Stuck on reading:

[jrittenhouse]

Sometimes, you end up with a movie or book or story that you just get stuck on - as in, you’re at page 138, and the early part of the book is good, but the author has just gone off on a tear with some weird artsy material that passes all rational understanding, and you just put the darn thing down and you don’t pick it up again for a while.

Other

Comments

[acmespaceship]

I never made it through The Hobbit and hence never started LOTR. I've been told that was a mistake and I should go directly to LOTR, do not pass Hobbit, do not collect $200.

I have bogged down twice in A Distant Mirror at the point where Tuchman, who says this book is about cultural history and not about who-fought-which-battle-when, breaks down into a long stretch of exactly that. Apparently my brain is incapable of processing the military history of the Papal States. It's a shame because I adore Barbara Tuchman.

I am currently wretchedly, miserably stuck on Page 106 of Mason & Dixon. I can handle 18th-Century prose. I can handle Pynchon. But Pynchon imitating 18th-Century prose requires getting used to. So I start reading, get into the zone, love the book... and life interferes and I have to put it down for a couple of weeks. After which it takes me a while to get back in the zone. Alas, I have now committed the fatal error of waiting too long, so that I have forgotten too many details and I'll have to re-read the first 100 pages. But I haven't forgotten enough to avoid boredom. And so there it sits, all 700-plus pages, aging until I forget enough about the Transit of Venus to read about it again.

[bibliofile]

I have that same problem of putting a book down for too long and then losing the thread/details/zone/all of the above. Some books I just note the page I got to and then take them back to the library.