skygiants

A couple years ago schiarire recommended me Susan Choi's The Foreign Student, which both she and I really liked, but Ji bounced hard off Susan Choi's other books.

"But The Foreign Student was so good!" I said. "And the one about Patti Hearst actually sounded pretty interesting?"

"Well, you should read it and tell me what you think," said Ji. "Maybe you will like it after all!"

So I went and picked up A Person of Interest, except ten or fifteen pages in it turned out that I had made a terrible mistake; A Person of Interest is not the one about Patti Hearst but the one about a professor having a late-life crisis and meditating on his past horrible treatment of his family, and if there is a genre of book that fills me with the most ennui in the world it is books about professors having late-life crises and meditating on their past horrible treatments of their family.

It's something of a compulsion with me to finish books once I've started them (and besides I did not have anything else with me to read on the subway that day), so I read it, but I can't really review it fairly because it is full of things in which I have zero interest. I mean, there is a plot in there that could be theoretically interesting - when the university is bombed, isolated Professor Lee attracts suspicion and feels an urge to clear his name! - except that all gets wrapped up in Professor Lee's old affairs and horrible treatment of his wives and feelings of jealousy towards other professors and inability to connect with anybody in any kind of way and I'm sorry, I don't care. I had no interest in spending three hundred pages in this man's head waiting for him to come to an epiphany.

This is almost certainly the book I've read over the past year (maybe more) that I've gotten the least enjoyment from - because really terrible books I often get a large degree of enjoyment in reading. I compose mocking LJ entries in my head and have myself a blast. Even books I vehemently, actively hate, there's a certain enjoyment in going through and hating them profoundly. But this book was perfectly fine, reasonably well-written with nothing outwardly terrible about it, and in a way that made it much more dull. It's the first book in a long, long while that I've really felt tempted to put down after twenty pages.

So what about you guys, what happens when you start a book with which you seem to be totally incompatible?

Tell me over on LJ!