Waking this thread up as I've just found it while searching for something else.

The "Gormenghast" trilogy. Everyone raved about it. I just didn't get it and gave up after three attempts.
"The Silmarillion", Tolkien's follow-up to Lord of The Rings which I loved. Utterly unreadable and up its own arse.
"The Golden Bough", which you're supposed to know if you want to understand The Waste Land which we had to do for A Level. I still have a copy of this turgid work that remains unread.
Like so many others here, I also tried to read Moby Dick but was very quickly defeated.

Conversely, I first read The Odyssey (the E. V. Rieu translation) when I was about eleven and I loved it! A thrilling adventure story full of travel, monsters, Gods, Goddesses and danger - what more could a lad want? I read it a couple more times soon after and then put it away until last year, when I thought how nice it would be to recapture that feeling. Alas it was not to be, the magic had gone and all I was left with was a thoroughly stilted tale far too improbable for the adult me to accept. Oh for the lost happy acceptances of childhood. The Illiad was even worse.
I read the entire Bible, both OT and NT, in a series of nightly readings when I was a lot younger. I don't think I'll do that again, and anyway I know the ending now.

It's probably fair to say there's not a lot of humour in Oliver Twist or Great Expectations. The Pickwick Papers is hilarious.

 

Atlas Shrugged. My head still hurts thinking about it.

 

James Boswell’s London Diaries but I will probably finish them in a week or two. I can’t read more than 5-10 pages each time I pick it up. It’s really good and everybody should probably read it but it is hard to get through something written over 250 years ago

 

A page or two at a time is the way I'm doing this edition of Plutarch. I need to pick up the pace a bit or I'll not finish before I shuffle off this mortal coil.


I love classic literature and dead British novelists such as Dickens and Thackeray. I love classical literature of the Greeks and Romans.

I've yet to wade through James Fenimore Cooper's "The Pilot" though. Cooper does not represent the best of American authors, not in the "Leatherstocking" series I read in my youth and most definitely not as a writer of adult fiction.

Can you say "duller 'n dishwater?

I thought you could.

 

I think what you are actually talking about here is "Unworthy books I started that turned out to be a waste of my time". May I totally applaud your choices, and also throw in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen. This was the work that first alerted me that majoring in Eng.Lit. was going to be a serious mistake...

 

I really enjoyed the first two books of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle". Then somehow I got bogged down and couldn't finish the final book. It was disappointing to read 2,000+ pages and then give up ... but I did.

 

I loved Boswell's London Journal. Don't bother with Boswell in Holland which is extremely dull. The diary of Samuel Pepys is readily available online, the expurgated version unfortunately but there's a day by day blog which fills in the bits the Victorians didn't want you to read. He just couldn't stop himself misbehaving but you can't help liking him.

Absolutely! Trollope is as good as the other two IMHO. Thucydides and Herodotus got me into learning classical Greek (but I was defeated by the notorious Greek verb). The Anabasis is as near to edge-of-the-seat as classical lterature gets.

 

I wasn't likely to read it but I'll consider myself warned off! Along similar lines, I forgot to mention Shakespeare. Everyone agrees he's our finest dramatist and poet, so it must be true. Not for me though. And as for anything by Milton....

 

Didn't mean to diss Shakespeare, or any other Renaissance dramatist or poet - just Spenser, darn him. I am wonderfully fortunate, I genuinely "get" Will S (Sonnets and all), but YMMV!

 

When back in college as a mature student, I read and enjoyed Ulysses. However, having read a lot of fantasy before coming to Lord of the Rings, I never finished it.

Also, I got stuck with Proust and Remembrance...
Could not get past book one.

That said, I have read and gifted every single Umberto Eco novel, some of them multiples times.

 

I wouldn't call it worthy, but there's no way that I can get through the Rolex Forum. Also most of the text books that I had to read in law school. Thank God for study groups to divy up the work. . . .

 

Don Quixote I got halfway, same as ' the monk who sold his Ferrari'. They're both great so I will finish them. A tough one to start but a real good read was The Quincunx. If you like Victorian London slang, it's very funny. Chuck palahniuks' books are easy reads, my last one I read was 'pigmy': laughed a lot. Sadly I can't get through a Wilbur Smith book anymore. I wonder if it's just me but his writing changed a lot when his wife passed. Kipling changed a lot too when his son passed away during the first war. Stephen King books have become less good too or is it just me? I hope you managed to read this entire post have a nice day or evening. Papillon is a great read but I read Patrick O'Brian's translation first and I just couldn't get through Charrieres' original...my guess is O'Brian was so impressed with Pappilons' sailing he just nailed the translation too well. One of my faves is ' the power of one' since we're on the subject of books here...mahalo everyone