What books did you hate on first try but love when you picked them up later? Do you give books and authors a second chance, or is one chance all they get?

Still Life With Woodpecker took me at least three tries before I read it and loved it. I'm on my third try with the Lord of the Rings trilogy; I don't hate it but it's just way too long. I have no idea why I didn't like The God of Small Things last time around. Dumb, I guess.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

Answers

I had to take a running leap into _Atlas Shrugged_--I really wanted to read it, but it's so damn long. I read 50 pages, then drifted away because I got distracted by other things. So the second time, I began reading it while on a long-haul flight to Europe. Nothing like ten hours strapped in an economy class seat with an Adam Sandler movie as the only entertainment option to make you dive into a book. I need to do the same thing with _Little Dorrit_, which I only got 1/4 through back in high school but want to finish someday.

Of course, there's always the chance that you really won't like the book, which is why I always pack 3 or 4 for any trip. Even a one-hour Southwest hop to Ohio.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

One Hundred Years of Solitude. Finally a friend of mine told me to ignore the names (I got frustrated because I couldn't keep anyone straight) and just read, and I did, and then I clued in and figured out what "Segundo" means and felt very monolingual.

Also The Hobbit. I tried a couple of times in high schoool, including again after meeting someone who went exclusively by the name Hobbit, but didn't get through it and the trilogy until after the first semester of college, after I fell in love with all my friends who had all read it.

I really liked The God of Small Things, but I know a lot of the cultural references went over my head.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

Moby Dick. I read it for a class in high school and hated it. (Hated the class, the teacher, the desks, the blackboard, etc.) After I said (on this forum) that I hated it, other folks suggested I try again, and I did. I liked it a lot the second time around.

I am more likely to give authors a second chance than the books themselves. Even my favorite authors have written books I didn't like, so I figure that they were just "off" when they wrote that particular book.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

I know this much is true, by Wally Lamb This is my second try. I'm thinking there is going to be a third try too, just because the book is so blasted long. I'm only on page 300 of 900. heh.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

Same with me and The Lord of the Rings. Except, I hated it each time I started reading it, the first three times. But people I like and love and admire kept urging me to it, and I finally capitulated. Fourth time, I was bored through the first book. Took me a month to get through it, which is just ridiculous, and then took me another month to even pick up the second. I only read it fitfully, because I was convinced I'd be outrageously bored again.

Then something snapped, and I devoured the rest of it, and the third, and was sad when it ended (though there were at least a dozen places, in the last 50 or pages where it could've ended and I expected it to end and I started to get annoyed that it hadn't ended, yet). Now I'm all about downloading the movie trailer and getting excited about seeing the two 70's cartoons.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was eight. I don't think I understood much of it. I certainly don't remember any of it. I want to reread it before the movie comes out in the fall.

I think I want to give a second crack at those Where's Waldo books, I swear I'll find that bastard this time.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

I didn't have any problem with Lord of the Rings, but The Silmarillion took me two tries. The first time, I couldn't get past all the begats and gave up before the actual stories started.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

The first time I read Moby-Dick, it was in a high school English class that was being taught by the gym teacher. He presented it as a straightforward fishing tale. And that's about what I got out of it.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

God of Small Things is a difficult read. The prose is hard to get your head around but once you do, it is so delicious. I have it on my shelf. I don't know if I have the stamina or courage to read it a second time but maybe I should.

I love White Noise by Don DeLillo but I'm really not sure if I've ever finished it. I know how it ends because I first read it back in my comp lit class in college but I usually peter out about 3/4 of the way through the book. I've read that first 3/4 many times and, strangely, I don't feel like I'm missing anything. I did buy his tome, Underworld, but try as I might, I can't make it through that one.

I have tried and tried and tried again to read Tom Robbins. The first one I read, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, didn't grab me. I think it was about five chapters too long. Someone told me that the one I should really have read was Still Life with Woodpecker. Ih. It didn't do so much for me but at least it was shorter. The last one I read, Jitterbug Perfume I enjoyed more than all the rest.

Why the dogged determination? Well, Robbins is a Northwest author and so many people seem to *LOVE* the man. I had to give him a shot. However, now that I've found one that I think is okay, I don't have to ever read another of his books.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

I never finished Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, either.

Ian: have you finished Middlemarch?

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

A few years ago my father read the Fagles translation of the Odyssey (that's the new lively one) to my brother, who was eleven. I got a copy very very cheap and began it, but didn't get far. Last month I saw my brother's 8th grade yearbook, which contains a couple of favorite quotes, and decided I was damned if I was going to be defeated by anything a thirteen-year-old read for fun. And it was energetic and fun and I just breezed through it.

I found the bookmark on page three, by the way. It's like a switch was thrown in my head to allow me to read epic poetry.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

There aren't that many books I hate, and generally when I do, I neither get very far nor try again. Sadly, perhaps, Salman Rushdie is a prime example, although I've only tried The Satanic Verses.

Sometimes a book just isn't right for the time when I'm reading it. The best case for me is The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. It's not easy. I think when I eventually finished it, it took something like three months off and on. But I love it. It's the only book thus far that I've read twice as an adult, and it may be about time to read it again....

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

It took me a year and a half to get through Infinite Jest.

(but well worth it)

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

I just have to say that The Gold Bug Variations is one of my favorite books ever.

As for the actual topic, I tried to read The Hobbit sometime in grammar school and HATED it. This summer I decided to give it another go, movie hype and all that. What I ended up doing was skipping the Hobbit altogether and diving right into the Rings Trilogy (don't let anyone tell you must read the Hobbit first, it's a damned dirty lie). I skipped all the introducing and prefacing and prologuing in the trilogy too.

And after the very first chapter I was hooked. Now I'm a giant freakish LOTR geek, devouring the preface, the appendices, every last drop, and getting way too excited by seeing the trailer in the theatre (before A.I.). I might even read it again before December. I am so ashamed.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - I went through a big Pynchon phase a few years ago. Gravity's Rainbow got thrown several times and then I just gave up. I tried to read it earlier this year. I just don't care about any of the characters or what's actually taking place within the book.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

Hey, there are some pretty good books mentioned here! I'm on my second attempt at Middlemarch, and today I crossed the halfway mark. Unfortunately that took a month of punishing reading. It felt good when I got to the bookmark I'd left on my first try, but I recalled getting to page 80, not just page 8. (It only SEEMED to be 80 pages I guess)

The only reason I continue reading is so I can lord it over everyone else in my book group next month, because there is no way anyone else will finish it. I sort of enjoy it by now, but wouldn't wish it on others.

Other books: I gave up my first time around on Gravity's Rainbow too. The only way I could finish it was by getting a "running start" by reading V. first.

I started Infinite Jest because of h, but I finished Infinite Jest because someone told me I just had to get past page 180 and then it would all fall into place.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome. I think I was too young for it. It used to reliably put me to sleep within four pages, and then I didn't touch it for a while, and then when I decided I needed a sedative one night (I was 12, I think?), and pulled it out, suddenly it was 3AM and I was half-finished.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Ooh, that's a good topic for tomorrow. Books you read when you were too young for them. Actually I'm going to start that right now. Maybe that's too many book topics, but I don't care. I like that one!

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Ian, can you pinpoint what makes Middlemarch so godawful? Because I can't. I couldn't believe I was having so much trouble with it -- it's not a hard book, and parts of it were engaging, but man, it takes forever to get through a page, and when you stop reading, it's almost impossible to make yourself go back to it. I'm not a huge Jane Austen fan, and I think her sentences are just as convoluted and impossible as Eliot's (sorry, Virginia), but somehow Austen is readable and Eliot is not. I think it must be the humor.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Yes, I can point out what makes Middlemarch so "godawful." It is the SENTENCES. Each one requires laser-like focus. If you let your attention wander, even for a moment, all is lost.

Here's the opening of Chapter 41: "The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward between Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning the land attached to Stone Court, had occasioned the interchange of a letter or two between these personages."

What a pretzel! Many pages have no paragraph break at all -- imagine a whole freight train of a paragraph, loaded with sentence structure like that. I must go weep now.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Hi! I've been a long-time reader of Beth's journal, but this is my first post, so I hope you'll bear with me.

I clicked on the link to this thread out of curiousity....wondering what books other people struggled with. I was tickled to discover that y'all were baffled by many of the same novels that gave me fits. As a young teen, it took me two tries to get through the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the 20 years since then, I've worn my LOTR paperbacks to shreds with rereading. One Hundred Years of Solitude and Atlas Shrugged both hammered my brain into little pieces. And Middlemarch is the only book I ever bought the Cliff's Notes for (which was strange, since I'm a big Austen, Hardy, and Bronte fan). A few others from my list (I actually haven't managed to finish any of these yet): Foucault's Pendulum, Cryptonomicon, and most everything by William Faulkner.

I adored The God of Small Things, though. No struggle to get through that the first time! In fact, I had to carefully ration the chapters so as not to finish it too quickly. I think it's time to revisit that book....

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Welcome, Monica! Jeremy is currently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and loving it, and he really liked Foucault's Pendulum, but I'm pretty sure he gave up on The Island of the Day Before.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Henry James - Turn of the Screw. I read the first 20 pages, put it down for the night and didn't pick it up again for months. I had to go back to the beginning again and still I kept feeling like I was reading just words not sentences. Sometimes I would get halfway through a sentence and realize I didn't know what the heck I had just read. If I hadn't already known what the plot was I don't think I would have picked up a lot of the story. I still have yet to go back and try it again.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Oh man. I love Umberto Eco, I really do, and I loved Name of the Rose and Pendulum and his essay collections, but The Island of the Day Before totally defeated me. I got really, really far, and then realized I didn't know who any one was, or why they were doing anything at all, got annoyed, and put it down. Well, threw it across the room, really, when the one guy walked off across the ocean floor and the science was all bad and they were stupid, and - well, it irritated me.

Beth, if Jeremy liked Foucault, tell him to check out The Illuminati Trilogy. It's similarly obsessed with conspiracy and cults and the Rosicrucians and so on, but is much more surreal, influenced by 60's drug culture, and satirical in a psychotic way.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Will it make him act all weird? Because if so I won't give it to him. I worry about him acting all weird.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Beth! No! It doesn't not interfere with your head at all! You have to understand that in Discordianism, any meatloafian blends the kundalini of three small peanuts, reality living with the satellite. Tentatively swept acid drops an almost elusive goddess as the Tarot deck sweeps the floor; however, a frozen riot cop pours freezing cold water on a subGenius living with an abyss. Fnord.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Beth, if Jeremy liked Foucault, tell him to check out The Illuminati Trilogy

Then tell him to buy a hammer with which to hit himself on the head repeatedly. Ask him which he likes better. I bet he says hammer!

The Illuminati Trilogy and Infinite Jest have the distinction of being the only two books I ever started and finally gave up on and never finished.

That includes the Bible. I've read the whole freakin' Bible, all the begats and untos and thees and thous and dos and don'ts and stonings and floods and whales and whores and all of that was more engaging than either of the above two.

However, they do make handy door stops.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Yeah, Jen, that’s about what I got out of it, too.

Every few months, I’ll pick up Proust’s Swann’s Way and try yet again to muscle through it. It’s my fault, really. I’m used to sentence clauses falling in a particular pattern, and not arranged in intricate recursive loops that eat up half a page. When it clicks, and I’m on a roll, it’s absolutely gorgeous, but I can only keep a running sentence diagram in my brain for so long. It doesn’t help that there’s about seventeen more volumes of Remembrance of Things Past to go after this one.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I would like to contribute an answer to the question posed, but I'm at a bit of a loss. So instead of an answer - a question. Have any of you ever read anything by Iris Murdoch? I'm half-way through her first novel, Under the Net, and I think I will recommend it as a read for as long as I'm able to.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Jen, I love you.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

No, no, oh ye of little faithians. Illuminati is hard, and it can be confusing, but if you don't take it seriously at all, it's funny and brilliant and the surreality is all sorts of words like delightful and amazing.

Oh, Christ, Infinite Jest. I gave up on that because it was too heavy to read standing up on the subway. And too heavy to read first thing in the morning.

And I forgot about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I thought I'd love because of a) the title, b) McSweeney's and c) everyone saying "oh! you'd LOVE this book, Jen, it's SO YOU."

But I found I hated him and his mother and his brother, and wanted them all to go away and leave me alone. Fnord.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I'm about to give Heartbreaking Work... a second try... but on the first try, I came away with "boy, this guy sure thinks he's clever, doesn't he? I disagree."

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I liked that book for a while, but when I started to hate it (about halfway through), boy did I ever hate it with a vengeance.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Hi. I'm new here too. I've been reading BHD for about 1 1/2. I love the book threads. I hardly ever give up on a book. There are some I've been meaning to get back to for a decade... but I haven't given up. Only one I refused to go any further in was an Iris Murdock book, The Green Knight. Half way through it I realized I not only didn't care about the characters, I hated them.

I think the one that took me the longest to get through actually working on it was Lilith by George MacDonald. Very strange book. I'd pick it up read a couple of paragraphs and put it back down to digest it for a couple of weeks. It turned out to be excellent and some year I'll reread it.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Why do people find it difficult to finish books full of characters they 'hate'? If you can work up enough steam to hate something does it not indicate a certain amount of (emotional) involvemen?

