Talking Entertainment: 10 Impossible-to-Finish Books

Nick Richards | Jul 19, 2013 11:00 am | Add a comment | 1689 reads

Last month Guangxi Normal University publishing house conducted a online survey on reading habits and came out with a list of the “Top 10 Impossible to Finish Books.” Among the titles, Chinese and Western classics like Dream of the Red Chamber and Ulysses are indeed industrious undertakings for any level of reader. But surprisingly, even titles that are considered an easy read proved a struggle for many.

“Top Ten Impossible to Finish Books”

1. Dream of the Red Chamber
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude
3. Romance of the Three Kingdoms
4. In Search of Lost Time
5. Walden
6. Water Margin
7. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
8. Journey to the West
9. How the Steel was Tempered
10. Ulysses

One literature professor from Nanjing University was shocked that Journey to the West and Water Margin made the list. According to him, the grammar in these books is a breeze when compared to Dream of the Red Chamber and finishing them shouldn’t be an issue.

Tea Leaf Nation reported on the survey and blames this inability to finish books on Internet culture. As information attacks us from all corners of the web our attention spans are getting shorter. Social media is educating us to absorb information in small spastic chunks. We’re always scrolling down the feed to see what’s next. And this is no different for Chinese netizens. Comments Tea Leaf Nation translated from Weibo drive the point home: sex and murder are what's on this generation's mind and they just can't be bothered to learn characters' names.

@ 明天会迷路 tweeted, “I decided to take one semester and one summer’s vacation to get through One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a good book, but the characters’ names and the plot are hard to follow. Fortunately, the depictions of sex are really fantastic.”

User @奇奇猴儿 posted: “Indeed, I couldn’t finish any of the 10 books on the list. Too many characters. Names are hard to remember. The content is too abstract. The cultural gap is too great! They are so thick that they can be used as murder weapons.”

In 2012 Chinese read 2.5 e-books on average and the number of people actually reading things in the country is increasing over 60 percent annually. With Amazon’s Kindle now on sale in China, it will be interesting to see how e-books and e-readers perform with such a drastic shift taking place in reading habits.

What books do you find impossible to finish? Do you think the internet has lowered you attention span?

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Photo: simon-read.com