Half-read books

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Half-read books? Don���t you hate them? They sit in piles on your desk or bedside table, gathering dust. Every now and again you brush them down and remind yourself how far you got: ten pages in? halfway? near the end, but you fell on the last lap? Should you try again?

I���ve got two piles��� worth of unfinished books, which suggests a lack of staying power as a reader. Or maybe I���m too easily distracted. Prominent among them is Hilary Mantel���s Wolf Hall, which I simply haven���t been able to get on with ��� I struggled to page 180 or thereabouts a couple of years ago and have remained there ever since ��� my problem, not the novelist���s. I don���t envisage tackling the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, anytime soon.

Other notable failures on my part include The Plot against America, Philip Roth���s counterfactual novel about Charles Lindbergh winning the US presidency instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt and making a pact with Hitler. It���s very depressing. But I asked for the book as a birthday present so don���t have much excuse for not making great headway. It���s generally thought to be one of Roth���s best.

Roth wrote the introduction to the translation of another novel that defeated me: Ji���� Weil���s Mendelssohn is on the Roof ��� I���d been meaning to read this one for years but when I eventually started it I couldn���t get beyond page 20. And yet I love Czech literature in general. I can���t really explain it. Some books, I guess, just don���t agree with you.

And then there���s Philip K. Dick���s The Man in the High Castle, which I have recently finished. The problem is that I started it in May, so that���s nearly three months to read a 250-page novel, and a really good one at that. Every time I picked it up again I had to go back a couple of pages to remind myself what was happening (in case you���re unfamiliar with it, the book offers another counterfactual: the Allies have lost the Second World War and the Axis powers have taken over the US, with the Nazis in New York and the Japanese in California ��� the book is mostly set in San Francisco). Had I stuck with it uninterruptedly I would undoubtedly have got more out of the book. Maybe I should read it again one day.

Then there���s Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil, set in Mumbai���s drug dens. It���s good, but dense. I got a third of the way through and put it to one side ��� a shame really. Also set in Mumbai is Katherine Boo���s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about life in a slum. It���s hard-hitting, but very grim; maybe that���s why I put it to one side. Both of these books I will surely resume at some point but I���ve lost something in not sticking with them first time round.

In a different category comes the politician Alan Clark���s Diaries, which was quite entertaining for a while, but ultimately became toxic ��� I simply couldn���t finish it. Maybe I should just put it back on the shelf.

I���m about to set off for a week's holiday and shall choose my reading carefully. I fully intend to finish whatever I start. So no door-stoppers then.