As you know, gentle reader, I very rarely put down a book that I own and think that I will never, ever read the book completely.
I mean, aside from the sets and encyclopedias I have about (some of which I have a flicker of hope I will read from end to end like A.J. Jacobs).
But if I start a book and I’m not really into it or if it stagnates on a book accumulation point for too long (which is often years), I’ll throw it back on the to-read shelves for another go when twenty years from now or whenever I’m down to it, my last book.
But I have recently (which means in the last two years) come across a couple of books like The Ruins and the complete stories of Algernon Blackwood that I will not bother to read, and both of them I knew very, very early.
The first, on the right, is Mark Merlis’ Man About Town. I picked that up last year at some point. I got that it was a Washington book, a novel about the goings on in the capital. The book started on in a Congressional hearing or something, and the narrator is an aide of some sort or policy expert. The narrator talked about his lover who had one of those ambiguous names that could be a boy or a girl, and a little while later it was revealed to be a boy. Okay, so the narrator’s gay. You know, I used to volunteer with a gay theatre company, and I have a certificate from one production proclaiming me to be the token straight man. So I’m not a flaming homophobe. But a couple pages later, the narrator is fantasizing about sex with a senator, and I’m gonna trust my squick on this one and put it down. Perhaps the author was hoping to shock the bourgeoisie, perhaps not, but I don’t want to read that. I’m in favor of keeping your private life private, and this book was not trending that direction early. As I mentioned, I started it last year and put it down shortly thereafter, and it’s remained on my paperback shelves where I put books and videos to donate and give away (it’s sitting there with the VHS version of Hitchcock’s Secret Agent which I tried to watch in March and found I also have on DVD). So the media accumulate there slowly, and I dispense of them as donations slower still.
But the small stack has this week been joined by Dark Star, a self-published novel about a murder mystery that erupts when a Hollywood lawyer/agent gives a new young lady a contract. I would read you the back material, which is the best edited part of the book. I started reading it, and it is bar none the worst-edited self-published novel I have ever encountered. It was so bad that I wondered if it was like the first part of The Sound and the Fury, told by an idiot, but the narrator is supposed to be a highly place attorney, for crying out loud. I read three pages of it, and I determined it was too much work amid the misspellings, grammatical errors, and Emily Dickinson capitalization to try to gut through the book in case it had an interesting plot.
So now I’m up to four books I’ve given up on as irredeemable. I feel like I’m getting awfully critical in my old age.
So to the top of my paperback bookshelves you go. To be donated to a church garage sale sometime in 2024 or when I get around to it.
Oh, and coincidentally, both of these books are dollar books from Hooked on Books. One has the red dot that they used to do and the other has the $1.00 sticker over the UPC that is the new paradigm. Come to think of it, The Ruins might also have come from Hooked on Books on the cheap rack. Perhaps I should not spend so much time (but not money!) there.
Also note that, although I gave up on The 1838 Mormon War In Missouri after a couple of paragraphs, that was a library book and completely different in this context.
Thank you, that is all.
