Abandoned Books

More on books I’ve started to read, and just couldn’t get into. Typically, if I abandon a book, it’s within the first fifty or so pages.

Again, feel free to tell me if I should continue on, because the book gets better. There are several books that I’ve had a hard time getting into, but really enjoyed once they got going. For example, it took me several months to get through the first several chapters of A Conspiracy of Paper, but about a quarter of the way in, something finally clicked, and I devoured the rest of the book in a couple of hours.

So, again, I’m not unwilling to be proven wrong.

Cloud of Sparrows (2002) Takashi Matsuoka

I am partiularly fond of fantasies set in Asia, or with an Asian theme. I loved Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori and Sean Russell‘s The Initiate Brother, and everything I’ve read written by Amy Tan. So I was very interested in Cloud of Sparrows.

The book started off interestingly enough, but then suddenly shifted to a group of Western missionaries traveling to Japan to convert the heretics. Rather unlikable missionaries at that.

Not at all what I was in expecting or in the mood for.

Daughter of Fortune (1999) Isabel Allende

My thoughts on this book are that perhaps I read too many fantasies and mysteries, so I have certain expectations about how a story should start. I’m still waiting to see if something is going to happen. There’s been nothing yet to really pull me into the story. I’m to page 31, and mostly I’ve just gotten background on Eliza (the main characters) childhood. No one has been murdered or robbed or kidnapped or stabbed (not that I was necessarily expecting any of those things), however, the back cover promises a “rough-and-tumble world of panhandlers, prostitutes, immigrants and aristocrats…” Maybe those bits come later, once I get through learning about Eliza’s childhood.

So really, I haven’t completely abandoned this book yet, but at the rate of reading only a page or two before falling asleep, I can see it might take me awhile.

• Browse the archives:
  
• Under Camelot’s Banner » »
• « « Mystic and Rider