It is always difficult to move away from a book that you really enjoyed [ie., The French Lieutenant Guy's Woman by John Fowles] and pick up another directly afterwards.I mean, the next book has to sort of compete with the chemical rush of the last one, right!
The synapses are all firing on that previous level!
The book I am currently reading [The Purest of Human Pleasures] is good, I don't want to 'diss it, necessarily, but it just ain't as good as the last one!
Have you ever read a book that was supposed to be so good [a real "Award-Winner"] and then the thing really missed the mark with YOU, as a reader? I have. Several times.
But perhaps never moreso than with this one book I am about to mention -- I hope I don't offend any fans of Gunter Grass, but seriously, I thought the book The Tin Drum [a Nobel Prize-Winner?] was not enjoyable at all. Just…. not GOOD.
I couldn't finish it, which is a very rare phenomenon for me.
I once wrote a more detailed diatribe against it --> HERE.
What would be a book, for you, that was "all the rage" and just made you want to "tear the page"?
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Gilead by Marilynne Robinson missed the mark for me. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and I was eager to read it. I can't even remember, now, why I didn't like it. I, too, don't often leave a book unfinished but I did this one. I just couldn't get through it. I wonder whether it was just not the right time or frame of mind for me. I thought about trying Gilead again but - alas - there are too many other books stacked on my nightstand...and more on my mental list.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, Wanderer.
ReplyDeleteI also read Gilead, and you know what?
It did not do much for me.
Then again -- what can one say of "prizes"?
Who judges these things?
I have submitted poetry to certain contests, and have not won anything.
Then I've read the winning entry.
No wonder I have a bald spot on the top of my head... that's where I scratch -- time after time -- after reading the results.