Five favorite books you never finished?

[Jo498]

Hard to tell, as I never completed reading Faustus. One conspicuous difference is the humour and the otherworldliness that pervade Zauberberg - until the abrupt, catastrophic ending. Two seemingly disparate elements held in perfect balance. Faustus seemed devoid of humour - something that is abundantly present in Buddenbrooks and Joseph, but absent also from Death in Venice or Tonio Kröger. I loved the latter, even its sentimental elements, but could never muster much enthusiasm for Death in Venice. When Mann is dead serious he becomes a boring storyteller.

I don't like either of these two novellas (apparently the most famous ones and frequently assigned in German schools) very much. But he has some wickedly funny shorter pieces like "Wälsungenblut", "Das Wunderkind" or others that are not mainly funny but done well.
Of the "big ones" I still have not read the Joseph books and Felix Krull (supposedly the lightest and most funny). Buddenbrooks is the most approachable, I'd say. I agree that Faustus is darker and more tragic than Zauberberg. But the latter is still darker than most of the others by Mann. Translation is probably also an issue with an author who relies quite a bit on his peculiar language. E.g. many names of characters are somehow funny and almost always have some meanings.

[vandermolen]

It was around 20 years or more ago but I don't remember any major problems with finishing War & Peace although I disliked the historico-philosophical excursions of the author (basically trying to prove that "great man" (like Bonaparte) don't make history, it's mainly "anonymous forces" and good/bad luck). I also disliked that a character that used to be a charming girl became insufferable after marriage (some people would claim that this not all that rare an occurence) but apparently she was still supposed to be a likeable character, she wasn't for me.

A book that took me three attempts to finish was Dante's Divine comedy. I don't quite remember the first time, I got through Hell (the most picturesque and entertaining part), maybe even through Purgatory. The second time I stopped around earthly paradise or so, in the early cantos of Heaven. About three years ago, 15 or 20 years after the last attempt I finally got through the whole thing. And I am glad I did because this time I was so fascinated by it that I hope to be able to read it some day in a bilingual version.

I agree about the forty pages at a time of Tolstoy philosophising on the meaning of life and history in War and Peace - I just wanted him to get on with the story of the main characters.

As for Dante's 'Inferno' I have made do with an audio book of 'highlights' ('lowlights'?) and the fine illustrations by Dore.

[Biffo]

Plenty of food for thought in the posts already.

War and Peace: I don't remember lengthy philosophising in the body of the work but the tedious Epilogue is full of it and took me almost as long to read as the rest of the work. I was relieved though when Platon Karataev finally kicked it. I never finished Anna Karenina.

I read a great deal of Thomas Mann when I was younger with Doctor Faustus being my favourite. The Holy Sinner is the only one of his novels I failed to finish.

I tried and failed three times to read Dostoevsky's The Devils (also known as The Possessed), I found the characters insufferable and their motivations unfathomable.

Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native is another novel I abandoned (twice), also find all the characters unsympathetic.

I never finished Moby Dick; the lengthy discussions of whales, whaling, the sea etc I found interminable. When something actually happens the writing is brilliant, gripping stuff, but it lapses back into more redundant verbiage.

I also went through a phase when I loved the works of William Faulkner but I never finished Light in August.

I have met people who have read all of Joyce's Ulysses but failed to do so myself.

[ritter]

My second one is "Die Strudlhofstiege" by Heimito von Doderer, one of the most famous Austrian novels of the first half of the 20th century. This one jumps between many different characters and story lines and again it was a combination of a story line with a boring character beginning and less reading time and it was also at halfway point.
(The longwindedness of Doderer was the butt of many jokes in 1920s Vienna, like: Doderer is working on his new novel, it deals with Frau Brandner crossing the Ringstrasse and the first 1000 pages are already done. It is actually more complex than that because his novel has also "sharp turns" and the combination with the length makes it hard to read it slowly. It has to be read quickly or not at all, I fear.)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strudlhofstiege#/media/File:Strudlhofstiege_2010.jpg

I had trouble with Die Strudlhofstiege as well. IIRC, I was actually enjoying it, but somehow my reading of it got interrupted, it fell by the wayside and I never got to the end. I should try again...

...
I have met people who have read all of Joyce's Ulysses but failed to do so
...

OTOH, I've never met anyone who has read the whole of Finnegans Wake. I didn't make it much beyond  "Riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's..." 

And then, of course, there's Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil...but that one I will finish some day! 

[vandermolen]

Plenty of food for thought in the posts already.

War and Peace: I don't remember lengthy philosophising in the body of the work but the tedious Epilogue is full of it and took me almost as long to read as the rest of the work. I was relieved though when Platon Karataev finally kicked it. I never finished Anna Karenina.

