I love to read. But some­times, I start a book, and it sim­ply does not cap­ti­vate me. If it’s still a slog by page 100 or so, I’m done with it.

1. The Lord of the Rings—I know it’s the defin­i­tive heroic fan­tasy tril­ogy, the one that every­one in the Uni­verse cribs from, but some­where around the mid­dle of The Two Tow­ers, I was struck with the feel­ing that I wasn’t read­ing an adven­ture story so much as a very long, and in many ways very dry, travelogue.
2. Chil­dren of Men—I so wanted to like this. I saw the film, and it was fan­tas­tic, a think­ing person’s action film. The book, how­ever, has no action in it what­so­ever. (Unless it starts on the other side of the hun­dredth page, that is. And I’ll never know now.)
3. Les Mis­érables—I didn’t really aban­don this one. Even­tu­ally I fin­ished it. But I had a wicked case of food poi­son­ing just as I was get­ting to the part where Jean Val­jean car­ries Mar­ius through the sew­ers of Paris, and the descrip­tions were a lit­tle too vivid at that point. I set it down and didn’t pick it up for about four months.
4. Life of Pi—Yann Mar­tel likes his lists. Lots and lots of lists. I can only read so many comma-separated lists before I start to won­der how I would take them apart for inclu­sion in a data­base. I’d prob­a­bly whip up a lit­tle perl script—fast, dirty, and inel­e­gant, but it gets the job done.
5. The But­ler­ian Jihad—I really, really wanted to be able to fin­ish this one. The thing that most fas­ci­nated me about Frank Herbert’s Dune future his­tory was the But­ler­ian Jihad, men­tioned often but only tan­gen­tially. I tried to read it, really I did. But after the fourth “ragged cheer” in less than 200 pages, I decided it wasn’t going to work out between us. I took the book back to the library.
6. House Atrei­des—As above, so below. The Dune series was SF lit­er­a­ture. The Dune pre­quels are not. I per­son­ally feel that Frank Herbert’s legacy would have been bet­ter served if his fam­ily had sim­ply released his notes instead.
7. Chap­ter­house: Dune—Okay, this one I read to the end, but Lord, I didn’t enjoy it.
8. Titus Groan—A clas­sic of West­ern lit­er­a­ture it may be, but it didn’t turn my crank. Maybe I should try it again, some­time when I’m not on a train, try­ing to sleep my way across Saskatchewan in the cheap seats.
9. Clos­ing Time—I loved Catch-22. This sequel didn’t cut it. Maybe I’m just not old enough.
10. The Divine Com­edy—When you’re chap­er­on­ing an overnight church retreat for 15– to 18-year-olds, and you vol­un­teer, per­haps fool­ishly, to be the guy that stays up all night to make sure the kid­dies don’t try any­thing stu­pid, some­times the only thing that’ll keep you awake dur­ing that dark lull from 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM is what­ever you can find in the church library. Some­times that’s an illus­trated coffee-table edi­tion of Dante’s Divine Com­edy. But you can’t take the book home with you, and really, all you want by morn­ing is some sleep and maybe some pizza, if the kids don’t eat it all before you get back.
11. The Hunt for Red Octo­ber—Three pages of intense, excit­ing action; fif­teen pages of tediously-detailed Russ­ian sub­ma­rine tech­ni­cal man­ual; repeat. I got about fifty-odd pages in and decided I just couldn’t hack it anymore.
12. Earth Sphere, by yours truly. I’ve can­ni­bal­ized too many ideas from that one, slot­ted them into too many other projects, to really go back and make a coher­ent novel out of this project.
13. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—I started to read it last year, or maybe the year before. I think I missed my win­dow. This strikes me as the kind of book I’d’ve liked when I was a kid, and would read now for the happy mem­o­ries, but the story itself wasn’t really engag­ing me, for what­ever reason.

• Doug reads Cosmo so I don’t have to
• Amy tells us about her perfumes
• Wacky Mommy makes me blush
• One-word titles from A Gentleman’s Domain
• Post a com­ment and I’ll link you up good!