If I start to read a book I try to make a point to finish it. There are only three books that I can think of and definitively say that I started and gave up on trying to finish; someday I hope to go back and read them cover to cover.
Pride and Prejudice
I just couldn't get past Jane Austen's writing style. I think I made it to the second or third chapter of this book before I gave up because I wasn't entirely sure what was going on and I didn't care what happened to the characters. I remember telling my then-teacher when I first started the book and she put a hand to her chest, sighed happily, and told me, "You'll love it, it's one of my favorite books." I did like the books that I was assigned to read for her class but this book just did not agree with me. Since then I've read some other Brit lit and gotten through it relatively painlessly. I saw the film version of this movie, the most recent adaptation starring Keira Knightley, and while I enjoyed it I wasn't enraptured, didn't find the romance particularly engaging. Maybe the next time I pick it up I'll be able to follow it better now that I know roughly how the action transpires. This tome has been on my "to read" list for a while and I keep passing over it; I've resolved to pick it up again if I happen upon the book (I won't actively look for the title while at bookstores or libraries). I'll let Fate decide when I should read it.
Crime and Punishment
This book became increasingly depressing the more progress I made with it. A good friend highly recommended this famous Dostoevsky work to me and I went into it with zeal. But again the writing style was a bit...turgid, I guess? A bit thick-- not thick as in stupid, thick like a very dense chocolate cake that is hard to swallow and demands a tall glass of cold milk to wash it all down thoroughly. It wasn't the book's fault, it was my fault that I had a hard time getting into it. Then someone (a woman much older than me) told me, "Dostoevsky is best read in your thirties," and so I felt justified in setting the book aside for the time and moving onto something else. And I have my own copy of the book, ready to be read when I come of age. On a slightly related note, I have read something else by the author, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and read it with relative ease. It's a short, thoughtful story.
Sing Me to Heaven
Unlike the other two, this book is really easy to read and was written in the late 20th century. It's the heartbreaking story and the simple and agonizing way in which the story is told that has deterred me from getting through it. It's a elegy of sorts, a true story of a romance and marriage in the 80s, a tale of a short-lived interracial/bicultural relationship, but most of all it's the story of a woman who married a man despite/because of his HIV positive status, and that man happens to have been a relative of mine. I remember attending a funeral when I was a child, maybe six years old, and in retrospect I think it was his funeral that I attended. He wasn't a very close relative, blood-wise, so maybe that's why his death wasn't really mentioned, or maybe there's some other reason; in any case, it wasn't until I picked up this book and started to read it that I put the pieces together. I think that within the first few chapters the narrator, his then-wife, reveals his medical condition and that she was widowed within two years of marrying him, but this doesn't take away from the tension in the story. If anything it makes her story more poignant, knowing that they went through so much and knowing that everything deteriorated eventually. Even just thinking about the book and writing about it here is enough to stir up strong emotions. Maybe someday I'll build up the emotional fortitude to make it through the book, but for now I don't really forsee even attempting to pick the book up again unless I feel the need to sob my eyes out.
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