I read a great deal of Thomas Mann when I was younger with Doctor Faustus being my favourite. The Holy Sinner is the only one of his novels I failed to finish.

I tried and failed three times to read Dostoevsky's The Devils (also known as The Possessed), I found the characters insufferable and their motivations unfathomable.

Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native is another novel I abandoned (twice), also find all the characters unsympathetic.

I never finished Moby Dick; the lengthy discussions of whales, whaling, the sea etc I found interminable. When something actually happens the writing is brilliant, gripping stuff, but it lapses back into more redundant verbiage.

I also went through a phase when I loved the works of William Faulkner but I never finished Light in August.

I have met people who have read all of Joyce's Ulysses but failed to do so myself.

Yes, Platon K was rather irritating! I had no choice but to finish 'Return of the Native' as I had to study it for A Level English Literature at school. In the end I enjoyed it and went on to read more Hardy for pleasure.

[Biffo]

And then, of course, there's Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil...but that one I will finish some day! 

Another failure for me.

[Jo498]

I had trouble with Die Strudlhofstiege as well. IIRC, I was actually enjoying it, but somehow my reading of it got interrupted, it fell by the wayside and I never got to the end. I should try again...

It was an irritating book for me. It starts "right in the middle" with plenty of references to stuff that supposedly already happened or will happen, but then jumps back 20 years or so.
The frustrating thing was that when I finally had the feeling that I was "in" and it was even somewhat exciting, the action switched to a different character I had found rather boring. Overall there is a little too much fin de siècle (although it actually takes place in the 1910-20s) Vienna mood and acerbic wit for its own good.

BTW fun fact: "Heimito" is not some strange old Germanic name (which is what I had thought first) but rather an austriacized diminutive of the Spanish name "Jaime".

[André]

Not a favourite book, as I never finished it, Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. I didn't go far in the first book (maybe 75 pages), I utterly failed to find anything I could hang on to. I lacked patience with that one.

[Jo498]

These people in "The possessed" are supposed to be insufferable. Some are psychopaths and almost all are highly neurotic but they are fascinating nevertheless.
I read it only once and it has a slow start, the slowest of all the "big ones" by Dostoevsky, I think, and there is also the strange feature of a narrator who fades into the background at some stage, but later on it was one of the most intense reading experiences I had.

I read Moby Dick as a teenager in translation but this was probably somewhat abridged although there was still lots of whaling infodump included. I got to about one third or so when I tried it later in English. Because of the dubious nature of that translation I read almost 30 years ago I should probably count it as unfinished. Eventually I want to try again in English.

I also got through Ulysses in German translation on my second attempt and I had a book with comments/helpful explanations on the side.

[Ken B]

It seems that mathematicians from Gauss to the early 20th century did successfully do differential geometry without "knowing" fiber bundles so they must have had a far higher tolerance for handwaving.

Oh what twaddle. They — Riemann ,Cartan, Levi-Civita— did the geometry rigorously, and MTW did not. MTW is not a rigorous math text.

The lack of rigor bothered me. So I went back to rigorous math, and the text book I used, GM for Mathematicians, was organized around fiber bundles. (In 1915 the au courant way of presenting the theory was Cartan's wedge product. Each generation finds new ways to present and unify the theory.)

[Jaakko Keskinen]

I can name only two. Both Tolstoy works. War and Peace I abandoned because I found the book dull and boring plus it's long as hell, long and dull don't go well together. Anna Karenina I liked more but the time I read some of it was very odd in my life, to say the least. I ran into a copy of it by chance in a hospital and when I got out the book stayed there naturally and I never have returned to it since. Also one scene in the book with a train accident of some sort of in it was a bit too much for me at the time, from personal reasons. I think I'll give both Karenina and War and Peace a second chance some of these days.

Edit: Honorary mention to a book that for the longest time, I never managed to re-read... that is, until a couple of months ago when I finally did it. The book was Moby Dick.

[aleazk]

It seems that mathematicians from Gauss to the early 20th century did successfully do differential geometry without "knowing" fiber bundles so they must have had a far higher tolerance for handwaving.

Well, at that time they didn't even have rigorous definitions of the notions of topological space and differentiable manifold (this one only came in the 1920s I think). Also, they used the old notions of tensors as things that transform in some way under a change of coordinates. But, hey, give them some credit, they were friggin inventing these revolutionary ideas! There's a book by famous differential geometer M.Spivak in which he explains in modern notation what was Riemann actually doing. When you see how they managed to get the right things with the primitive, by today's standards, tools they had, it makes you to admire their brilliant insight even more. Also true in the case of Einstein's 1915 paper in which he set the foundations of GR with those very same tools.

