Two books I have not finished
I am so far behind on my book reviews that I have no idea how I will ever catch up again, if I don’t get a few days off anytime soon. anyway, here are 2 books I definitely DIDN’T enjoy:
So far I was quite lucky with the books I have read this year. Out of almost 30 there were only two I didn’t finish:
Will Self’s “The Book of Dave” and Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”.
Both of them promised so much and delivered so little. If I had a 50-pages-rule, neither one would have passed it, but since I am an eternal optimist when it comes to books I plodded on, in the case of Jonathan Strange for another 200 pages. But it just wasn’t any good.
To compare Jonathan Strange to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings - as some reviewer did (and of course they had to put that line on the cover) - is just plain preposterous. The only thing the two books have in common is the occurence of wizards in the story, although to call either Strange or Norrell a real wizard is quite a stretch. Apart from that I can see no reason to even put them in the same broad category in terms of storyline or subject, much less so in terms of quality. Susanna Clarke’s writing is miles, no leagues away from Tolkien’s. This book was abysmally boring and pointless.
My opinion of Will Self’s writing is marginally better. Quite a while ago I have read his book “How The Dead Live”, which I enjoyed, even though it was slow going and took me ages to finish. So I came to “The Book of Dave” with some amount of expectation, which is almost never a good thing. Mainly I expected to like it, because the blurb made it sound like a dystopian fiction, which is my favorite genre at the moment, and also like a dig at religion - and how could I pass it up in that case? Sadly, in my eyes it delivered on none of those promises. The story took a long while to get into gear and then just dragged on and on interminably - until I gave up around halfway through. So now I will never learn how Dave’s demented ramblings went on to spark an equally demented religion in a dark and distant future. But you know what? I think I can live with that.
