Meh-Reading

Photo by Stuart Miles via freedigitalphotos.net

One of my favorite terms to come out of Internet TV criticism is hate-watching — which obviously describes the syndrome of compulsively watching a TV show that annoys you. I’ve found a similar syndrome with books: hate-reading. I don’t do it much, because why would you, especially when you no longer work at a library where you may be called on for your assessment of Fifty Shades of Grey or the latest Dan Brown? Though I recently had an unhappy experience with an audiobook on a road trip that could be called hate-listening. That’s particularly bad because you can’t skim, which is what I’ve done when hate-reading titles like Angels & Demons or Fifty Shades of Grey. With an audiobook, in a car, your choices are to give up or to keep suffering so you can find out what happens in this crappy book that you’ve already given your attention for way too many hours.*

Lately, though, I’ve been trying to just quit reading books that annoy me. Like The Marriage Game by Alison Weir. (Dear Alison Weir, you are such a good writer of history. Please stick with nonfiction.) The Nancy Pearl rule is a good one — give every book 50 pages and then you can quit. If you’re over 50, subtract your age from 100 and that’s the number of pages you have to give it. I aspire to the Nancy Pearl rule.

Except … it doesn’t really help in the situation I recently found myself in, which can only be described as meh-reading. It was especially uncomfortable since it was a digital advanced review copy that I had requested. I gave it an honest and not malicious review on the site that gave me access to it, which I think is your primary obligation. And I don’t think it was a bad book. It wasn’t one of those cases where it may well be a good book just not to my taste. It was an OK book, just good enough to keep me going but with enough drawbacks that I was kind of annoyed with myself for devoting the time to it.

I suppose this is no worse, and possibly better, than spending the time watching sports or TV re-runs or whatever other ways we waste our time these days.

The book, in case you’re wondering, is Newport by Jill Morrow. Historical fiction, which is my most-read genre these days. But it just didn’t pass the plausibility test for me, and I’m a pretty generous suspender of disbelief in fiction.

*The audiobook that tortured me on my recent road trip was The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler. Don’t do it! There is so much better-written crime fiction, even specifically Scandinavian crime fiction, out there. This one was just ridiculous. Stieg Larsson, if you weren’t dead you’d have a lot to answer for …

 

What I read last month: September

Because I cannot fully control my inner gold-star-seeking preening child, and because this is a book blog, I’m going to start posting a monthly roundup, with capsule reviews, of what I’ve been reading. And because I have a lot more reading time on my hands now, and can’t really resist bragging about it.

In September I read:

The Fever by Megan Abbot – The highest praise I can offer for this book is that it isn’t really my thing … and I still couldn’t put it down. High school girls mysteriously get sick, around the same time they are discovering their sexuality and getting vaccinated for HPV. While high school remains, for me, a mostly dreaded land where I have no wish to return even in fiction, I was fascinated by this book. And I didn’t see the end coming, which is always a plus.

Lost by S.J. Bolton – Since the Key West Literary Seminar focused on crime fiction, last January (see Megan Abbot, above), I have been slowly expanding my reading of contemporary crime which had before then been mostly limited to P.D. James and Kate Atkinson. S.J. Bolton is harder-edged than either of those and not as good a writer. But I’m enjoying her Lacey Flint series … and I’ll keep going if only to find out if she’s EVER going to finally jump Mark Joesbury’s bones like they’ve both been wanting for several books now.

The King’s Curse by Philippa Gregory – I reviewed this one for the Miami Herald. It’s the final entry in Gregory’s Cousins’ War series about the Wars of the Roses, and brings us up to Henry VIII. This time our narrator is Margaret Pole, a York cousin who has a front row seat for Henry’s increasingly desperate search for an heir, growing tyranny and the turmoil England experiences as it breaks away from Rome. I haven’t loved every entry in this series (I liked The White Queen and the Lady of the Rivers, the others not so much) but this is one of the good ones.

Audiobooks: What’s my problem?

Photo by Curious Expeditions via Flicker Creative Commons license.*

I want to be an audiobook user. Reader? Listener? OK, I don’t even know the correct term. I love the idea of experiencing books in a different way, of having someone literally tell me a story. And I like the potential multitasking, too. I could be reading and knitting. Or cleaning. Or driving.

