"It's evil. It's diabolical. It's lemon-scented. This Plan Z can't possibly fail!" - Plankton, "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie"

The Guardian has the results of a survey of British readers: Books you own but have never finished.

Topping the list: Vernon God Little
I own this book.
And I have never read it.
I am in good company: 35% of the survey’s 4000 respondents had bought it and never finished it.
It won the 2003 Booker, beating out worthy contenders like Brick Lane (ok, I didn’t like that one either and never finished it) and Oryx and Crake (all right, admittedly one of Atwood’s weakest). Nonetheless, it did win the Booker, generally a fairly decent guideline of reading material.
I have started it a number of times; I have never finished it.
I was irrationally irritated by the author’s use of “fucken” instead of “fucking” or even “fuckin.’”
For that matter, I still am irrationally irritated by the author, and his heroin-addict/wastrel-turned-brilliant-novelist pose, and his conceit of using DBC (standing for “Dirty But Clean”) without initials. (I SAID I was being irrational.)
Seems I am not the only one.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Really?
I liked this one.
The fifth was deadly, the sixth practically unreadable, and while I will struggle through (and buy) the seventh, I am not anticipating enjoying it.

Ulysses
I HAVE read this.
As previously noted, I had to read it for a class, and write a rather involved paper on it, but mostly, I enjoyed it well enough, in parts. I loved the Molly Bloom bits, and skimmed the stuff I didn’t love.
I would not want to read it again.

Captain Correlli’s Mandolin
I read this one, too, on vacation down the shore two summers ago.
I was alternating it with The Sparrow, which was so intense that I occasionally need to take a breather, and I filled the breather with de Bernieres. It was ok. Not wonderful, but ok.

Cloud Atlas
What?! Are people smoking crack? Are they braindead? This book is brilliant and wonderful. Humph. Well, if they don’t finish it, it’s their loss.

As for Wild Swans - I can’t tell you how many times I have checked this book out of the library. And returned it unread YET AGAIN.

"Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey…said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them. Rachel Cugnoni, from the publisher Vintage, said the apparent unpopularity of tough literary …suggests readers are purchasing "intellectual credibility for the bookshelf.”
Oh-kay. That’s just pathetic.

And this man has his head up his ass, as Eats, Shoots, and Leaves was pretentious and annoying: ”…the publisher behind Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynn Truss's UK bestseller, blamed the readers for the text appearing fourth on the list. "These people must have the intelligence of plankton not to be able to get through 204 pages of a comic, readable book," said Andrew Franklin…”
I will bet HE hasn’t read it. I tried, and could not see what all the fuss was about; if you want to get cute with grammar, I much prefer The Transitive Vampire.

I was chatting with the Rogue Librarian just this morning, about Katya’s book meme, and we were talking about our least-favorite books that we have finished. And I realized how hard that question was for me, because one thing I have succeeded in doing within the past few years is allowing myself, with relatively little guilt, to not finish a book I hate.

Thank God, or I’d still be slogging my way through The Emperor’s Children and both the wonderful Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and the exciting White Darkness would still be unread, sitting forlornly on top of the teetering pile by my bed.

And that would be very wrong.