Depends.

Right now I've been at Herman Melville's Typee for a couple of months now. I could read Ulysses faster than I'm reading Typee. Before starting that I was reading Murakami's Norweigan Wood and went through that in a couple of days, and during the interim I read a work entitled "A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings", which is a badass title btw, by Knut Hamsum, which was pretty decent, although the contents weren't as badass as the title. I read that in two-ish days.

It's not that Typee is a bad book (It's a good book) but sometimes there are books you just read in a sitting no matter the page number then there are books that you make excuses to avoid reading, not out of hatred or anything but just that other things start looking more interesting. Typee is in the latter category.

Ulysses the first time took me a few months, but every other rereading gets faster and faster, only slowing down to annotate my book with all of the references. That's really the nasty part of Ulysses: It doesn't end when you finish it, because now you got all these shitton of references that you have to research because they actually are interesting. Joyce you motherfucker. I love you. I can't wait for June to do it aaaaaallllllllllll over again.

People should give up on books if they feel they should give up on them. I've had this argument before. I'm more or less of the camp of always finishing a book I read, after reading and watching movies that I wasn't too big into and then by the end I was left with my foot in my mouth (Eraserhead!). But it doesn't matter. There are more books in the world than we have time to read them, and everyone has different reactions to books. I don't think the great books are the end all be all just because a lot of people like Dante and reference him. Maybe they like them, but someone who doesn't shouldn't really have to sit through it just because others did. Find what you like and enjoy.

I read Mein Kampf once. That was perhaps the only book I never finished and never will finish. I had a hundred pages to go and I just could not go any longer. I barely remember anything except a lot of frustration at trying to read the book for more than a few minutes. It might have been the translation but I hear from many that the translation doesn't matter. Hitler could not write for shit. I still have the book. I often second-guess myself at times and wonder if maybe now if I read it it'll be different, but I know. I know.

I should probably finish Typee. I only have about a hundred pages to go. That in theory takes perhaps about two hours for me. Less than that even.

But every time I say that and then try to read it I am faced with the incontrovertible truth of Hofstadter's law.

Reading as an achievement?

...I never cared about it. I only started to read because I was faced with a kind of crisis where I decided I wanted to change myself. I started reading anything I could get my hands on. Found out about many authors and Project Gutenberg. Found out about the Western Canon and enjoyed a lot of stuff from there, while also still enjoying things out of the canon and just read anything that sounds interesting to me. I mean, in a way I read Ulysses every year just to say that I do, but also because I genuinely enjoy that book. Wanting challenges and goals to achieve isn't wrong, but don't make it all that matters. Enjoy yourself.