Not Finishing Books

Although I generally believe in persevering with books to the end, I have had some experiences lately that made me decide that I should allow myself the luxury of abandoning certain books if they have not engaged me after 75 pages or so. Almost all of my blah reads are contemporary novels (including crime novels). When you read a lot of classics as I do, the thin, unsatisfying quality of many current fictions -- even highly lauded ones --is glaringly apparent. If I am reading your book side-by-side with a novel by Dostoevsky or Dickens, yours had better be pretty good, or it is going to look very bad!

Joshua Ferris's intermittently clever Then We Came to the End, for example, became penitential as it went along, and I really had to force myself to finish it. I will admit that there was a mild pay-off to this effort in the form of a lovely ending, but long before that, all the authorial tricks wore out their welcome: the first person plural narration ("we" did this and "we" did that), the quirky-but-flat characters, the half-hearted nods at magical realism (such as some unbelievable business with a totem pole, and the story about an adult who sits in a McDonald's play pit), the sentimental mid-section about cancer. I could not reconcile the high praise the book received with my assessment of it as, at best, a middling effort.

Another painful book to get through was David Schow's violent, preposterous thriller Gun Work in the Hard Case Crime series. As a shrewd Amazon reviewer put it, "Unfortunately its appeal is limited to a very distinct niche audience. Specifically gun aficionados who enjoy tales of extreme violence unencumbered by character development or coherent plotting...One would really have to have an in depth knowledge of armaments in order to fully appreciate or even care about the detailed specs given each and every time a new weapon is introduced."

Yann Martel's Life of Pi was a quick and undemanding read that I wasn't tempted to abort, but it didn't add up to much in the end. (The Man Booker Prize? Really? Who were the judges that year?) Zero Cool by "John Lange" (Michael Crichton), also in Hard Case Crime, is an extremely silly book but also zipped by.

So, with those disappointments in mind, I dropped Chang-Rae Lee's acclaimed Native Speaker after 81 pages because I found it dull and aimless, and it was boring the pants off me -- no story to speak of, affectless narration, insubstantial "characters" (really just names on a page). Because I am living in Korea, it is not exactly news to me how rigid first-generation Korean immigrants in America might be, and also not difficult to guess what effect that might have on their offspring ("Am I Korean? Am I American?" and so on). As a novel of the immigrant experience, the portion of Native Speaker that I completed did not hit a single unsurprising note.

More recently I'm in the process of being unimpressed by Leighton Gage's Brazil-set crime novel Blood of the Wicked, which is mechanical and uninspired so far. I haven't been able to get on with this one because it's in a box in storage just now (along with some other books in progress that I wasn't able to bring on the plane to Korea). Probably I will finish it eventually because it is not too too bad, and the effectiveness of a crime novel does have a lot to do with how the author pulls off the denouement. I'll give Leighton Gage one chance to show me his endgame moves.