Why would anyone care about Hilary Clinton’s memoirs? I mean I can understand if it was like Teddy Roosevelt...he can talk about his exploits with the Rough Riders or Grant’s memoirs. But Hilary Clinton? What has she done that’s worth that many pages?
Currently reading "Enemies Foreign and Domestic".
Math professor? Sounds like he's got an axe to grind with the English department.
Hmm. I read the Kahnemann book cover to cover. Really enjoyed it, actually.
My personal formula ... if a book hasn’t grasped my interest in the first 100 pages the rest goes unread. Often times it’s just a couple of chapters.
Hillary has the intellect of a three year old, “her” book is worthless.
Piketty’s book is the economics equivalent of that hocky stick glow-bull warming joke.
Let’s not confuse things like that with Stephen Hawking’s book, please.
The Brothers Karamazov in my case. I got half through it twice. Its a great book, but man, its a chore to read and follow casually.
I can proudly say that, of that lot, I have read exactly none.
But as evidence that I do not lack perseverance, I have actually read “War and Peace” (twice!) AND “Moby Dick.” Furthermore, I enjoyed them both.
On the other hand, I struggled with Dostoevsky and found “Ulysses” (Joyce) unreadable.
Most unreadable books ever:
1.Gravity’s Rainbow- Thomas Pynchon
2.Ulysses- James Joyce
3.Satanic Verses- Rushdie
4.Anything by Umberto Eccho
5. Cryptonomicon- Neal Stephonson
Camp of the Saints depicts an invasion from the third world underclass that ends Western civilization.
The only book on this list I’ve read is the “50 Shades” book. I only read it because an old girlfriend compared me to Grey (of which I disagree). I found the book to be horrendously bad and wish I had never read it.
War and Peace and some of the other longer classics have been difficult to get through until you’ve built up the character in your head. In some it’s just so much going on that it’s hard to grasp, in others the development just takes a while.
Then there are just the poorly written ones. Atlas shrugged was a hard read for me until 150 pages in then it clicked and things moved on till about 3/4 through when it hit a bit of a wall then it picked up again.
I made it through A Brief History of Time just fine. However, Fifty Shades...not so much.
Bump
Nor is it especially fair to measure popular novels such as Catching Fire against popular science pablum such as Hawking's book. They're two entirely different genres. I have highlighted very little of Jonathan Israel's Revolution of the Mind, my evening's project, compared to that unforgettable entire fifth chapter of Naughty Nurses In Bondage, the one with the dyspeptic midget and the circus pony... Note to self: better not hit the Post button on this one...
I encouraged so many friends to read Saul Bellow’s Henderson The Rain King, letting them know that it starts out painfully slow for the first third of the book, but the last two-thirds are just breathtaking.
Everyone put up a stink when I asked about their progress through the book. True enough, they struggled through the beginning of it.
But it was such a joy to see their faces after they had finished it. Every single one of them loved it as much as I do and were glad they persevered through the slow beginning.