Everyone has them. The books gathering dust on shelves, tossed underneath beds, or accumulating various marks of damage at the bottom of a backpack. The books we begin but do not finish. Those poor works that once held such promise, now left to yellow unread and unloved.
But not, in my case, unwritten about.
I have a reading rule I sometimes adhere to which is: There are millions of books in the world. Do not waste your time on one you don’t like.
Whether or not I stick to this rule is based on the book and the reason I am reading it. Sometimes I force myself to finish books I don’t like because someone asked me to, or because I am proofreading it, or because I am stuck on a plane and that was the only book I brought with me.
However, there are books that warrant a good rule following. Books such as My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, and Aloft by Chang-rae Lee. These books passed through my hands, some more briefly than others, and were not finished.
I got a little over half way through the thick volume of short stories My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me before setting it down for the last time. I was excited about this book because it was a collection of “modern” fairy tales, and I have always had a soft spot for fairy tales. I grew bored with this book when many of the stories were based off of the same original fairy tale, and therefore ended up being rather similar. Some authors really re-invented the old tales, while others simply re-wrote them. One of the stories I loved, however, was Timothy Schaffert’s “The Mermaid in the Tree” which took place in a coastal town that would frequently have dead mermaids wash up on shore. It told the sad story of a young man who saved and fell in love with a mermaid while his human ex-girlfriend jealously pined away for him. Aside from the few really great stories, I grew bored and realized what I really wanted was just a copy of complete Grimm’s Tales instead of this book.
I stopped at page 86 of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It’s not that this book was immediately dull, it held my attention for a little while before I left it, unopened, for a few months. I honestly can’t recall why I abandoned this book, except that I think it has to do with the return of my boyfriend after a long time apart. I believe another problem was that I had expected this book to be a little scary and thrilling, and instead it was just detailing the town of Savannah, Georgia and introducing some quirky characters. I very well may take this book up again, but not before I explore a few other books’ pages first.
I only got through the first 22 pages of Aloft. Those pages were long dragged out description of an older man buying an airplane and flying it over his house. I just got bored very quickly and abandoned the book for something more interesting. I do feel bad about this one, having barely given it a chance, and I may return to it once I have finished all the other books on my shelf I have yet to get to.
I am currently taking my sweet time with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. It rests now, untouched for days, on my bedside table open to a dragging chapter I can’t seem to get through. Hopefully soon I shall pick it up again and it won’t be added to my list of unfinished books.
Bent Shelf Book Reviews 