Two books though lost their coveted bedside table spot and were returned un-finished to the library.
Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits
Celia Rivenbark
Another round of Rivenbark's funny stories about living in the deep south. While I appreciate her ability to self-deprecate, throw in some explanations for the Yankees, and generally be southern---I just couldn't get into it this time. Perhaps if I'd charged right into it following Bless Your Heart, Tramp but instead it languished. And surely others need a chance at the humor.
LarklightPhilip Reeve
Magpie-like, I picked this book up based on the cover of the third book in the series. I've tried to read it and I've tried to enjoy it. I fell asleep over it when I was in NY but that was attributable to exhaustion, I fall asleep over books I'm enjoying all the time.
Reeve sets out a world where a family can live in space, with hoverhogs (convenient vacuum cleaners that have an interesting method of propelling themselves about) and gravity generators and, of course, the absent mother for two kids and the father. Only, spiders show up and take over and the father is killed and the kids must set off on adventures around the universe.
I wanted to like this book but two things bothered me: the unnecessary swearing and the repetitive sentence structure. I'm not the librarian to write off a book just because there is a curse word in it, though it does frustrate me when an otherwise easy-sell book becomes instantly impossible because the parents will not approve on that basis. But here it felt like the author was trying to be cool and edgy, and so was tossing in swearing. It got in the way and felt very out of place for the Victorian setting that the book was supposed to have, where talking of bodily functions is deemed unnecessarily crude. Secondly was the repetitive sentence structure. While this works for rhyming books, it got dull and less imaginative here. And I got bored.
Not everything is a hit, which is all well and good, but these didn't even warrant finishing. At least not for me.
1 comment:
Oh man, I know what you mean about stopping books versus not starting them. In fact, I think my inability to do the former has led to some unfortunate tendencies toward the latter. When I was a young teen, it didn't bother me in the least that I would start a book, then be unable to do anything else (barring eat and sleep, both of which I did mostly thanks to my parents' intervention) until finishing it. Now, though, I have work . . . exercise . . . occasionally even a social life! And, notably, I do a lot of writing, which tends to take up the same time slot - the sitting-in-my-chair-with-something-in-my-lap time slot, one might call it - as does reading. I think these other activities have created the not-starting-books behavior as a defense mechanism. A few days ago, I finished a first-time reading of a great book by my favorite author. I have, on the table next to me, its sequel. And I have not managed to start it yet. Gah!
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