The first novel I can remember starting and not finishing is Catch 22 — so it certainly caught my attention when the Wall Street Journal listed it as the most-often-started, least-often-finished title.
The second entry also caught my attention: The Lord of the Rings. Then I realized that I had started The Fellowship of the Ring and stopped long before finishing — but I was eight years old at the time, and I came back to it when I was older.
Heck, I’ve read and re-read LOTR over a dozen times. Catch-22 was read for an English class. Only reason I stuck with it? The teacher was a hottie and I wanted to impress her.
I got half way through Gravity’s Rainbow before I couldn’t take any more. Brilliant and unreadable.
Read Catch-22 a long time ago. I may revisit it.
I think plenty of folks — most of them? — reading this blog have read Lord of the Rings more than once, which is odd, when you think about it.
I found Catch-22 unreadable, as a twenty-something, because it read like it was written by one of my more insufferably “clever” high-school friends back in 10th grade. (I only powered through Catcher in the Rye, as an adult, because it was so short. It was… lousy.)