Books we don't finish

A while back, people in the UK were surveyed to discover which books they failed to finish. I have listed the fiction results here though, for the record, 'My Life' by Bill Clinton came in second on the non-fiction list.

Top ten books people cannot finish - fiction
1 Vernon God Little, D.B.C Pierre 35%
2 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling 32%
3 Ulysses, James Joyce 28%
4 Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres 27%
5 Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell 24%
6 The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie 21%
7 The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho 19%
8 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 18%
9 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy 16%
10 Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky 15%

Of the reasons given for failing to finish a book, none related to the book itself , but I don't know what the questions were. Maybe there was no opportunity to address this question.

Top reasons for not finding time to read:
Too tired 48%
Watch TV instead 46%
Play computer games 26%
Work late 21%

So, do any titles on this list surprise you? Some surprise me. I'm amazed Ulysses is listed and Finnegan's Wake isn't. Maybe the reason people didn't fail to finish Finnegan's wake is that they were smart enough not to start it in the first place. War and Peace makes its expected appearance but Proust doesn't figure at all. Since I don't read books for peedie folk I can't account for Harry Potter. I'm also surprised to find The God of Small Things on the list. It seemed an excellent novel to me.

Arundhati Roy is an interesting case. Ms Roy is heavily into politics and I think it unlikely she will publish another novel. Is this a good thing? I don't believe it is. There are plenty of politicians out there and even more people taking an active interest in politics. But Ms Roy has a talent for writing which will go to waste if she doesn't use it. I'm reminded of Alexander Borodin. Not only did he divide his energies between chemistry and composition, he was in constant demand to join committees and often agreed to do so. Yet he had a natural talent for music and many of his melodies are instantly recognisable as coming from him. Not many people have that ability. (Life in the Borodin household is beautifully described in Rimsky-Korsakov's book, My Life in Music.)

Here's my question. If you wanted to add a title to the fiction list, what would it be and why?

Here's my answer. 'Underworld', by Don DeLillo. I started this book several times, failed to finish it each time, and gave it to a charity book-shop – which might not be deemed a charitable act. The first, lengthy section centred on a baseball which was hit into the crowd as a result of the winning strike. Who had it? Where did it go? A character in the book then makes it his life's work to track this ball down. Interesting or what! Now I realise that the search for the ball is a mechanism by which a range of environments and issues can be explored. But it's so boring! Yet apparently I'm in a minority of one. How do I know this? Because the marketing department went into overdrive for this title and had everyone from the Pope to the Dalai Lama extol its virtues as of it were the best thing since sliced bread. 'Everyone' includes a number of authors, and I believe I hear the loud and unpleasant sound of mutual back-scratching at work here.