Books you had a hard time reading

The Great Gatsby. I could not get past the first page and a half. Luckily our English teacher swapped it out with another book the next day.

 

Off the top of my head, two books which I didn't complete would include Vineland and Flags in the Dust. Liked both of them well enough, though the latter is particularly embarrassing as I tried getting through it twice.

In recent memory, there are two I would mention. The Blithedale Romance, this actually was the first pre-twentieth cent. novel I'd read, so wasn't entirely prepared for the extensive verbosity. As well as Light in August. Loved August, though it felt as though reading the first half went quickly without really making progress, then by the second felt worn down and almost couldn't keep up with just how quickly it was heading toward the conclusion. (Haha.)

 

"Of Mice and Men" in about the 8th grade. I could NOT force myself to read it and never liked it.

 

Did you know about the game heart of darkness?

---------- Post added 20th May 2012 at 12:54 AM ----------

for me, it was space odyssey 2001. Just like the movie, it took like for ever to get to any real part. most of the beginning is only descriptive. I slept withing the 12th page. never went back to read it

 

InkHeart by Cornilia Funk, SOO boring.-.-

 

Great Gatsby is sinfully boring. Moby Dick isnt exactly a page turner either.

 

Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The first half is excruciatingly boring. I gave up reading it, and after a while I decided to continue. I literally skipped the first half, and I'm glad I did. It got much much better and I actually like that book.

 

I tried to pick that one up at the library many times, but never got the courage to do it.

I had a hard time reading The Divine Comedy, mainly because sometimes it was like half a page of the actual book and half a page of footnotes.

 

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, was one of the most difficult books I ever read for my English Literature class. I had to write notes as I went along reading the book, just to make sure I did not miss anything. Note taking was tiresome, yet helpful for the exams...

 

Wow really? I LOVED East Of Eden I sped through that in like 4 days! However I did read it on my own so that may have helped.

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was horrible. Between the vernacular writing and blatant racism, I couldn't get through it.

 

I struggled a lot to finish reading Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane.

 

A Tale of Two Cities Jesus Christ, that book was so hard to get through, it was also very boring
The Stranger by Albert Camus. That whole story made no sense and the narrator made me want to tear by hair out one by one
Les Miserables I tried reading the unabridged version and I couldn't stand it after 300 pages, Victor Hugo just wrote long descriptions of stupid things.
Atonement by Ian McEwan. It was amazing but his language was so flowery, it was difficult at times.
Never Let Me Go Devastating, a bit too 'monologue-y' at times but other than that it was amazing.

 

The Stranger is based on Camus' philosophy of absurdism (a sibling, or child, of existentialism). If you don't have some idea of where Camus is coming from, the story won't make sense. His book The Plague is much better and is, in my opinion, a response to many of the ideas expressed in Stranger.

 

The Pendragon Series. I liked the whole storyline, and I usually enjoy fiction, but something about it wasn't captivating me. Almost like it was too fictiony.

 

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shrier.

In a word, dry.

 

When I was in elementary school I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and failed the Accelerated Reader test over it. I started crying and my teacher let me retake it >.<

note: I know I was an awkward kid

 

Enduring Lve by Ian McEwan, i hated that book. Had to read it for a level engllish and i only got through it once because we had to read it as a class, i don't think i could have got through it by myself.

Oddly, i've actually liked a lot of the books mentioned already by other people. Although i have still yet to finish war and peace but only because it is so long and i keep getting distracted by other books.

 

Heart of Darkness is the only book I've never been able to read. I tried, oh how I tried. It was an assigned reading my senior year of high school. I fell asleep about 10 pages in every single time.

 

I didn't even finish Jane Eyre, even though I love classics. I just found the beginning way too boring in the beginning. And then the whole drama that began near the middle was way too much of a mood swing for me to have even a small interest in finishing the book