July 16, 2009

Books That Defeated Me

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What famous books haven’t you read?  That’s too easy a question.  Tons of ’em.  But what famous (or, in a pinch, reasonably well known) books have you given the old college try but just couldn’t get past the first hundred pages or so?  I can think of five big ones off the top of my head:

Ulysses
Moby-Dick
Bleak House
The Brothers Karamazov (twice!)
Foucault’s Pendulum

I’m not sure what sets these books apart.  It’s not that I’m allergic to long books.  I plowed through War and Peace, Les Miserables, and Infinite Jest just fine.  I’ve read plenty of other Dickens (though I’m not really much of a fan) and nearly everything by Dostoyevsky except the Brothers K.  Ulysses is famously difficult, so no surprise there, but I’m not sure why I gave up on Moby-Dick.  Probably the middle third did me in.  Just wasn’t interested enough in whales.  And frankly, I don’t even remember Foucault’s Pendulum, let alone why I gave up on it.  And I suppose I ought to throw the Bible onto this list too, since I’ve often thought I should read the whole thing but then given up pretty quickly for fairly obvious reasons.  How about you?

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