Chels

It’s incredibly rare for me not to finish a book. Even if I’m really not enjoying it, I’ll power through just to see it until the end. However, there are several novels that I studied in school that (for many reasons) I never finished. Today, I’m finally confessing to my DNF sins.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

This one isn’t really my fault, although it’s been over a decade since I studied it and I still haven’t returned to complete the play. At my school, over the three years we prepared for the Literature GCSE, we studied more than one required text for each section of the exam. I’m not sure why, because by the time exams arrived, they decided for us which text we’d answer for, and we ended up possibly less prepared than we could have been. I digress. Plays are hard to teach and hard to read, so instead of actually reading Macbeth, we watched a filmed performance of the play and analysed extracts that were related to the themes we might be asked about in an exam. I don’t even think we looked at them in order. 

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

This one is entirely my fault. I do not like ghost stories. There’s not a lot of horror that I can handle, and it’s only in the last few years that I’ve started to explore horror literature. Back when I was 14, there was no chance I’d have slept at night if I committed to reading the full novel. The annoying thing is that from the parts that I did read, I remember it being a really good story, unfortunately, it scared me far too much to read. I couldn’t even watch the film in class as a substitute (in fact, the parts of the film that I did glance up and see still haunt me).

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

When it comes to A level required reading, I ended up at a disadvantage because I changed schools a week into term. At my first college, they didn’t give summer reading, so during the first lesson we were sent to the library to pick up a copy of Rebecca. I think I read the first chapter in preparation for a second session that I never actually attended, but that’s as far as I made it. Of all the novels I left unfinished through school, Rebecca is the one I’m most interested in trying again – possibly because I didn’t get far enough into it to have proper memories of the story.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood

Part two of my A Level disadvantage comes from the fact my second sixth form did set summer reading. Luckily, in the first year, we studied one novel and one poetry anthology, and poetry has always been rather quick and painless for me to read. Everyone else had managed to read The Handmaid’s Tale, so I had to balance catching up on reading it with all of my other work. I got incredibly close to finishing – I think I only had a chapter or two left before my workload overtook me. The HBO show had just started airing when we studied the novel, so I think I intended on watching it to save the time that reading would take. It’s a good job I didn’t, because they changed a lot of the plot, but I wasn’t actually at that much of a disadvantage. In fact, I got a better grade in my first year exams having not finished the novel than I did in second year, when we wrote on The Great Gatsby and Othello, both of which I read multiple times.

Nova by Samuel R Delaney

I was really proactive in uni. I read ahead, I organised my time well, and I was committed to getting the most out of my modules. Things fell apart a little during my speculative fiction module after the reading list wasn’t made available until the first week of term, and I wasn’t able to pre-read. A novel a week was quite hard to manage when I was also reading and watching Shakespeare plays weekly and learning Old English to catch up with my classmates who had all studied it previously. I really tried to commit to Nova, but I just can’t get into space based fiction. There was just so much jargon that it felt like my reading pace had slowed drastically. That week, I prioritised my other reading – I knew that of all the subcategories of speculative fiction, I was least likely to write about space fiction.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin

Again, from my speculative fiction module. I really wanted to finish it. So much so that I sat outside the seminar on the novel trying to get as far into the novel as I could. The Left Hand of Darkness fell at the final session before reading week, so I was utterly behind. I really enjoyed what I did read, and I’d have continued if I wasn’t determined to get ahead during reading week. 

I do want to defend myself though – while I may have left two novels for my speculative fiction module unfinished, I was committed to the work. So much so that I did read every other novel we were set – including, against my better judgement, the tentacle erotica.

Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

My final confession is a novel that we were advised not to attempt to completely read. There are book clubs dedicated solely to Finnegan’s Wake. The novel takes people months to read even without analysing each section. I gave Finnegan’s Wake a good go. Did I understand much of it until we went through it during a seminar? Not at all. This is another novel that I’m determined to actually read one day. I imagine it would take some time, and I think I’d need some kind of book club or reading buddy to take on the task with me, but it’s definitely a bucket list novel.

Those are my biggest reading sins – the novels I never finished. Which books are you ashamed to have abandoned? Do you love any of the stories I listed – should I try reading them again?