On the other hand, one can actually make rigorous Riemannian differential geometry without fiber bundles. Fiber bundles are used to give a very elegant definition of the covariant derivative in terms of connections in the tangent bundle. But one can just define the covariant derivative axiomatically in terms of linearity and the Leibniz rule. You get the same results. Most modern courses in GR do this, since there's no time to introduce all the bundle/connections machinery. Excellent rigorous textbooks, which are standard now, are R.Wald's "General Relativity" and S.Hawking&G.Ellis' "The large scale structure of spacetime".

But those textbooks I mentioned are more the exception rather than the rule in terms of mathematical rigour. Most textbooks written by physicists are very sloppy in how the handle the math. Particularly the ones which deal with QM and, oh dear, functional analysis.

[Ken B]

Well, at that time they didn't even have rigorous definitions of the notions of topological space and differentiable manifold (this one only came in the 1920s I think). Also, they used the old notions of tensors as things that transform in some way under a change of coordinates. But, hey, give them some credit, they were friggin inventing these revolutionary ideas! There's a book by famous differential geometer M.Spivak in which he explains in modern notation what was Riemann actually doing. When you see how they managed to get the right things with the primitive, by today's standards, tools they had, it makes you to admire their brilliant insight even more. Also true in the case of Einstein's 1915 paper in which he set the foundations of GR with those very same tools.

On the other hand, one can actually make rigorous Riemannian differential geometry without fiber bundles. Fiber bundles are used to give a very elegant definition of the covariant derivative in terms of connections in the tangent bundle. But one can just define the covariant derivative axiomatically in terms of linearity and the Leibniz rule. You get the same results. Most modern courses in GR do this, since there's no time to introduce all the bundle/connections machinery. Excellent rigorous textbooks, which are standard now, are R.Wald's "General Relativity" and S.Hawking&G.Ellis' "The large scale structure of spacetime".

But those textbooks I mentioned are more the exception rather than the rule in terms of mathematical rigour. Most textbooks written by physicists are very sloppy in how the handle the math. Particularly the ones which deal with QM and, oh dear, functional analysis.

Indeed. Cartan's wedge is an axiomatic way of dealing with the "transform according to certain rules", and tying it to intuition about why some of those rules. My observation, which so incensed one commenter, was simply that I found the lack of rigor in MTW a problem. They have nice pictures of vectors rotating as they move. Move where? That is not defined in MTW, and perhaps for physicists need not be, but for me it was a problem. It can be rigorously defined, and was in the text I mentioned.


Let me add that I was much less bothered by the functional analysis and Dirac delta vagueness, as I had already done the real math, so was able to connect the delta "function" to the rigorous math.

[aleazk]

Indeed. Cartan's wedge is an axiomatic way of dealing with the "transform according to certain rules", and tying it to intuition about why some of those rules. My observation, which so incensed one commenter, was simply that I found the lack of rigor in MTW a problem. They have nice pictures of vectors rotating as they move. Move where? That is not defined in MTW, and perhaps for physicists need not be, but for me it was a problem. It can be rigorously defined, and was in the text I mentioned.


Let me add that I was much less bothered by the functional analysis and Dirac delta vagueness, as I had already done the real math, so was able to connect the delta "function" to the rigorous math.

To be honest, I can't remember how MTW introduced those concepts, but I believe you. I am, too, mathematically minded and don't like the physicist approach... I'm actually in that strange limbo we call mathematical physics, in which we try to do mathematically rigorous physics. Physicists usually learn to solve problems in some sort of practical, almost like an art, way and they are happy with that. In my case, I prefer to know what I am doing rather than using magic tricks to solve problems.

One thing I remember from MTW is that they were indeed the first GR textbook that introduced tensors as multilinear maps rather than the old coordinate based appraoch. Since then, most GR textbooks do, thankfully, the same. But, overall, I find MTW rather clumsy.

Re QM: ha lucky you, I really suffered with this until I learned proper functional analysis (particularly the issues related to unbounded operators), lie groups and their representation theory.

[Daverz]

Oh what twaddle. They — Riemann ,Cartan, Levi-Civita— did the geometry rigorously, and MTW did not. MTW is not a rigorous math text.

The lack of rigor bothered me. So I went back to rigorous math, and the text book I used, GM for Mathematicians, was organized around fiber bundles. (In 1915 the au courant way of presenting the theory was Cartan's wedge product. Each generation finds new ways to present and unify the theory.)

You might find this book by Tevian Dray interesting.  He uses Cartan's method of moving frames, but only assumes a knowledge of vector calculus.

[asin]1466510005[/asin]

[Jackman]

OTOH, I've never met anyone who has read the whole of Finnegans Wake. I didn't make it much beyond  "Riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's..." 

Because it begins with the ending, and ends with the beginning?