Mosquitoes are dirty used
needles that fly.
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I did something today that I have never done before in my life. I quit a book. Done. Finis. Threw it across the room less than half read.
I hear and read about other people who get partway through a book, and set it aside as not being worth the effort. I never do that. I struggle onward and (eventually) finish every book I start. Sometimes it takes a while. The House of the Seven Gables, for example, required literally years of coming back to it, but eventually I did finish it. There were a few others like that.
It's not that I'm especially virtuous or anything. I'm just pretty careful about what I pick up. I choose books based on reviews, recommendations, or skimming in the bookstore. Buying books online makes it a bit harder to skim, so with crap like that shades of purple thing, I sometimes get stuck. It arrived, I skimmed, and just from a paragraph or two here and there I knew it was so poorly written it would drive me crazy, so I never even started actually reading it. Stuff like that doesn't count.
Well, I stupidly fell for Michael Crichton's sales numbers again.
I've read Crichton before, and every time I end up annoyed. He can't tell a story! It's like he immerses himself in the topic, learns all the buzzwords, loads up on details, and then writes 300 pages of everything he has learned about the topic, like he wants to show how smart he is, and half-heartedly wraps a thin story around it so he can call it a novel, rather than a textbook.
I got 141 (of 431) pages into Airframe and gave up. I'm tired of page after page of details on airplane parts, repeated over and over, and thin characters who seem to serve just to spout that stuff. It really is possible to give us as much as we need to understand the situation, Michael, without page after page of detail!
And then, of course, I remembered that I'd had the same thoughts reading Crichton in the past. Phooey! I have a very poor memory.
If you want good mystery, try Lawrence Block. I've read two of his books recently, and enjoyed both.
(Yeah, I know the color on the "shades of" thing is wrong, but you know what I meant, and I didn't want it to show up in searches. Ok?)
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2 comments:
I was thinking this was a "life is short" thing until you said Chricton. Hate him.
Michael Crichton wrote one good book. It's likely out of print now. It fell into the 70s craze of family sagas. It was called The Camerons.
The fifty shades books! Lord have mercy. I read the first paragraph and fell down foaming at the mouth. Oh, come on, ladies, if you're looking for bdsm erotica, go to Pauline Reage's Story of O. Or Anne Rice's Beauty trilogy. I'm sure there are others out there, but likely they're too much for me.
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