Longest time to read a book

[Esceptico]

What is the longest it has taken you to read a book? About 7 years ago I bought Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in Spanish). I’ve been picking it up, reading some and then stopping since then. Just picked it up again. Now just over half way (250 of just under 500 pages). To be fair, my Spanish isn’t really good enough (in between I’ve read loads of young adult books in Spanish as more straightforward vocabulary).

I could add The Satanic Verses to the list but not sure if I will ever finish it. I’ve tried three times. First was when it came out so that goes back almost 30 years. I start off enjoying it but about a third of the way through lose momentum and never get around to finishing it. Not wholly sure why. I did really enjoy Midnight’s Children and Shame.

[Doofus]

Shantaram.

Took me nearly as long to read as it apocryphally took Gregory David Roberts to write.

[Xerstead]

Pushing 25 years for me. Picked up Frank Herbert's Dune as a teenager and still have it sat on a shelf. I made it, maybe, 10% of the way through before putting it down. I've tried restarting it a couple of times over the years but haven't got any further with it.

[thebraketester]

I started to read a midsummer nights dream in 1996…. Still have not finished it and I never intend to. :-)

[sociopath]

Xerstead said:

Pushing 25 years for me. Picked up Frank Herbert's Dune as a teenager and still have it sat on a shelf. I made it, maybe, 10% of the way through before putting it down. I've tried restarting it a couple of times over the years but haven't got any further with it.

Wait until you see the turgid rubbish he wrote as sequels.

[FunkyNige]

sociopath said:

Xerstead said:

Pushing 25 years for me. Picked up Frank Herbert's Dune as a teenager and still have it sat on a shelf. I made it, maybe, 10% of the way through before putting it down. I've tried restarting it a couple of times over the years but haven't got any further with it.

Wait until you see the turgid rubbish he wrote as sequels.

Randomly I picked this up last night to read again, first read it as a teenager and back then I though I should read the sequels, I don't remember much of their plots but I remember them getting weirder and weirder (with the half worm guy who could predict the future and the sex experts who were running everything because they knew so much about sex).

If I give up on a book I don't tend to go back to it, though I have started reading 'Emma' a few times and never feel in the right frame of mind to get into the language so rarely make it past the first few pages!

[renmure]

Life of Pi.

My usual reading is general fiction that you can bash through on a deck chair by the pool without thinking too much.

I could appreciate that this was obviously a bit more classy, well written and descriptive. My bad habit is folding over a corner of a page when I have a break and the number of times I went back to the point I’d finished and had no recollection of reading the previous paragraph or pages was crazy. There were parts I must have read 3 times that seemed new to me each time. It was a battle of wills to finish it months after starting it.

Bizarrely, I saw the movie a year or so later and really enjoyed it but not enough to pull the book out again.