Open Thread: Books You Feel Bad about Not Liking?

Friends, Coworkers, Society—They All Want Us to Like Certain Books, but Sometimes You Just Can’t Get into Them

Feb 27, 2025

There are books you’re supposed to read, supposed to know, supposed to love. Often these books rank as classics and bear such names as Austen, Brontë, Conrad, and Dostoevsky. Other times those names signal the “it” authors of the moment with books praised in the Atlantic, New Yorker, and Esquire.

And then there’s you: You who live in a society, a person who wears pants, pays taxes, tips your server, and knows who goes first at a four-way stop. You want to care, to join in, participate in the conversation, to know what the buzz is all about, what you’re currently missing. And so you dutifully download the audiobook, visit your neighborhood indie, or order the book online. You wade in with hope and expectation, only to be—cue the womp-womp sad trombones—disappointed.

You just can’t get into it. You can’t sustain the juice. You can’t work up the interest to keep going. And so you set the book down around page 32, 57, 84, whatever. The tome sits atop your bedside table for a while, then migrates back to the shelves, maybe even the donate pile. And you feel a little crummy about yourself; at minimum you feel awkward when you have to explain to the book’s eager fans what you found wanting, what failed to draw you in, why you gave up.

You’re supposed to love this book, and you don’t. What’s wrong with you! Nothing, as it happens. But, oy, there are dozens of books that might make you feel that way.

Here are a few for me, books I expected to like, expected to enjoy, books by authors I’m supposed to regard as perceptive, piercing, prophetic, and all that—books I may still, eventually, finally reassess and finish but which for now mock me mercilessly. Glancing at my shelves, here are five—actually six—in no particular order.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (and for that matter Crime and Punishment)
Mario Vargas Llosa, The War at the End of the World
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

No, I haven’t read it yet. I can’t get past page 72!

There are plenty more, the admission of which would cause my friends to doubt my sincerity, character, and possibly my faith. Alas: We live to disappoint each other.

All that said, I’m curious: What books do you feel bad about not liking? What brilliant books have you abandoned half-read? There must be a few. Let us know in the comments; we’ll all try not to judge.