Britain’s unfinished books

A couple of weeks ago, I did a blog posting about Britain’s favourite books. This week, we have the results of a survey of books which Britons buy but do not manage to finish reading.
In fact, it’s a very rare experience for me not to finish a book – it’s partly that I usually know a fair bit about any book I obtain and partly because I’m a pretty committed reader. So I found that the lists in this new survey contained books that I have started and finished although, in some cases, I can understood why faint-hearted readers might have given up (mainly length, but sometimes complexity of structure or style).
In the top five fiction books not finished, there were two that I’ve read: “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” [my review here] and “Cloud Atlas” [my review here]. In the top five non-fiction books not finished, again there were two that I’ve read: “Eats, Shoots And Leaves” [my review here] and “Wild Swans” [my review here].

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Cultural issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

3 Comments

  • Sharon
    March 14th, 2007 at 7:54 am

    Well, I think I read about the first 20 pages of Captain Corelli, hated it and so didn’t finish – actually I barely even started!

  • Roger Darlington
    March 14th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    I reckon that “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” takes 60-70 pages to get into, but it is a terrific read.

  • Mavis
    March 14th, 2007 at 10:27 am

    “Captain Corelli” – I read it all the way through and then berated myself for wasting good reading time. I should have given up after the first page.
    Now “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” was hilarious. “Wild Swans” read twice.