The Terror of Knowing

Welcome one, welcome all, to ‘Emma Remembers Top 5 Wednesdays Exists And Decides To Join In’… again. Top 5 Wednesday is a weekly meme/challenge which was created by the wonderful Lainey from gingereadslainey and is now overseen by the equally lovely Sam from Thoughts of Tomes. Every Wednesday, participants devise their Top 5 based on a given topic.

This Wednesday’s topic is Books That Took The Longest To Finish. As Sam specified “These are the books that you had on your nightstand “in progress” for months or years. The books that you took weeks to read because they put you in a slump. Those books that were an uphill battle. These are books you started and actually read, not books you’ve just had on your shelf the longest.”

So there might be a few reasons for a book taking for-ev-er to read: it’s rather long and difficult to read, it’s not your cup of tea and you put off reading it, or you don’t want it to be over so you take your sweet time reading it. My Top Five for this week feature a mixture of these reasons but, one thing is for sure, these books took much longer for me to read than they realistically should have.

5. A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin (x)

Confession time: technically this didn’t take me “the longest” to read because, um, I haven’t technically (read: at all) finished this yet. I might, possibly, be still reading this. It has taken me an entire month to get almost 300 pages into this… which would be fine-ish, if it weren’t for the fact this book is a good 780 pages, I need to have finished it in September to stay on schedule, and I’m meant to be moving onto the following book A Dance With Dragons this month. Something tells me I’ll definitely not finish the A Song of Ice and Fire series along with the rest of the #readasoiaf readers.

4. Adam Bede by George Eliot (x)

This book might not be that long, compared to other 19th century novels, and it may not have technically taken that long to read it (little over a fortnight) but (and it’s a pretty big but) it felt like the longest time ever. Mainly because I found this book so incredibly deadly dull. Sorry, George Eliot, I did enjoy the book when I discussed it in my Victorian literature seminar but the actual story itself wasn’t an enjoyable read.

3. Scarlet by Marissa Meyer (x)

I’m not sure why this book took me nearly 6 weeks to read. I read it over Christmas vacation so I literally had nothing else to do, apart from eat a lot of chocolate and turkey (though not together), so it really shouldn’t have taken me until the beginning of February to finish. I’m sure I must have been distracted by something shiny and that’s not at all the fault of the Lunar Chronicles books, I’m sorry Marissa Meyer, your books are lots of fun!

2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (x)

Before anyone starts throwing things at me in disgust – the amount of time it took me to read this book does not in any way reflect the quality of the writing or how much I enjoyed it. Rather, I deliberately took forever to read this book. Why? Because it was the last Harry Potter book which (at least at the time) meant the last time we would get the chance to explore the wizarding world. So, of course, I took my own sweet time with the final book to try to make it last. Come on, that logic completely makes sense to fellow readers.

1. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare (x)

This book has taken me three separate attempts and, in total, well over a year to actually read in its entirety. Why? Because it’s crap. Well, that’s not true – it’s shitty writing and characterisation and plotting and… to be honest the only redeemable thing about this book is that it spawned the Netflix Shadowhunters series which actually does some pretty great things with some otherwise mediocre source material. (Sorry if you like The Mortal Instruments, no offence) So, I felt like I had to read this book first before the books I actually wanted to read (The Infernal Devices trilogy). Turns out you absolutely don’t need to, so I only suffered through one book and I tried enough to say that I’m not a fan of The Mortal Instruments and won’t be struggling my way through any more.

So there we have it – those were the top 5 books that took me the longest (or seemed like the longest!) time to read.

Do you agree/disagree with my choices? Do you have a Top 5 Wednesday list or post of your own? Be sure to link it below if so; I’d love to take a look!

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