But it just keeps not happening. This despite the fact that I have once joined Audible, multiple times laboriously downloaded books on CD from the library, then transferred them to various iDevices and even tried Playaways, those self-contained audiobooks.

My most recent attempt was with The Quick by Lauren Owen. It’s a book that appears to be in my wheelhouse and the only format the library had it in was audio. So I got it. On a trip up the Keys last week, I started listening.

But the problem was that my attention just kept wavering. And it wasn’t the story’s fault — the story was interesting! I want to read this book. In fact, I want to read it so much that I requested the library purchase it as an ebook, which they did. The rest of you who are into historical/supernatural/British/literary fiction can thank me later. I’ve already got it checked out.

A similar thing happened over the summer, when I tried so many times I’m embarrassed to admit it to listen to The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. I love Sarah Vowell. And she reads the book, along with a bunch of special guest stars like John Hodgeman and Stephen Colbert. I love history, and don’t mind if it’s got a bit of snark to it. It should have been like the best extended episode of  This American Life ever. But again, my attention kept drifting. And this despite the fact that some of the time I was listening to it I was on buses of various species, traveling across the state of Massachusetts. There could not be conditions better suited to listening to that book.

Another work about some of the same characters, John Barry’s book on Roger Williams, is very useful for putting me to sleep on plane trips, I have learned. But I still don’t feel like i know much about Roger Williams. And I’d like to. And I like John Barry.

I’ve only found audiobooks really successful a couple times in my life. During really long car trips where you just have no choice. During long, boring projects like painting a room. And back in the 1990s when I used to cover the county for the Miami Herald and spent a lot of time driving up and down the Keys. The two-cassette abridged versions of John D. MacDonald novels were perfect for a single trip — and maybe it didn’t matter so much if I zoned out a little along the way. They were abridged anyway.

Even though I’ve given up on The Quick, I’m going to keep trying. Though it might take me until my next long car ride, or painting project.

 

 

 

 

* Image above, as the caption says, comes from Flickr’s Creative Commons. The terms say you’re supposed to link to the license, which I couldn’t figure out how to do in the photo caption. But there it is, if you’re interested.

I give up

I almost never give up on a book once I start reading it. But I’m trying to change my ways. Most recently I made this decision with a book that I would have thought was written with me in mind — historical crime, set in Victorian England with a literary bent (Thomas de Quincey is a character as well as the inspiration for the title).*

And yet … as I found myself struggling to get through this book, looking for reasons to read something else and realized I had met superlibrarian Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50 — I decided the hell with it. And returned the book to the library. And I feel much better!

I’m not sure why I’m so averse to quitting a book even when I’m not enjoying it — something of the contrarian “this book is not going to defeat me just because I dislike it,” something of the Protestant “you must finish what you started” ethos, I suppose. And there are those rare cases when your experience changes radically during the reading itself (“The Shipping News” by Annie Proulx is probably the best example I can think of offhand). And there are cases where you’re just not in the right frame of mind to read a particular book — quitting means you can go back and start afresh. Sometimes it seems like a whole different book. I recently had this experience with “Gods of Gotham” by Lyndsay Faye — the first time I tried to read it, the period jargon drove me nuts. I went back because friends and literary sources I trust said it was good — and I loved it. Go figure.

I should quit more books, and I’m going to try to do just that. I work in a library so I borrow or get free advanced copies of way more books than I buy. This way, maybe I’ll take more flyers, get deeper into the backlist of the writers at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar. I’ll have more time to walk the dog, go to the gym, clean the house, prepare elaborate meals.

Or maybe I’ll just watch more baseball and bad TV crime shows. Either way, I see it as an improvement to my quality of life.

* One reason I may NOT return to this book — and I’m serious — is because the chapters that detail the actions of De Quincey are entirely in italics. I realize this was intended to set those sections of the book apart. But there’s a reason italics are generally used sparingly in print. Because it’s annoying to read in long stretches. Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky. But when the first section popped up — and I realized it was going to be more than a page or two — I found myself seriously irritated. And when I realized that this experience would be repeated throughout the book, that was another persuasive reason to just quit reading.