Welcome to Writers Talkback. If you are a new user, your account will have to be approved manually to prevent spam. Please bear with us in the meantime

Books I Gave Up Reading

124»

Comments

  • I am very happy to leave you and Neph to do the crime and horror. :)
  • I do enjoy a bit of horror in my crime novels too . . .
  • THE LORD OF THE RINGS are incredible reads Jay! But, as hard as it is to say it on this occasion, each to their own.

    A book I am struggling with at the moment would have to be Clare Morrals - The language of others. Her first novel was remarkable. Her second, awful and this one, well...it is so depressingly dull and...really rather badly written with cliched descriptions and cringeworthy dialogue.
  • I wasn't all that impressed by her first novel, apart from the title "Astonishing Splashes of Colour".
  • Eucalyptus by Murray Bail

    It may have won some sort of award and they were even going to make a film about it.
    Russell Crowe pulled out and that was the end of that.
    The book, It was so boring
  • I very nearly put down 'The History of Love' by Nicole Krauss but I'm glad I didn't. I just didn't get it until about 3/4 of the way through!
  • 13th June 2009

    For Kaz.
  • edited June 2009
    Years ago I began "Man and Boy" by Tony Parsons. Myself and a few colleagues used to go and buy a few books and discuss them whilst reading them. I couldn't bear the self-pitying tone of the main character and gave it up half-way through. It is one of the few books I found impossible to pick up. I usually can't put them down. Dreadful, dreadful stuff. I was reluctant to read anything my colleague chose, after that.
  • White Tiger.
  • What about books you've read but should have given up reading. I persevered with Barbara Erskine's Daughters of Fire in the hope it would improve. I wished I'd saved myself the time and effort,
  • Susie, I felt the same about her book Midnight Echoes, or something. Dreadful, truly dreadful and historically inaccurate, too. I should know, as I talk to some of the people who she featured ... but apart from that, what she got wrong is in books, loads of them.
  • I am on the verge of giving up on Night train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier.

    Dire translation from the original German, full of textual errors and up to page 105 a very boring story so far.

    I have jumped to another book meantime ( a bio) and will try and go back to Pascal Mercier's novel, but it really is hard going.
    I never like to give up on a book once started but this is proving a struggle.
  • Yup, know what you mean about Barbara Erskine. The one that did my head in was the one about Matthew Hopkinson. But I finished it - I didn't finish The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas - I loathed the main character, and someone, somewhere suggested I read some books whose titles included the word, 'Stonewylde'. The pretentious 'y' and 'e' in the spelling should have been the clue <SCREAMS LOUDLY, HANDS OVER EARS> I daren't say what I actually think for fear of causing offence...but I certainly didn't finish it...
Sign In or Register to comment.