Future King, by T. H. White. How many ways can you describe trees? I can honestly see several ways, but 100? Yes, that is an exageration, but alas, for me the entire book was too much like being read to, instead of being read. I still have it for the day I actually decide to try again.

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

The fiction I read most, recently, comes in comic-books (and often says Warren Ellis on the cover, but I am sure that is just a coincidence).

[reddragdiva]

We still have your copy of Global Frequency!

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest".

A massive doorstop of a book, written in dense paragraphs of gratuitous mundane detail; or so was my impression at page fourtysomething, at which point I threw in the towel.

[oonh.livejournal.com]

I am really tempted to take a copy of /Infinite Jest/, dip it in liquid nitrogen, throw it against some hard surface, and mail the fragments to David Foster Wallace.

Probably going to get strung up from a lamp-post for this...

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

The Fellowship Of The Ring. I did read it in its entirety once, when I was much younger, and couldn't understand what the fuss was about... I tried again when I was older and wiser in case I failed to appreciate something first time around, and just gave up on it halfway through.

Mind you, that isn't to say that I didn't completely miss something the second time, either. The first time I read Mostly Harmless I got to the end and thought "uh, what? That's it?", which left me rather puzzled. On second reading, I discovered I'd turned over the penultimate two pages as one, and completely missed the whole showdown at the end.

I can't think of any others that I've failed to finish. A few that felt like a slog towards the end (Robert Rankin had a dodgy spell for a while), and some that have taken me far longer than would usually (Blood Hunt, by Ian Rankin writing as Jack Harvey, springs to mind) but those I put down to having been in a pretty poor state mentally at the time and just not having time to sit up and read.

Re: Probably going to get strung up from a lamp-post for this...

[reddragdiva]

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

omg! i can't believe i forgot Song of Stone by Iain Banks. i actually like Iain Banks. i bought the book at a train station so i'd have anything at all to read. i later wished i'd bought a copy of Heat, because at least it would have been higher brow and had more plot twists.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552132217

"The Coming of the King", Nikolai Tolstoy

It's the only book I've given up on and never came back to later. Indeed, it's the only book I've given away, unfinished.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I struggled through the whole thing when it first came out. I tried to re-read it a year or two ago and realised that the problem hadn't been that I was stressed & avoiding exams when I first read it, it really does suck, and gave up 80 pages in.

[oonh.livejournal.com]

David Foster Wallace's /Infinite Jest/, and Thomas Pynchon's /Gravity's Rainbow/.

Also, after reading David Foster Wallace's spew on infinity, I'm even more irritated with his writing than beforehand.

[tintintin.livejournal.com]

I made the mistake of buying Infinite Jest, thinking it looked interesting. I think I gave up after the fourth set of nested chapter-long footnotes. I still find people praising it to the stars, though; I automatically assume they haven't actually read it.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

http://www.baen.com/library/0738847240/0738847240.htm

I like trashy vampire novels, but there's a fine line.

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

_The Dead Father_, by some utterly talentless hack.

I didn't do so well in that class, since the proffessors (plural) thought it was good.

Nor did they appreciate my opinion of Jackson Pollock.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Shameful confession...

I used to read Jeffrey Archer voluntarily, and enjoy it.

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe.
It's the first book I remember intentionally putting down before the end. I realised I don't care what happens to any of the characters. It was supposed to be brilliant and funny and a satire of the eighties, but it was dull, dull, dull.
Here is a man, he has no redeemeing qualities. Here is his wife, she has no qualities at all. Here is the mistress, she is greedy. But so is everyone else. Here is the five year old girl, she is cute because she is a small child. And one thing happens. In a novel of over 700 pages.

Gonna get lynched for this one but...

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Perfume by Patrick Suskind. It's on the favourites list of loads of people I otherwise respect, but I found the whole thing repulsive, and not in an interesting way.

There must be others, but I am notoriously obsessive when it comes to finishing books I've started.

Re: Gonna get lynched for this one but...

[redcountess]

I picked up a copy of that from Scope's charity shop for fiddee pee, and my reaction was similar.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

The Shelters of Stone, by Jean M. Aul - the most recent (I think) of her Earth's Children series. Journey across the Plains, the previous book, was the one to blame for this; either Aul has the most astoundingly fertile imagination coupled with a one-track mind, or else she's having the most mind-blowing sex known to anyone, octagenarian be damned. In Journey it seemed they'd journey for about 2 pages, then you'd have 30 pages of sex to wade through until you got to another bit of plot followed by another 20 pages of sex; lather, rinse and repeat. I skipped past whole chunks of the book. As a result, I got through about 10 pages of Shelters wondering when the next orgy was going to start, and just gave up on the whole thing.

Oh, and just about anything by Douglas Adams, which will probably get me lynched in this crowd. I read about half-way through Hitchiker, which was enough to put me off anything else he ever wrote. Shame, because I actually liked the radio play.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Sheri Tepper's The Fresco.

[notintheseheels.livejournal.com]

This probably counts as obvious, but The Davinci Code by Dan Brown is one of the most appaulingly written things I've ever had the misfortune to partly read. And it never ceases to annoy me when people exlaim, on finding out that I study theology, 'oh, yes, I know about that sort of thing, I've read The Davinci Code!

[reddragdiva]

It's a real pity in such cases that theology isn't more analogous to computer science. "Piss me off and a bolt of lightning will coincidentally come down from the heavens."

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

The best worst novel I was never able to finish was Dostoevsky's "The Idiot". I got to 30 pages (give or take) to the end when I realized "Yes, he is an idiot!" and put the book down.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

There have been two.

1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This was a paragraph or two of actual story, interspersed betwixt sever hundred pages of "And the fourth house on $STREET in Paris had an interesting front door, and several quite fancy arches in the hall..." I'm not fucking kidding. At one point he describes every last brick in the fucking cathedral.

2. Uncle Tom's Cabin. The famous anti-slavery novel. To read this piece of shite, you'd think negros were God's chosen and the sweetest, kindest, most sensitive people on the planet. Oh, and that the sun shines out of their asses. It's that fucking thick. Not to disparage any black folk, but Jesus Christ. Seriously.

[redcountess]

YES! I had the same reaction to The Hunchback of Notre Dame!

Umm...I don't think I should be here, really.

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

(turns and runs).

Re: Umm...I don't think I should be here, really.

[reddragdiva]

I've told you of my Dhalgren anti-fandom at length before. I'M ALLOWED, I PAID FOR MY COPY!

Anyway, your books have plots and characters as well as ideas. So you're fine.