Books that defeated you!

Oh ….and Wuthering heights !! I tried…and tried …and tried to see what all the fuss is about! No wonder it was her only book ….give me her sister Anne any day.

Ulysses . Bored to death!

I am afraid to say that I hated Wuthering Heights (ducks!!) I did read it but just disliked it very much. As regards what people have said about Tolkien, I read the Hobbit as a child and then read all the Lord of the Rings books as they came out. The books are marmite - I have one son who gobbled them up and the other one couldn't get on with them at all. They had the same reactions to Harry Potter. Needless to say, I loved all the Harry Potters.

The Hobbit and anything by JK Rowling. Not a Harry Potter fan and I hate "Strike" that so-called crime thriller utter rubbish.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - I could not get on with her writing style at all, her odd use of "he" was confusing and driving me nuts! Put me off reading anything else by her. Most books I have read, or attempted to read, that have won prizes are not to my taste at all.

Just has to be Moby Dick. I was happy to call him Ishmael, but all those lists of fish!! Life’s too short.

No you’re not alone. That was another on my DNF list, along with Gone Girl and others of that ilk. The CI of the Dog in the Night Time didn’t appeal to my voracious reader DGS, even though he has ASC. He said it wasn’t realistic? I couldn’t argue because it was a DNF for me.
Love the Page 17 club idea, though for some books, even that’s too long.

Guess I’m alone with this - I hated Life of Pi. Wanted to sink his boat, drown him, whatever! If a book irritates to that extent you’ve just got to give up.

I agree with those who gave up on Richard Osman's " The Thursday Murder Club". I love murder mysteries but found it boring.
Hated Thomas Hardy books. Too tragic.
Have also outgrown DH Lawrence, though loved his stuff in my youth.
Never read sci-fi or science fiction. Can't accept the authors' fantasies!
Gransnet HQ should produce a top 10 (or 20) of books we love best and books we hated the most.

Anything involving science fiction. I Can't read them they bore me to pieces.

I seldom give up on books but tried and failed twice with Wolff Hall

AnneRob Yes, I enjoyed The Wings of the Dove and most James.
My did not finish list is long: Jame Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, The Corrections, All the Light we cannot see,

Anything by Salman Rushdie, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.
Ploughed my way through Wolf Hall and the second in the trilogy but decided life was too short to read the last book

Cannot understand all the hype around Sally Rooney books. Not for me. But ‘The Count of Monte Cristo” is fantastic - even if I’m not normally into historic novels.

I’ve got to the same place in “love in the time of cholera” three times and am determined to finish eventually. No particular reason on any occasion, just lane of time.
Also “The curious incident of the dog in the night time”. My brain just could not get into it.
Oh and also very recently “The Martian”. The film was ravesd about but I found the book to be not much more than a pretty boring diary

With Captain Corelli you need to skip the first couple of chapters, then it gets really interesting.

The last "Strike" book, by G K Galbraith. I enjoyed all the others, but this one defeated me. Richard Osman "The Bullet that Missed" and Howard Jacobson "Mother's Boy" (presents at Christmas) both have bookmarks halfway through, as they became so boring. Anything that won the Booker Prize.

I remember reading several books and having to write essays about them for my GCE English Literature O level back in the 1970s. It really put me off enjoying books having to analyse everything. The books were:
Sons and Lovers
Romeo and Juliet
A book of WW1 poetry
Lord of the Flies
Jude the Obscure
I have always enjoyed crime novels such as the Shetland books and Agatha Christie but now I use books for reference. Currently I am reading about the Lancaster Bomber aircraft as my Dad was a pilot in 1944.

I couldn’t get into The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and found the Harry Potter books very boring. But I’ve read lots of Dickens, War and Peace (twice) and Game of Thrones. That being said, I’m a member of the “page 17 club” now - if a book hasn’t grabbed me by then, it’s on to the next … life’s too short!

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Had to read it for a book club and hated it from start to finish. It would never be the sort of book I would pick up and read by choice in the first place, but I found nothing exceptional or likeable about it at all, nor anything that would make it a ‘classic’.
Only point I could make about it, and it’s not a good or pleasant one, is the sad fact that the premise of the book, which is that books are outlawed, is not so far removed from what is happening in the present day. In supposedly civilised parts of the world, books are effectively being outlawed and knowledge censored, which makes me very sad and disillusioned. I found the book an incredibly depressing read.

harrigran
I have to disagree about Richard Osman. The Thursday Murder Club series is very cleverly written - plenty of twists, keeps you guessing. I think the retirement home setting is brilliant and Joyce and Elizabeth are great characters.
Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are hard work because there are so many names to remember.
I was put off several authors at school - Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Molière. The best way to destroy a book is to have to analyse it in mind-numbing detail!
Oh, and then there’s Shakespeare… Not a novelist though, as far as I’m aware. 🤔

Mill on the Floss, just disliked the characters so much. Gave up War and Peace too, names were all too similar!

All this talk of the wonderful Wolf Hall has made me find the TV adaptation, and I’m watching it while ironing.
So good.

Sci Fi. not in books or films. there's enough to think of in the real world.

I agree with HPQueen exam books are the best way of putting you off of a book or writer - hence my aversion to Jane Austen. I very rarely give up on a book but did recently over Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin.