A British poll has just revealed the books that people start but don’t finish The Guardian newspaper reports today:
It’s the literary club no author wants to belong to, but boasts the likes of Salman Rushdie, Bill Clinton, Paulo Coelho and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A survey out today of the books Britons own but do not finish shows a surprising lack of appetite for many of the nation’s most popular titles...Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them. Rachel Cugnoni, from the publisher Vintage, said the apparent unpopularity of tough literary texts like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment - all voted in the top 10 - suggests readers are purchasing “intellectual credibility for the bookshelf” rather than books they actually want to read.
I couldn’t possibly comment on all the books I’ve started and not finished, but I would LOVE to know what books you’ve discarded in disgust (or ambivalence) and why…
Well the for the longest time, I think I was like a lot of people in that I truly believed I had to finish books I’d started regardless of whether I was actually enjoying them. Now I have to read so much, I’m pretty ruthless. If a book isn’t doing it for me then I’ll to cast it to one side and move on because there are so many great books out there that I could be spending my time on and because I have a huge stack of required reading for my job.
That said, I never discard books because they’re ‘difficult’ or challenging, I only really do it if I don’t like the writing or the subject doesn’t interest me.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be very politic of me to talk about books I thought were unreadable - even if they were published by someone else - but it took me 3 tries to read the English Patient and I was very glad that I stuck with it in the end. Dead Souls by Gogol took me a a couple of goes, as did The Good Soldier Svejk by Hasek. Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography was picked up, put down, picked up and put down for about a year I think, but again I’m glad I finished it.
SO - given it would be professional suicide for ME denounce something as unreadable. Does anyone else want to suggest some titles?
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Any examples, Dan?
I’m guilty of not finishing the Satanic Verses. Three separate times, I’ve started it and made it to about page 125 before I stopped. All three times I remember thinking that I just wasn’t enjoying it but I knew that I SHOULD read it to I (tried) to saunter on with it. It seems to be like that for classic books that I’m only reading in the first place because I “should”. Contemporary books get bookmarked and put back on the shelf often for being subjectively rubbish.