Been having trouble selecting a book to read today.

I started with Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane, but gave up after 30 pages, unable to figure out how such remedial writing could still be so confusing. I give up.

Then I picked up a book called London Blues, which starts off with the narrator watching a video of Get Carter. No big deal, writers often reference a scene from a movie because it mirrors something in the book... only he's not describing one scene, he seems to be giving a synopsis of the entire movie! Then Get Carter is interupted by a porno film and he spends the next ten pages describing THAT scene by scene. I can think of few less interesting ways to start a book then by describing what an unknown person is watching on TV for 15 pages. I give up.

What's the fastest book you ever bailed on?

I liked TTKK. That was William Peter Blatty's early works.

I have a rule to give a book 100 pages to hook me before I decide to bail. I've quit several books though can't seem to remember any offhand.

Less than a paragraph. Wanted to read a Tabitha King book just for the celebrity factor but she gave me the vibe that she wrote to sound smart and I just can't get into that style of writing.

I wish I could do that. If I'm a significant chunk into a book, I force myself to finish no matter how much I dislike it. Then I feel stupid for wasting my time.

So now I'm gonna start giving books a shorter window. If they don't hook me in my first sitting, I'm out of there. Hopefully, this new system will have me reading more books I enjoy this year.

I looked the book up on Wikipedia and it says he wrote it twice. I happened to pick up the earlier, less polished version. Blatty says the first published version is rougher but "funnier".

My reaction to "Finnegan's Wake":

Bailed on Life of Pi after 1 1/2 pages.

Yeah, that's the one I read. The re-written version is The Ninth Configuration, which was published in 1978 and then Blatty wrote and directed the adaptation in 1980.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max - I dumped that thing in less than 10 pages. A couple people I knew thought it was great, I thought it was awful. What a piece of shit, even if he is lying about his stories.

I've given up on a couple of free Kindle Books after just looking and noticing that the formatting was a total mess - paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences and stuff like that. Of course I then have left a "Kindle Formatting Problem" review of that book!

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Couldn't finish the first chapter; the style of the writing made it a chore to read, even though I have read and enjoyed Pynchon's other novels like Gravity's Rainbow, V, and Crying of Lot 49.

The fastest I've given up on a book is maybe 2 chapters in. No books in particular, it's happened a few times for different reasons. Sometimes the writing style s annoying, or it was way too boring way too early on, and sometimes I realized I'm not in the mood to read that particular type of book at that time.

I stopped reading The Satanic Verses after about 30 pages. I know I meant to pick it up again, but that was about 10 years ago.

Yeah, I basically had the same reaction to "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I saw the gibberish on page 1 and decided I wasn't going to waste my time.

In recent memory, I gave up on JK Rowling's THE CASUAL VACANCY after about 50 pages.

I stayed with Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE for about a quarter or more of the novel...but gave up about 50 pages after the 'time jump'. One of the few books I've ever read that went from pretty good to really bad all at once.

I gave up on Stephenie Meyer's THE HOST half way through...but it serves me right for picking it up at all.

I loved Ender's Game but, iirc, didn't make it very far in the sequel. Same with Interview With a Vampire .

Many scholars who've spent their lives studying it have had the same reaction, apparently.

My reaction to Last of the Mohicans:

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Misery ... It took me three attempts to read it. The first two times I couldn't make through Stephen King's attempts at writing a romance novel so I quit shortly after that part started. Finally I skipped those parts and read a pretty good book.

I hear the 3-D version is more engaging.

WWZ by Max Brooks. I read the intro on Amazon and got bored on the first few pages. I'll be giving it another try.

Infinite Jest.

I love David Foster Wallace's non-fiction, but I just couldn't get past the first dozen pages.

I think that I've only given up on two books - The Emperor of All Maladies & American Gods. I just couldn't get into a good flow with either, but I think that I was at least halfway through on both. A lot of it probably comes from mental state, etc at the time of reading the books. I could see myself going back and starting Gaiman's book again, but if I went back to EOAM, I would pick up where I left off (if I could remember).