Defeated by entertainment?

[Martin]

Vince Vaughn!

[Susannah]

Proust except for "Swann's Way"
Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"
Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" trilogy-- I only finished "Titus Groan" before I remembered I don't like fantasy/sci-fi.
Ditto many, many novels by Philip K. Dick

[AllisonLeGnome]

Every single video game I've ever played, with the exception of some sort of Mary Kate and Ashley horseback riding Gameboy Color game I had in 4th grade.

[John Junk 2.0]

The computer game MYST.

Seconded!  Gave up on this, AND gave up on Riven.  Decided I could pull rusty levers and solve puzzles IRL, dude.

[Emily]

Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

yes! perfect example.

[dave from knoxville]

All computer games.

Films by Satyajit Ray (sorry, Rajput, I really tried!)

Foucault's Pendulum (but I liked the Island of the Day Before, or some such.)

Rap Music (except for, so far, Public Enemy and Mos Def)

[Phantom Hugger]

I wouldn't call it entertainment, but I read about half of the Fountainhead and said, 'nope'. 

I think they may be a dying breed but whenever I encounter a Randhead I want to curl up and teleport away.

I wish they were a dying breed, but I think you may know fewer of them because you're getting older. Early 20s seems to be a prime time for these jackasses. Only the real jerks manage to hold on to this "philosophy" past age 25 or so.

Angelina Jolie is a fan!

I think I dropped my copy into a mailbox I was so mad at it. Maybe it somehow wound up at Vince Vaughn's house.

[Beth]

I know nothing about The Fountainhead besides the fact that the douchey waiter, Robbie, was reading it in Dirty Dancing. Also, Objectivism has always sounded like some sort of cult to me. No thank you.

[A.M. Thomas]

2000: A Space Odyssey  - I have completely given up on this one and I don't think I'll ever try to watch it again.

I have watched 90 some films on the AFI Top 100 list and this one was by far the least interesting.  I like other Kubrick films, but that one is boring with a capital oring.

Also Finnegan's Wake, and I gave up on Ulysses, too, about the part where he spends 5 pages eating a kidney and talking about how he loves the taste of urine.

I've watched 2001 around ten times.  It is my favorite Kubrick film and probably my favorite film ever.

James Joyce, though, is a different story.  I somehow ended up finishing Ulysses, but I regret doing so.  I made it through maybe fifteen pages of Finnegan's Wake.

Dostoyevsky has defeated me several times (esp. The Brothers Karamazov, which I still have not finished reading after several attempts), but he is still one of my favorite writers.

[A.M. Thomas]

Oh, and that game "Dwarf Wharf" in the FOT arcade has me totally defeated.  I really hate those seagulls.

[John Junk 2.0]

Great Expectations

Dickens can suck it.

[mokin]

Moby-Dick.

The original Police Quest computer game from the '80s (couldn't get past the drug deal in the park).

So many John Le Carre books... Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (also the miniseries), A Perfect Spy, Tailor of Panama... It took me forever to figure out that while I might love the Cold War spy genre, I don't love it's supposed "master".

[masterofsparks]

Moby-Dick.

Good one. Twice defeated by it - once when it was assigned in school, once a few months ago when I decided I should give it another try, mostly so I could say I finished it. I see a lot of simiarities between it and Gravity's Rainbow, actually - tons of digressions that, based on the amount of page time, seem like they're more important than the "plot."

[Pete Velcro]

I made it through most of the first Lord of the Rings, but fell asleep intermittently throughout the sequels. It's not that they were too challenging intellectually, it's just that I kept being reminded I was 33 years old and actually trying to make an effort to understand these complex relationships between elfs and goblins and whatever the hell. The depressingness of that triggered my sleep reflex.

Same here. I saw all three in the theatre and fell asleep in the middle of all three.  Once I had a sense of what a battle sequence was going to be like, I would just check out.

I am currently loosing the battle against Naomi Kleine's "The Shock Doctrine".  I keep listening to interviews with her, which is like getting the cliff notes in audio form. Also, I just picked up Chris Elliot's "Shroud of the Thwacker" and can't stop laughing.  

[Stupornaut]

Moby-Dick.

Good one. Twice defeated by it - once when it was assigned in school, once a few months ago when I decided I should give it another try, mostly so I could say I finished it. I see a lot of simiarities between it and Gravity's Rainbow, actually - tons of digressions that, based on the amount of page time, seem like they're more important than the "plot."

I really liked the John Huston movie version of it, though, with Gregory Peck as Ahab. Apparently looking it up just now I found out that Ray Bradbury co-adapted the screenplay, which is an interesting fact I didn't know.