Sunday, March 11, 2012
When is a book not worth reading?
I have been reading The Edumacation of Jay Baker by Jay Clark over the last week or so and the blurb on the front (You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll feel awkward by association) is just not true! I didn't laugh or cry, but the book did make me feel awkward. While there is a plot, it is loose, and the dialogue is mostly one-liners strung together with the main character (Jay) swapping witticisms with his mom, his best friend, his teachers and sometimes his nemesis. Of course, Jay gets all the best lines, in case you did not guess that he is loosely based on the author. And BTW, why do male authors do this? Is it some kind of ego thing that they have to give the main character their own name? (See Jack Gantos latest Newbery winner!) While I slogged through to the end, it just did not seem worth it and several times I had the urge to put the book down and find another that would suit me better. So the question is: do you give a book 10 pages, 50 pages? When do you give it up and say, no, I can't read this! To give the author credit, I may just be out of my genre, but in spite of his clever use of words, this book just did not do it for me and I find myself wishing I had given it up and gone on to something better!
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Wendy, I used to finish a book even when I hated what I was reading, because I always thought that maybe the ending would salvage it. Of course, its rare when that happens and so I was left feeling as if I had just wasted my time reading a bad book. Now, I just don't finish them. If a book is not engaging me in the first few pages then I'm done with it. Its not worth my reading time to spend it reading a bad book. It was hard to break my habit of having to finish the book, but I did it and now I'm okay with putting down a bad book.
ReplyDeleteI agree, there are times when I do stop reading. I find this harder when the book was given to me and I want to find something redeeming in it. I did stop reading a new graphic novel because it just was not what I wanted to spend my time on. I agree that reading a bad book is a waste of time!
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