Books wot I have started in 2008 but probably won't finish

The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers
It's not bad or anything, but I keep putting it down and reading something else instead. Maybe it's just got too much about tides and sandbars and water currents and other boating stuff in it. A young man accepts an invitation to join a friend on a sailing holiday in the Baltic. Set before WWI, apparently they discover a German plot to invade England, but I don't think I'd quite got to that bit yet (page 126). The characters are well drawn and all, but...maybe another time.

Gagged - Richard Asplin
This book is subtitled "A thriller with jokes" but I'm afraid I didn't find it very thrilling, and the jokes must have gone over my head. I read 82 pages too, so I did give it a reasonable innings - maybe suffered from "too many characters" syndrome, Lord knows I can't handle very many...anyway, it's something about people pitching new hit television sitcoms to other people, and someone got murdered (two people I think), and also there were some other people who were related to these people, and still others whose purpose I hadn't entirely discerned.

The Whisperer in Darkness - H P Lovecraft
This is a book of collected short stories - Lovecraft's "tales of mystery and the supernatural", and although I quite liked the three that I read, I didn't really feel the need to read any more of them, if you know what I mean. A bit samey? Might read one or two every so often when I feel like a dose of hellish black mires, troubled and dream-infested sleep, the distant baying of gigantic hounds and ruined and nameless cities. (PS If trying to pretend have read Lovecraft at parties, many of his stories feature the crazed Abdul Alhazred's ancient and forbidden text, the "Necronomicon" and the terrifying giant being "Cthulhu" - a "thing that cannot be described" but nevertheless has "flabby claws").