How do you cope with a really disappointing book?

When I picked up The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, I was sure I was on to a winner. Russian novelist? Brilliant. Magic Realism? Check my bookshelf – it’s stuffed with it. The devil appearing as an undercover character? Love it. Talking cat – don’t even need to say it. So on opening my battered copy, I was excited. 

A hundred pages in – I couldn’t care less. So I stopped reading it. I can’t explain to you why – maybe the cultural nuances failed to translate for me, maybe there were too many subversive Russian male poets called Nikolayevich – but I couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for it.

Actually coming to a point of not wanting to finish a book has happened to me many, many times before – I do have an English degree after all, and my lecturers seemed to have a particular enthusiasm for Joseph Conrad – but abandoning a book that seemed like it would be amazing is a terrible feeling. I’ve found myself in a grip of self-doubt: what if it’s me, not the book? Is it my own ignorance and philistine brain that’s holding me back from loving this book? THERE’S A CAT WHO POURS HIMSELF VODKA - there is literally nothing on this earth that makes me more excited than that prospect.

This doesn’t often happen with me. When I think I’m going to like a book, having a rough idea of what it’s all about, I usually do. Things I think I’ll hate, I usually do – case in point, Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye – if you’re an angry young man who likes smacking people around and don’t much like women, knock yourself out. I entered into Bukowski's grimy world fully aware that it would not agree with me. But this? Awful.

So I’m feeling bruised and sore. It feels like being rejected by a boy at a school disco. Damn you Mikhail!

Have you experienced this? Am I blowing this out of proportion, or do you feel bad when you give up on a book that promised so much, and failed to deliver for you?