I feel like such a failure when I don't finish a book but I've only done this 3 times since 1987. Some books are so dreadful or boring that they are physically painful to read! The first one was "It" by Stephen King. I devoured all that he wrote until that point but I believe that he was smoking weed when he wrote this one! He would digress for 100 pages or more. Maybe he eventually put down the bong because "Cell" was much better! The second one was "Spangle" which was recommended to me because it is about a circus in the 19th century and I loved "Water For Elephants".But after 300 pages I stopped looking for a narrative (it's over 800 pages long!) and realized that it is just a bunch of vignettes strung together without a central plot.By the way,the author is Gary Jennings who also wrote "Aztec" which I will definately not attempt!The third one is "Intruder in the Dust" by William Faulkner. I pride myself on reading classics as well as contemporary fiction but this was awful.I read half of it and then just skimmed the last half and read the plot summary on the web. What the heck is so great about a three page sentence and NO punctuation!
the book i couldn't finish
By bkrdr63Tue, 12/01/2009 - 22:57
I feel like such a failure when I don't finish a book but I've only done this 3 times since 1987. Some books are so dreadful or boring that they are physically painful to read! The first one was "It" by Stephen King. I devoured all that he wrote until that point but I believe that he was smoking weed when he wrote this one! He would digress for 100 pages or more. Maybe he eventually put down the bong because "Cell" was much better! The second one was "Spangle" which was recommended to me because it is about a circus in the 19th century and I loved "Water For Elephants".But after 300 pages I stopped looking for a narrative (it's over 800 pages long!) and realized that it is just a bunch of vignettes strung together without a central plot.By the way,the author is Gary Jennings who also wrote "Aztec" which I will definately not attempt!The third one is "Intruder in the Dust" by William Faulkner. I pride myself on reading classics as well as contemporary fiction but this was awful.I read half of it and then just skimmed the last half and read the plot summary on the web. What the heck is so great about a three page sentence and NO punctuation!