What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
Ask any book lover what’s the first thing they get asked by visitors to their home and most will answer “how many of them have you read?” Depending on how this question is asked I have two responses: some people ask this question as if they’re trying to catch you out, as if you’ve furnished your house with books to impress others; others are genuinely interested and I’m happy to tell them that any good library has plenty of choice. There are books in my library that have been there several years without being opened. Others are read the minute they come through the door. No matter how much we read and how varied our library there are books we pick up and struggle with. No matter how much we’re told about how brilliant it is, or how many prizes it’s won, we simply can’t get into it. It might be the wrong time, maybe something has happened in life that means we’re not emotionally prepared for it. Maybe it sounded interesting on the shelf in the bookshop but now you can’t build up the enthusiasm. Maybe you started it but hate the narrative voice or structure. Whatever the reason we all have famous unfinished books and here are a few of mine. I normally don’t do negative posts but I know these authors can take it. They’re bestselling authors with books beloved by the world, in fact I have books by all three on my shelves so I’m sure they won’t mind.
A novel of mind-bending imagination and scope from the author of Ghostwritten and Utopia Avenue
Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies . . .
Six interlocking lives – one amazing adventure. In a narrative that circles the globe and reaches from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, Cloud Atlas erases the boundaries of time, genre and language to offer an enthralling vision of humanity’s will to power, and where it will lead us.
I know everyone thinks this is brilliant. I’ve even read other books by the author and enjoyed them. But I genuinely can’t get into this novel. My rational brain keeps telling me this is a book you need to keep reading to see its full effect and if I just give it a couple more chapters I’ll know what’s going on, but my irrational part is screaming ‘throw it out the window.’ I’ve tried on three different occasions to read this and one of them was in a holiday where I’d run out of books and this was the only one in the house. It’s in a lot of holiday cottages when you start to look and I have a theory. It’s a book people save to read on holiday and then decide life is too short and it’s better to play scrabble and stare at the rain. No matter what I do this book languishes on my shelf until the day comes when I’m ready to read it.
Some people wait their whole lives to find their soul mates. But not Holly and Gerry. Childhood sweethearts, they could finish each other’s sentences. No one could ever imagine them without each other.
When Gerry dies, Holly is devastated. But Gerry has left her a bundle of notes, one for each month of her year, each signed ‘PS, I Love You’.
As the notes are opened, the man who knows Holly better than anyone teaches her that life goes on. With some help from friends and family, Holly laughs, cries and finds that life is for living – but it helps if there’s someone watching over you.
I genuinely did throw this book out of the window and into the garden! It made me bloody furious. Gerry is dying from cancer, but somehow in the final weeks of his life he summoned up the energy to write Holly letters, buy gifts and even go to the travel agents to book a holiday with no one else knowing. In my experience, both providing care for elderly people with cancer and watching my own husband die from MS complications, people in their final weeks rarely have the energy to do all this without help and someone is always with them. I get this is a romance but it did push reality to one side to create something so sickly sweet I couldn’t bear it. One day I might be ready to read this, but a few years after a major bereavement? Absolutely not.
First came the virus. And then came the dreams . . .
A man escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out over 99 percent of the world’s population within a few weeks.
Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge – Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a peaceful community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the ‘dark man’, the apostate of death, the warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil.
Now the survivors must choose between them – and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity.
I had a horror reading stage in my late teens and early twenties, powering through James Herbert, Dean Koontz and most of Stephen King. I love Stephen King’s ability to tell such fantastical stories that we believe utterly and scare the wits out of us. Everyone I knew who read widely said his best book is The Stand so I gave it a go. As a reading experience it felt like wading through treacle, plodding along and taking its time to set out the post-apocalyptic world and its leaders. It just wasn’t grabbing me like his other novels and I was really struggling to stay interested. I kept looking at how many pages were ahead and thinking if life’s too short to stuff a mushroom it’s definitely too short for meandering through this. I set it aside and didn’t come back. We’re now thirty years on and I finally picked it up and read straight through. I have no idea why but I really enjoyed it, it’s not my favourite of his books but it isn’t the worst either. I have no idea why I had such an aversion to it: a teenager’s inability to concentrate, being used to more ‘sensational’ novels or that my taste has simply matured. Who knows?
The Lotus Readers 