It really doesn’t surprise me that the reason most people give up reading a book is that it is boring and slow (46.4%). Very hard to read and spent a long time between the interesting scenes.Ītlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – Great doorstop, selfish drivel to read. Moby Dick by Herman Melville – I read this when I was in primary school. Ulysses by James Joyce – At a thousand pages, unless you like an abridged, tiny text, 600 page version, this was never going to be an easy read. While I loved it, there are unnecessary characters, events, chapters, scenes, language use… Okay, it’s long and waffly. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien – I can see why some people wouldn’t like this book. One of the rejection letters for Catch-22 said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say…Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.” I haven’t read or heard of anything to do with the other two on the list.Ĭatch-22 by Joseph Heller – When people don’t get it then of course they will abandon it. Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson – When you have a trilogy that could have been edited down to a single book there are bound to be a few readers, like me, who think this ‘thriller’ is slow going.

I’ve heard it is a particularly dark book and the remark that people were expecting it to be more like Harry Potter shows that no-one read the blurb.įifty Shades of Grey by EL James – Who’d have thought that Twilight fan-fiction would be poorly written? I’ll offer a few comments on each part of the infographic.Ĭasual Vacancy by JK Rowling – This is no surprise really. Not just #1, it is number two and three as well, as the next reason had less than half the polling. It is very interesting to me that “slow and boring” is the #1 reason people abandon a book. I largely agree with most of the sentiments and books listed.

This is a great breakdown of why readers give up on reading and which books are the biggest culprits.

Joseph heller goodreads