Why Midnight's Children defeated me twice before I finished it

Born at the stroke of midnight when India became independent, the narrator has his life tied to the country's, and he tells you all of it, loudly, with digressions inside his digressions. I gave up around page 80, twice.

The third time I read it aloud to myself, and that helped enormously. It's a talking book, it wants to be heard. The section set during the 1971 war was especially hard for me to read, as someone whose family lived through it.