Books that defeated you!

DellaandtgeDealer

Three Men in a Boat is my favourite book, laugh out loud funny in places and profound in others.
Agree with Captain Corelli, hard going at the beginning but then unputdownable.

Glad it's not just me re The Thursday Murder Club...

These days I don't feel I should finish a book if I don't like it!

I love Three Men in a Boat, too. The humour is so timeless, too. I couldn’t put down Captain Corelli. I struggled with the Gormenghast trilogy, never getting beyond the first chapter or so and then one day I tried again and it was as if a door had opened and I had entered another world. That’s why I sometimes try to persevere with books. The third book was a disappointment though. I can’t get on with His Dark Materials other than loving the idea of us having daemons.

GrannyBettie
At least one hundred pages!

The Silmarillion by Tolkien. Boring after his other books. Probably a first novel issued after success of the others! I gave it away.

Three Men in a Boat is my favourite book, laugh out loud funny in places and profound in others.
Agree with Captain Corelli, hard going at the beginning but then unputdownable.

Glad it's not just me re The Thursday Murder Club...

These days I don't feel I should finish a book if I don't like it!

The Hobbit - I literally cannot get past that opening line!

I agree with The Life of Pi comment, I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like Circe either. I did however push through with The Poisonwoid Bible and really enjoyed it. The Goldfinch could have “lost “ a 100 pages I thought.

Thanks Sara1954 I will.

Am late in posting on this thread....as usual....but here we go
TerriBull I too enjoyed The Blind Assassin!
MerylStreep I was just going to post that I have never been able to finish a Donna Tartt book!
I struggled through The Wasp Factory and actually quite enjoyed the end.....or was I just glad to reach it 🤔.
I enjoy Kazuo Ishiguro's writing style and was happily reading When We Were Orphans until the story turned very weird part way through and I lost the will to carry on. Same happened with another of his books, can't remember the title but it was based in Anglo Saxon times

War and Peace. Badly written. Could have been a great book but was so boring. Didn’t have to be. Great competition would be for the best re write.
Oh, a son in law, knowing I was a reader, presented me with a Barbara Cartland. Good grief! What silly rubbish

Romola
Adam Bede is in my opinion, a really lovely book, I always feel it’s ahead of its time.
I always like a tale of country folk

I'm a George Eliot fan but haven't been able to get on with Adam Bede.
And I threw the Da Vinci Code into the waste-paper basket after a few pages. How can such bad writing have been so successful commercially?
These are just two titles among many, I must confess.

Thisismyname1953

I agree with the poster who mentioned Richard Osmans Thursday Murder Club , it was that bad I had to permanently delete it from my Kindle 😂.

I did that once, but I can’t remember what the book was, which won’t help to prevent me from buying it again. It was a first generation kindle, and I had no idea how to delete anything from it, but whatever it was had me so incensed that I found out and deleted it with relish. That’s not at all like me, as usually I just stop reading if I hate something or am bored, so it must have been bad. I did get a lot of free or very cheap books when I got my first kindle, before I realised that they were free for a reason . It was probably one of those.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin was my first "did not finish". My Book group recently had another book by the same author and none of us liked it.
I am surprised so many do not like Wolf Hall. I love all Hilary Mantel's books.
I used to always finish books even if I did not much like them but these days often give up on a book quite quickly. I used to be more into reading heavy, dense books but now want something lighter. I also think (as others have said), there's so many good books, life's too short to read ones we don't like.

Forgot to mention that I love PG Wodehouse. Also have read and enjoyed the biography of Queen Victoria and Mary Queen of Scots by Lady Antonia Fraser. Love good historical biographies!

Beloved. I finished it, but it was disgusting and gross. I get what it was trying to say, still hated the book. Also, poorly written. Like taking a trip in a vehicle with no brakes and no map. I need my authors to throw me some punctuation once in awhile.

I agree with the poster who mentioned Richard Osmans Thursday Murder Club , it was that bad I had to permanently delete it from my Kindle 😂.

Jane Eyre. I only managed sections we had to read for English homework.
That book gave me nightmares, so I never read any other Brontes . Even driving through Howarth village it seems a dull and miserable place.

Canterbury Tales and The Last of The Mohicans - love JR Tolkien books though, struggle with a lot of Dickens too !

Ulysses, again, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Lord of the Rings. But have read Terry Pratchett , all of them , many times.

I don’t think anyone is expected to finish Ulysses.
TerriBull I have exactly the same dislikes as you. Except I’m the muppet who carried on reading Cloud Atlas to the bitter, pointless, pretentious end. I think I was on holiday, so I didn’t have an excuse not to. What a waste of a week.
After the first volume of Proust I felt I’d done my duty and stopped.

I hated Wuthering Heights - gloomy and depressing

Couldn't get into Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Didn't like The Time Traveller's Wife

The Slap - horrible characters

Wuthering Heights has never ever been made into a decent film or TV series, probably because it really lives in the head of the reader. Wolf Hall, otoh, is one of my favourite TV series of all time, but I couldn't get away with either the book or the audiobook.

It seems that Wuthering Heights and Wolf Hall are the books we either love or hate.
Personally, I love both.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers. It began well but just went on and on... 500 pages with not much to engage me. Also couldn't get on with Girl Reading by Katie Ward - too disjointed and trying to do something clever with the format (similar to Cloud Atlas which I also abandoned). I was tempted to abandon The Thursday Murder Club, but kept going, skipping through the pages very quickly. What a waste of time. It must be galling for writers struggling to get a novel published to see these celebrity bestsellers.