Fiction
In reply to the discussion: Do you feel guilty about putting down a book, halfway through? [View all]hippywife
(22,767 posts)with age comes the sense of time and what it's worth. When I was a lot younger, I could not for the love of me get into Tolkein's Ring Trilogy. I tried a couple of times, just could not do it. Then one day I found myself sick in bed, nothing else in the house to read, so I tried again. Voraciously read all three books and loved them. It's not that they're poor literature, so I guess I just hadn't been in the right frame of mind to appreciate them until then.
I'm in the midst of one now that I'm absolutely not enjoying, but I've got some time constraints this week preventing me from being able to start and get into a larger book, so as I mentioned in another post, this one is working as my current sleep aid.
Recently I took another one back to the library unfinished, it was due back and had holds on it so I couldn't renew it for one thing, but for another, more than a hundred pages in, with nearly 300 more yet to read, I wasn't enjoying it in the least. That one really surprised me because it was John Cleese's autobiography, So Anyway.... I love Monty Python, I love wry comedy, but I could not love this book. He seemed to ramble around quite a bit, and that far into the story of his life, he hadn't even reached the point of being out of school yet. Imagine the most boring, monotone person you know talking incessantly about his childhood for hours.
Another that I almost stopped reading was Dearie:The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz. Almost 600 pages and the first quarter of the book seemed to be mostly about her ancestors. I don't mind the background information, especially if it's interesting and sets up the rest of the book well. This just seemed to go on and on and on, and nothing in it made me really care about her grandparents or great-grandparents, and was somewhat confusing to boot. I did persevere and finally got past that, and it got better. But had I not had the patience at the time, I would have returned that one unread, too.
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