No Go

This is my second post for Thursday, in case you're confused.  Or maybe it's the first, depending on how the posts appear on the blog, I'm not sure. 

It has been well-established that I like to read - and read a lot.  However, part of the nature of being a voracious reader is, of course, trying to get through books you don't like.  Well, my philosophy has always been... DON'T.  If I'm not liking it, to the point where I can't finish it, I don't.  That's not to say that I don't read and finish books that aren't good, that I really don't like (Robert Parker, I'm talking to you...).  But we - and I, especially - have dealt with those books that for whatever reason we just can't push ourselves to complete.  Most of the time for me it's because I'm reading other things or I have too many other books that are available to read.  Sometimes, too, I just can't get into a book - the characters, the writing style... whatever it is, it's bothersome.  Most of the time, it's a modernist work that I just finf annoying, too dense or overwritten.  Just as often, it's a work by an author I like - or who has works that I've read and enjoyed!     

Well, after much ado, here is a list of the books over the course of the last... oh, say, three years or so... that I wasn't able to finish.  Some of them I got about halfway through, most of them far less than that.  Who knows?  Maybe you fight this list as interesting, as amusing or telling, as the list of books I have read over the same period of time:

- A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
- The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (twice!)
- The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
- The Women, T.C. Boyle
- Sanctuary, William Faulkner
- Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
- So Much For That, Lionel Shriver
- We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
- Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
- I, Claudius, Robert Graves

- An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
- Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
- Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
- Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst
- In One Person, John Irving
- Memories of the Ford Administration, John Updike

- Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
- The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
- A Great Deliverance, Elizabeth George
- The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin
- Nostromo, Joseph Conrad (twice!)
- The Bronze Horseman, Paulina Simons
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
- On the Road, Jack Kerouac
- Ten Days in the Hills, Jane Smiley
- La Brava, Elmore Leonard
- Quentins, Maeve Binchy
- The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
- Field Gray, Phillip Kerr
- I'd Know You Anywhere, Laura Lippman

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
- Hollywood Station, Joseph Wambaugh
- Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
- The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
- Beloved, Toni Morrison
- Falconer, John Cheever
- Loving, Henry Green
- A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
- The Terrorist, John Updike
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carre
- Case Histories, Kate Atkinson


I could probably summon up a few more, and I might occasionally update or, if I'm in a forgiving mood, cross some titles off this list if I feel like giving them a second chance. 

Do you think I should have stuck with any of these?