Our staff share the books they didn’t finish in 2015 – but that you might want to…

I wanted to love As You Wish, Cary Elwes’ account of the making of The Princess Bride. I’m not a massive fan, but I did really enjoy the film, and the book it’s based on even more. However, I found this memoir a little too sentimental, and slow-moving for my liking. This said, I’ve certainly heard other people rave about As You Wish, and I suspect true fans would not encounter the same problems as me. – Bronte Coates, digital content coordinator

I powered through Hilary Mantel’s two Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell at a break-neck speed. It’s not a period in history that I have more than a passing familiarity with and the books left me hungry for more, so I picked up a copy of Alison Weir’s impeccably well-researched book The Six Wives of Henry VIII. It gets brilliant reviews, and has been described as ‘entertaining’, ‘thrilling’ and – uh oh – ‘reliable and scholarly’. I’ve learnt over time that I’m not a very good non-fiction reader. Even if it’s a topic that I’m fascinated in I find without a narrative to keep my brain on track I get a bit distracted, and my mind goes off in tangents like: ‘Oh, so Anne Boleyn had a little Havanese dog? I wonder what that breed looks like? Oh, it’s related to a Bichon. Look here’s a video of a Bichon playing with a cat. Cats are nice, huh? I like cats.“ I managed about a third of The Six Wives of Henry VIII before I ran out of puff and put it down, but if you had less of a goldfish brain than I did I can see it being an absolutely fabulous read. – Lian Hingee, digital marketing manager

I used to give books entire chapters to suck me in but now, if I’m not invested by the end of a paragraph, I’ve probably moved on. (Terrible, I know, and I’m trying to get out of the habit. Maybe after Christmas, when more spare hours appear.) I’d heard great reviews of A Little Life from colleagues, old and new, and it seemed right up my alley. And the first paragraph had me spellbound even. But gosh… Why did it have to be so BIG? Every time I picked this tome up, I pictured myself still getting through it in a decade. I’m being melodramatic of course, but the reality is I never did persevere, even as more and more people adored the novel. Still, I’m still not handing it over to any friends in case I feel compelled to return to it in the holidays. – Fiona Hardy, bookseller at Carlton

(Ed. note: Hear from a staff member who LOVED this novel )

I tried to finish Illuminae, I really did! But I couldn’t get my head around a complete plot being hidden in a collection of found documents. Though a colleague has given me a tip on how to get through it though (she says you don’t need to read every single word in the documents, but rather scan it like you would a normal file) so I’m going to give it another go! – Dani Solomon, children’s specialist at Carlton

(Ed. note: Hear from a staff member who LOVED this novel )

2015 saw the release of a movie (The End of the Tour), based on a book (Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself), based on a Rolling Stones article, by journalist David Lipsky. Lipsky wrote about the few days he spent with David Foster Wallace during the latter’s 1996 book tour for Infinite Jest.

I found the film fascinating, and afterwards I enjoyed reading Foster Wallace’s non-fiction writing (especially his teaching notes included in The David Foster Wallace Reader). I also sought out books about the author (including a recent biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story), and even attended a panel discussion about his influence. However, I’m just not ready for his magnum opus, Infinite Jest.

I don’t know if I’m scared off by the book’s length (1,000+ pages), or its complexity (the novel includes 288 endnotes), or something else entirely. The New York Times called it, 'a masterpiece that’s also a monster’, which hopefully explains why every time I pick the book up I feel overwhelmed and put it down after a page or two. Don’t worry – I spend a lot of time thinking about reading Infinite Jest, and one day hopefully I’ll be brave enough to commit.

I’m similarly overwhelmed by the buzz surrounding Japanese ‘expert declutterer’ Marie Kondo’s cleaning bible, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying. Like many others, I’m delighted by her approach (Put all your clothes in one pile, take them in your hand one by one, and ask yourself quietly, “Does this spark joy?”), but I’m just not ready to face the epic one-in-a-lifetime task of cleaning out everything I own, so I never finished the book. That’ll go on the list of resolutions for 2016 (1. Finish reading Kondo. 2. Sort out worldly possessions/entire life). – Stella Charls, marketing and events coordinator