Gonna be that guy and go with In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
Well, Iāve read the first volume, but even that took me about eight years (not continuous reading!)
Supposedly itās one of the best reading experiences there is. But so farā¦ itās just kind of boring?
I know what you mean, heās so incredibly boring 
he reminds me a little of James Joyce- who I want to love, but Ulysses honestly killed me. I didnāt finish that book either and fumbled through most of the other Modernist texts. Virginia Woolf is probably one of the only modernist writers I like/tolerate.
And even then I barely tolerate Woolf, I enjoyed her at the very end of my English Lit A Level but hoowee it took a long time for me to appreciate the experimental prose
Did anyone mention Ulysses yet?
Thatchapterthatwaswrittenwithoutanypunctuation.
Exaggerating, but my eyes still hurt, and I gave up trying to read the book 18 years ago.
Other failures include āHow much is Enoughā, āThinking Fast, Thinking Slowā and Hayekās āThe road to Serfdomā.
Has anyone actually finished Ulysses?
I think itās all a con and people say how great it is so they donāt have to admit they fell asleep and gave up. Nobody can call them out on it because nobody else had finished it either
Itās meant to be a must read. I love classics (read every Bronte sister novel, love Austen, Dickens, Elliott, Tolstoy,Thackeray) so this should have been easyā¦ I tried several times and then realised it wasnāt going to be.
I did! Had to read it for my modernism module and whoever says they finished it is lying. Itās so painful. Anyone who lists it as their faves must be the same sort of person who nods at a pile of tyres in a museum and tells you how profound it is because #art
Iāve owned the Grapes of Wrath for about 4 years and I can never get more than a third of the way through it.
Iām currently reading Sapiens but like a few others Iāve struggled to really get into it.
Itās super weird how Of Mice and Men is so readable but Grapes of Wrath really isnāt tbh
I loved both Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice And Men.
I did read them on maternity leave when I was too big to get out of the chair to do anything else so maybe that helped
I think Iāve started the Iliad/Odyssey about four times! One day I tell myself 
There are a whole bunch of āclassicsā that I never got round to reading, but I try not to feel guilty about it. Lifeās too short, and there are so many good books out there!
I was thinking about this and I need to add anything by Ayn Rand - I keep trying to read them but they are so juvenile I give up.
I think not being able to finish an Ayn Rand book is totally acceptable tbh 
Plenty of different translations out there for those books, so if youāre struggling with one, perhaps you just need to try another? The Fagles translation of The Odysessy is commonly recommended, for example, but maybe youād fare better with the recent Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey, for example.
That book destroyed me. So good.
Thatās a brilliant suggestion, I never even thought of that! Thanks Nick 