30 Day Book Challenge | Day 22 — A book you want to like, but can’t get into

I had a copy of this on my bookshelf, “borrowed” from my mom (meaning, I just took it with me back to college one day from my parents house with the best intentions) for several years now. Knowing it is a classic and after enough hearty recommendations from friends, I finally started reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller this summer.

I tried. I really tried. Got nearly 100 pages in, even. I just didn’t like the pacing, the scattered round-about narrative, and the endless stream of new characters to remember. The business of the plot was just taking too long to arrive for me. I gave up, and it has been pretty rare that I gave up on a book (only two come to mind—Watership Down and A Confederacy of Dunces). Although looking back there are plenty of books that I should have stopped reading because I wasn’t enjoying them fully, but you know, I suffered from thinking you had some allegiance to the author or the book. (I believe that feeling of must…finish…book…I dislike… comes from years of required analytic reading assignments in school. You don’t finish? You fail. F.) Anyway, I asked my mom (a reading teacher) if this was worth it to plow through and she said, “I read it decades ago and don’t remember any of it.” So that helped me justify putting Catch-22 down. I really wanted to love it; my friends who’ve read it think it’s amazing and hilarious! Sigh.

What book have you wanted to like but didn’t grab you?