Dec

6

Abandon Ship

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The idea of “Abandon Ship” is one I preach better than I practice.  I often talk to my LSAT students about it, and how sometimes the cost of spending time on a question far outweighs the benefit that question can provide to your score.  (Especially if you end up getting the question wrong, in which case the benefit is zero.)

Hypothetically this would be a good strategy to apply to books.  I have a limited amount I get to read each year (though it’s still a pretty significant number).  And I’d rather read good books than bad ones.  This year in particular I’ve read several books I haven’t really liked.  Even though I will have read almost as many books as last year, my end of year list this year will be somewhat sparse, whereas last year I had to make like 4 different lists to contain all the awesomeness.

With all that said, I still have a very hard time abandoning books.  It rarely happens.  Even if it is bad.  Sometimes there is an excuse.  Like with Pat Conroy’s new book, he is an author I enjoy so I’m more likely to give him more and more chances.  (Even if he completely squanders them so that now if his next book is not good I will be out very early.)  Or if I suspect that something is going to happen at the end that will make it all make sense.  (Like that behemoth The Children’s Hospital, which should have had that kind of ending, but instead went with the deus ex machina kind of thing that I really hate.)  But more often there is no good reason to keep going, yet I do anyway.

I recently compromised.  And I think this may be my new thing, especially with thrillers.  I like thrillers and mysteries, but it’s particularly hard to put them down because the end is kind of the whole point.  I was reading Jennifer McMahon’s new book, Dismantled.  It was recommended by someone whose books I like, though I have to admit that my tastes vary widely when it comes to taste in books.  (This is the case with many authors.  Dismantled is blurbed by Stewart O’Nan, who is the last person on earth I would have suspected.  He writes lovely, spare, books about people whose lives feel real.  Why is he blurbing this really lame thriller?)

I knew I’d read McMahon’s first book and disliked it.  It was compared to The Secret History, my very favorite book.  I will read pretty much anything if it is compared to The Secret History.  Unfortunately, nothing lives up to the comparison, but I try anyway.  I had forgotten that I’d read McMahon’s second book until I saw it on my list from last year.  Then I remembered that I hadn’t liked it either.  I was about 50 pages into Dismantled and wasn’t liking it so something needed to be done.

Because it is so very hard to abandon mystery/thriller types, I took the middle ground.  I skimmed it.  I flipped pages through the rest of the book, occasionally stopping to read half a scene.  I finished it in less than half an hour, and wow, it was not good.  I was seriously annoyed at how not good it was and I was barely reading it.  (Seriously, I should know better than to read books with a slight supernatural bent.  They annoy me.  Even when done well, a la The Little Stranger, it is hard for me to set aside my rationality and just acknowledge that something may be unexplainable.  I demand explanations!  Agatha Christie at least gives them to me.)  It was a good solution.  I was able to feel justified in my choice to not really read it.  Had it gotten good, I could have slowed down and started to read for real again.  And it will not go on my book list because I didn’t really read it so I don’t have to remind myself of its badness.  Except to remind myself that I do not like Jennifer McMahon and need to stop reading her books.  Self, please remember this.

I did finish my audiobook of Brave New World and I still firmly believe that while it has some amazing ideas, in terms of working as a novel, well, it’s rather mediocre.  It’s like a movie or book where all the dialogue is clunky backstory.  Plus it does what I so dislike: it preaches at you directly.  I can happily now say that I do prefer 1984 and not just rely on my high school memory.

My new audiobook is the aforementioned Stewart O’Nan, Songs of the Missing.  And because it is Stewart O’Nan it is very likely that the missing girl will never be found and this is very likely to annoy me, even though it is the whole point.  Or at least, I assume it is.  It has yet to rise to Last Night at the Lobster, which I loved quite slavishly.  But if I don’t hold its subject matter against it, it is so nice to read O’Nan, who writes about small towns and suburbs without being condescending or quirky.  It is wonderful to read something that is not set in a big city and not populated by unbelievable characters.

I also have a small paperback of Up in the Air sitting in my purse which I will read while doing things like waiting in line.  I suspect it will be some time before I get to watch the movie and I’m pretty sure it will diverge enough that it won’t be bad that I just read it.  Plus, as a frequent–though not this frequent–traveler, it appeals to me.

I did just read Karin Fossum’s new book The Water’s Edge in one sitting.  It is not the best, but I did like it.  I am not sure which one is the best, though I was very fond of The Indian Bride.  I’d have to go back to the first one I read, Don’t Look Back to see if it’s better.  There was not much of Inspector Sejer in this book, it was very slim, but I do like the style of her mysteries far more than most other writers.  This one had a particularly neat little subplot that I found very intriguing.  For me, overall, Fossum is right up there with Kate Atkinson for writing really interesting mysteries.  No one else quite gets it the way they do.


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