Highly rated book you DNF

Grrr... I guess I need to work on formatting. Let's try this again

1984 by George Orwell

Catch-22 Joseph Heller

Dune by Frank Herbert

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

LESS NOTABLE:

Black Sea Gods by Brian Braden

Mythos by Stephen Fry

Smallworld by Dominic Green

The One by John Marrs

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I was also bested by Dune. I never finished "To Kill a Mockingbird" in high school, and have never had any desire to pick it back up. The most embarrassing/shameful is... "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." I love the movies, and I love learning about the lore on YouTube, but I just cannot make it through that book. "The Hobbit" was such a fun and silly little story, and I loved it! Fellowship just reads like those chapters in Genesis that you tend to skip over.

The colour of magic isn’t highly rated by anyone. Most discworld fans will tell you to skip the first two books and don’t really count them. I hope you didn’t skip discworld based on that. If your willing to give it another go, most fans suggest starting with Guards Guards! as the feel of discworld is well established by this point and the Watch sub series is a fan favourite.

There are 5 main sub series; the Witches, Death, the Watch, Industrial Revolution and Rincewind. Rincewind is the least rated. You can read them in pretty much any order but each sub series is recommended to read in the reading order:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discworld_Reading_Order_Guide_3.0_(cropped).jpg#mw-jump-to-license

Well, I don't feel so bad now that I've never finished Dune. My mom raved about that book, and I tried... I really did.

Infinite Jest

Dune

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I heard so many good things about it but I could not make myself read it.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

I usually try push through to the end with most books, but I couldn't do it for this one.

Even after it won the Hugo I was never tempted to go back to it. Found it to be so formulaic. I read just past halfway and it felt like a novelisation of a daytime movie.

I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to finishing books generally, unless they're just generic trashy NYT bestseller stuff.

One on my list bugging me though: Three Body Problem. I got it on audiobook, but its too dense for that format. I need a physical copy.

War and peace is my white whale, I’ve tried a few times. I’ll put it down for a while as I often do with books but when I pick it back up I’m completely lost in who is who and where I am.

Between Two Fires by Chris Buelhman

I had heard good things about the book, and while it is fantastic, its very dense and plodding and very depressing. There are chapters that leave me in awe but then there are 4 chapters of slow depression that bring the story to a grinding halt.

I only have a third of the book left so I might finish it later but man it's rough to read sometimes

Piranesi: I could not get into the book, got to around 80-90 pages in. Just was not for me probably, might retry another time though.

Quiet the power of introverts: the beginning was informative and relatable but after that it become to much historical which wasn’t for me.

Red Rising. Felt like a ham-fisted, beat-you-in-with-the-class-warfare-moral imitation of Hunger Games, complete with a manic pixie dream girl. I still don’t understand how it’s so highly rated.

I got to a really early point in Dune where a character was thinking about the various ways to be manipulative (not necessarily evil, just politicking) with their expressions and words and body language and I just got tired of it.

Also gave up on Wuthering Heights. Was it revolutionary in its day to draw back the gilded curtain and display naked domestic abuse for what it was? Sure. But…I don’t need that curtain drawn away, as I’ve seen far better depictions of DV, and, well, I go out in public, too. So it was just tedious bitching and being cruel to each other until I stopped reading.

@JoeClu The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix. I did not enjoy it at all.

Edge of Darkness by Brent Weeks.

I just couldn't finish it. Got to the point where Kylar got his hand back and was like okay I guess the story is over now? Felt really weird that there was still around 3/4 of a book left. I just couldn't bring myself to keep reading after that.

I searched the annals of the books subreddit way back when and could quite literally only find one other user besides me who couldn't stand A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. I tried two separate times to read that book and just couldn't do it. I understand the premise of crusty old guy is soft and mushy on the inside, but ffs he is SUCH a massive prick in the beginning I just could never get past it. I also read Anxious People by him and couldn't stand it, so I think maybe this author just isn't for me.

Super noteworthy wise I quit A Tale of Two Cities on like page 4 lol, but that was more because I didn't understand that style of English than anything else.

The Once and Future King by T.H. White.

Look, I'm a big fan of Arthurian legend. I've read modern retellings by Andrew Lang and James Knowles, and reimaginings like The Mists of Avalon. I've also read Thomas Malory, and even some original Welsh and Middle English legends (in translation of course). But I can't stomach White.

Yes, I know it's the basis for the Disney movie (which is great). Yes, I know White came up with the neat idea of Merlin experiencing time backwards. I know several modern fantasy writers were influenced by it. But it's just so incredibly boring. Every time I've tried to read it (yes, it's been multiple tries) I can't ever get to the part where he pulls the sword from the stone. Why? Because I looked ahead, and it takes twenty-two chapters for the sword to even appear, and another chapter before Arthur finally pulls it out. The only writer I know of that took longer than that to get to that point was Geoffrey of Monmouth, but only because he was supposedly writing the entire history of England.

And it's not just that it takes that long to get to the good part. It's that nothing interesting happens on the way there. None of it is fun to read. It's just a slog. Maybe it gets better later, but I'll never know, because I've just given up.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has never finished Good Omens. I've picked it up several times. What I've read of it, I enjoyed. But I never felt compelled to finish it. Put differently, I guess it's just not engaging...?

Orwell was a snitch anyway.