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A poll of 4,000 adult readers has discovered that many of the books they possess have never been finished. A large number of readers admitted that end, or, in some cases, never starting them. (55 per cent, interestingly, admitted to buying books only as decoration, or to look intelligent to their guests - Ulysses was the top choice here). Cruelly, the survey then went on to ask them which books they had conspicuously failed to finish. The list was a very curious one. Some of the books were just over-promoted, and a niche taste ended up being bought by people who would never much have enjoyed it - DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little or Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Some of them were obviously books which no intelligent adult person would have much patience with: the autobiographies of David Beckham, Jade Goody or David Blunkett, the interminable fourth volume of Harry Potter’s adventures, or the new-age ramblings of Paulo Coelho. Some of them, however, were the sort of books which everyone is meant to admire, and most cultured people feel they ought to have read. Interestingly, in most cases there isn’t a recent, well-known film of these books to give readers the impression that, in fact, they have finished them when they’ve only watched the dramatisation. When people buy Ulysses, Crime and Punishment or War and Peace, it may be with every good intention. However, a significant minority of readers—28 per cent, 18 per cent and 15 per cent - say that they never managed to finish them. Quite a lot of the others, of course, are lying. Can you really believe that as many as 72 per cent of people who buy a copy of Ulysses manage to finish it? Of course not. More total liars are to be found among the 56 per cent of people who said "they had never given up on a book." If there really are such people in the world, they ought not to be trusted. Surely everyone, sooner or later, gives up on a book halfway through. I gave up on Vernon God Little, too; it just wasn’t my sort of thing, and about a hundred pages in I’d got the general point and it all seemed to be going on in much the same manner. I couldn’t be doing with Monica Ali’s Brick Lane - it all just seemed a little bit stupid, somehow, and it got left in a hotel room. I’m sure both of them improved enormously, and it’s my loss, but, like most readers from time to time, I didn’t really care very much. Sometimes, your failure to finish a book feels like a premature and unfair judgement on it. I gave up on A Dance to the Music of Time about the eighth volume once, and then, a few years later, went back and persevered; I was very glad I did, since the last three books are absolutely stunning. Sometimes, you just have to confess yourself defeated by a book - I’ve never got to the end of Nabokov’s Ada or Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and never met anyone who has. It doesn’t mean, however, that they aren’t great books. Of course, on occasion it’s just a question of sheer length. The slightly sad 34 per cent of readers who said they would never buy a book of more than 350 pages are always going to be defeated by most standard 19th-century novels, let alone something like Proust or Musil. Even though War and Peace, in practice, is one of the most utterly absorbing novels ever written, with its short chapters and constantly vivid action – you could read it on a beach between dips - it always looks like a challenge. Other books, however, contain deliberate affronts to the reader on a page-by-page basis. Henry James isn’t enormously long by most standards, but many more readers start a book by him than finish one. It took me three goes to finish What Maisie Knew, at less than 300 pages, and, despite several efforts, I have never managed to read The Sacred Fount at only 193 pages. But, to continue with a writer like James, the rebarbative difficulty of his style, and what in the end makes him magical are two aspects of the same nature. Like many of these challenging writers, he wants to establish a world. He wants to draw the reader in by the force of his own efforts. Many of the great novels aren’t simple entertainments, constantly checking on the reader’s health and enthusiasm. Quite a lot of them depend on wearing down the reader’s resistance, actively taxing him or her, and gaining their most powerful effects through moments of ambiguity, difficulty, obscurity and even boredom. As the Viennese used to say, if you want the meat, you have to pay for the bones. Sometimes, readers give up on books because they are a little bit stupid, just that - Mr Andrew Franklin, commenting on the amazing 26 per cent of readers who said they couldn’t finish, of all things, my friend Lynne Truss’s delightful book Eats Shoots and Leaves said, fairly accurately, that they must have "the intelligence of plankton." But sometimes it is an exercise of some judgement; sometimes, too, it is a kind of tribute to a book’s ambition and power. You don’t know what you’re missing if you give up; on the other hand, a reader who never gave up would be no sort of reader at all. And now I really must go and have another fruitless attempt at Moby Dick. — By arrangement with The Independent
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