Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.
The rules are simple:
- Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
- Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
- Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
- Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Ten Most Recent Books I Did Not Finish. I rarely set aside a book unfinished and on the occasions I do, it’s because I’m not enjoying it or think it’s poorly written. I choose not to publicise widely my dislike of a book so I’ve decided to focus on books their authors did not finish, mostly because they died before they could. (Compiled and annotated based on information from Wikipedia.)
- The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens – only six of the planned twelve instalments had been written at the time of his death in 1870
- The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov – despite the author’s request that it be destroyed upon his death in 1977, it was published by his son in 2009
- Sanditon by Jane Austen – only eleven chapters had been completed before she set it aside a few months before her death in 1817
- Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy L Sayers – a Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane murder mystery novel the author began writing but abandoned. It was completed by Jill Paton-Walsh, based on notes and fragments, and published in 1998.
- Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson – set during the Napoleonic Wars, it was unfinished at the time of his death in 1894
- The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald – published posthumously in 1941 by Edmund Wilson, a writer, critic and friend of the author
- The Pale King by David Foster Wallace – a novel the author had been working on for over a decade, it was published in 2011 pieced together from manuscript notes and computer files
- Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) by Herman Melville – published posthumously in various versions before what is considered the ‘authoritative’ version in 1962
- The First Man by Albert Camus – the incomplete manuscript of this autobiographical novel was found at the site of the car accident that killed him in 1960
- Silverview by John le Carré – completed by the author’s son and published posthumously in 2021.
Have you read any of these? Would you read an unfinished novel, or a novel completed by someone other than the original author?
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