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

No, it might just mean irritation.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I have finished books with characters I hate. Usually there is some compelling aspect of personality that makes them interesting in spite of their odiousness. I'll even tolerate bad characters used to illustrate some moral point the author is making. The characters in The Green Knight bored me unto resentment. Life is too short and there are too many books I'd enjoy or at least learn from.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

How can anyone have trouble with Middlemarch?? Dude - it's one of my favorite books. These are some great characters, and all those convoluted sentences are doing more than setting up who's who, but personalities - George Eliot's fond of a wink and a nudge. It's the same way with Vanity Fair which I'm reading now - how the author writes about the characters gives you keys to their motivation, etc. And you don't get a better story than Dorothea and Will.

The God of Small Things I read on one go through, but I'll be damned if I remember anything about it - except one notable point near the end which, while titillating, made no sense to me. I've tried to get through A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth five times in 9 years and I just get stuck. It's all interesting - I think the problem is that there are a lot of characters, I have my favorites and I lose interest when chapters ignore them. Foucault's Pendulum is still kicking my ass 11 years going. The farthest I progressed was a little over two years ago, right before I moved to Chicago and got about 3/4ths of the way through.

Neuromancer was the book which I had to run at many, many times before I got through it and then a few more reads (of it and the rest of the Sprawl trilogy) before I loved it passionately. I was freaked out by non-details, reared on sci fi that hit you over the head with why the world was this way and what happened and all that stuff which cyberpunk by and large dispenses with entirely.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Echoing much of what's been posted already....could never get into Pynchon, Vineland moulders on the shelf after my last run at it a decade ago. Cryptonomicon was hyped to the bejabbers for the little it was and my interest expired at around page 1700 or whatever. The Moor's Last Sigh, Harlot's Ghost, The Island of the Day Before were all started with good intentions and cast aside halfway through with glee. A Suitable Boy, wanted so much to love it but kept picturing those flamin' Merchant Ivory flicks. Thanks for the heads up on Infinite Jest y'all, that big-arsed, unread slab is still taunting me from the bookcase.....I

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I liked Staggering Genius just because it was so different than anything else I read. But I did and do think David Eggers is a pretentious arse. The whole multiple covers for the paperback release? Yes, yes, we get it, you are oh-so-different than any other popular author.

I'm all about the Toph love though. He's my secret boyfriend.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I have tried and tried and tried on trains, planes, the tube, in the garden, on the beach, in bed, on the sofa, in 3 different countries but I cannot seem to get past the first chapter of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I do feel that I must be missing some gene that every other 30-something Londoner has because everywhere I look, I see peopel reading it. So now it languishes on my bed-side table, mocking me.. Maybe I should just go and see the movie?

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Beth, -please- start a "book of the month" thread... your reader's comments on these other books show what a good time it would be... whadaya think?

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

We can try. It hasn't been very successful in the past.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Re: A Suitable Boy

It might help to give yourself a license to skim. If you want to find out what's going on with Lata and Haresh, and don't really care about Mahesh Kapoor's party affiliation, go ahead and skim until you get to the good stuff again. You can always get the stuff you missed on a later attempt.

I skimmed much of the political stuff the first time I read the book. The second time, I read (and liked) the whole thing. Since then, I've occasionally reread particular plot lines, reading just the chapters dealing with one character or another. It works pretty well.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Maybe I should just go and see the movie?

Aaaaack! Nonononono! Gah -- movie -- Nic Cage -- aaagh --

...

Sorry. Of course you should see the movie. Nicolas Cage is every inch the actor to play Corelli. Have a lovely time at the theater.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault. Everyone told me I'd love it and that it fits so well with my research. The fourth time I tried, it clicked, and they were right.

I still haven't finished Madame Bovary. It's a good vacation book for me because it fills all the free time and I have fond memories of sitting in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia reading it, but I haven't finished it yet.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

_The Plague Dogs_ by Richard Adams. The first two times I tried to read it, nothing. The third, I read it in one sitting (well, I was 15 and living at home and had no summer job, so it was really one sitting-lying-down-wandering-around-the-kitchen-sitting-at-the-dinner- table-retreating-back-downstairs-all-without-removing-my-nose-from-the -book, but whatever). And as to why I don't like to read books with characters I universally detest: I *ONLY* universally detest characters if I feel they are stupid, irritating, and have no redeeming qualities. So I basically detest them for wasting my time. Truly eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil characters, I tend to fall half-in-love with, though I would not like them one it in real life, simply for being so interesting.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001