I dumped Darkness Peering by Alice Blanchard last night. It’s probably a fine book – I liked the sample I read at Amazon, so I bought it. I liked the first several chapters that set up the story.
A female cop/detective decides to investigate an old unsolved murder.
I stopped reading for several reasons:
She’s hot for her married boss, who she had an affair with. Bitch.
She had no good reason to reopen the old case. (The victim’s father had just died and she felt sorry for him.) Don’t you have other work to do?
She shouldn’t have been allowed to work a case where her brother was a suspect. We went through that at the start of the book, where her father (also a cop) was working on the case.
Blanchard wastes a couple of pages at a firing range, describing weapons, stance, ammo, technique, etc. Yep, you did your research.
She calls criminals “perps”. Nobody outside of Reno 911 calls criminals perps.
Maybe I’m too picky. Og knows I’ve read worse books and liked them.
I read for fun. If a book doesn’t grab me and entertain me by 1/3 of the way through, I move on.
I recently stopped reading Death and the Dancing Footman by Ngaio Marsh.
Also Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell.
I never once gave a rat’s behind what happened to any of the characters in either book. In the latter, there were so many footnotes that I was bored before the end of the second chapter.
I have put books aside before for no other reason than that they had too many misspellings or typos. If the publishers don’t care about the book, why should I? Besides, it makes me feel like I’m reading spam.
I mainly read science fiction. The last book I stopped reading (can’t recall the title or even the plot) featured a humanoid crewman that had four eyes - one pair on top of the other.
I don’t know why that bothered me so much, but it just struck me as ridiculously stupid.
I dumped Kathy Brandt’s Dark Water Dive and was tempted to dump Garth Nix’s Shade’s Children because it was squicking me the hell out, but I persevered.
I don’t often give up on books. I can think of a couple of cases where I probably should have … but the last one I actually dropped was something by Poppy Z. Brite. I can’t remember the title, but it was some hugely trendy horror novel … ISTR that I hated every character in it, and wanted them all to die horribly, and then I realised that since it was something about vampires, even if they did all die horribly, I wouldn’t necessarily have seen the last of them. So I took it back to the library I’d got it from, and never bothered about it again.
In fact, I used to feel much more obligated to finish books I’d started. Then I read the intro to an edition of The Best American Short Stories, in which the guest editor (can’t remember who right now) commented that “life is too long to read bad fiction.” I liked that sentiment, and have been much choosier ever since.
I gave up on A House for Mr. Biswas after a couple of hundred pages. Mr. Biswas was supposed to be rebelling against all sort of things, but really, he was kind of a dishrag. I have a hard time with books where I have difficulty identifying with the protagonist.
Usually, if I can put it down, I don’t pick it back up. And by that, I mean, if it’s not a book that I want to take with me EVERYWHERE until I finish it (subway, bathroom, lunch break at work), it most likely won’t get finished. Funny, because I haven’t always been that way. It’s the same with TV, to a degree. If I don’t mind missing a show, it’s not worth it. I only watch shows I absolutely can’t miss. (Regularly, I mean. That doesn’t count idle channel surfing, but most every show is either “meh” or “stay home from a party to watch.”
**Fast One **by Paul Cain. A doper reccomended it to me in a “Reccomend me a noir!” thread I started long ago. Raymond Chandler (who I quite like) called it a high point in the hardboild fashion. It got good reviews on Amazon, and was called “pure noir” in this very forum. Sounds good, right? Well I found it terribly convultued, and the writing was horrendously dry. Dashielle Hammett’s writing can be much the same, but I still like him because his writing often includes witty one liners, and most chapters have a line that recaps everything that has been going on so you don’t get lost in double, triple, and quadtruple crosses. I was about fifty pages in and reading about how the main character was accusing a girl about a safe being broken into, and I realized I neither knew what the hell either character was talking about, nor did I care
Thankfully, I am now reading a compilation of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
With me it’s a form of natural selection. I’m usually reading several books at the same time. So I have a choice of which one to pick up and read at any given time. The best ones are the ones that I keep coming back to. The others get picked up less and less and never get finished.
I’ve always been a book finisher, no matter how bad. Except for The Silmarillion (sp?) That was the first book I actually threw across the room. But in this last year, I’ve given up on so many books I can’t begin to list them…I’d rather forget them. Sometimes it’s a book in a series that I’ve always enjoyed, but now the little things get to me. One series I read, the main character is always “wailing” and continually jumping to conclusions and coming up the the most bizarre explanations. It was cute the first few books, but now it’s tedious.
And the Dan Brown books…the formula is just so blatantly THERE that I have given up on Digital Fortress and will never read anything by him again.
In another series I’ve long been fond of, the author spends so much time name-dropping the authors and titles of various mystery books and characters…as in, “she reacted just as Miss so-and-so did in Famous Author’s “The hunt For a Decent Read” and quickly reached for the telephone”…that I have sworn that I’ve read the last of her series.
I got halfway through “Marry Your Baby Daddy” and decided life is too short, so I skipped to the last chapter and read the ending. I should have know better than to try to read something so different from my usual fare.
I still have at least three books going at once, but now if it is a chore to pick it up, it goes back in the library tote bag.
My mother subscribes to Silhouette books. And I read 'em. Well, some of them.
If the book doesn’t interest me within the first chapter, it’s not worth working any further to read it.
Other times I’ll dump a book if the characters annoy me, or if the author does.
But more often than not, I’ll finish a bad book rather than dump it. I may mark up my copy with all sorts of grammatical corrections - but I’ll finish it, usually.
I hope that I will never stop reading. Okay, I know that’s not what you meant…
Ah, yes. That was my summer vacation reading book a few years ago. Part of the way through I kicked myself for not bringing another book. I finished it, but would have put it down in a New York minute if I had anything else at hand.
One book I should have thrown across the room was Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”. That’s a day or two that I’ll never get back. I like his other works, but that one was a student writing project.
Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. Just one of the many who never got through the whole book.
One author whom I can’t seem to finish is Umberto Eco. Not that I don’t like him; I find him to be an extraordinary writer. But, I got about 2/3 of the way through both “The Island of the Day Before” and “Baudolino”, got interrupted for a few weeks, and then realized that I’d completely lost track of the plots. I debated beginning again and decided to put them aside “until I have more time”. Still haven’t finished them… From now on, I’m not putting a book aside until it’s finished or until I give up on it.
