The Explorers Guild: Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala, by Jon Baird

I really wanted to enjoy reading this book. I like the concept: an old-fashioned adventure novel. I like that the book intersperses panels of graphic novel into the text. I like that it feels written a hundred years ago and yet current.  I like the writing style with its rich and textured tone.

I'm not crazy about it being set in the late 1910's. But I do like the concept of searching for the mysterious city Shambhala.

You know at this point that there's a "but" coming your way. Here it is: but I just couldn't read this book. I made it to page 363 out of 763, not even half-way through. And I realized that I just do not care about what happens next.

I wasn't even curious enough to skip to the back pages to see what happened at the end.

For the right reader, this might be a fabulous story. Alas, not for me.

The Explorers Guild

Girl Jacked, by Christopher Greyson

I made it all the way to 37% of this mystery novel before giving up.   It wasn't that it was horrible so much as it was uninteresting; both the story line and the character development.  This novel is tedious.

The concept is sound:  Jack, our hero and a policeman, looks for a missing girl - the sister of his best friend from high school.   Jack is completely unlikeable: his is borderline incompetent and drinks to excess.

Girl Jacked (A Jack Stratton Mystery)

Wolfkind, by Stephen Melling

This should have been a good novel:  an assassin is at large, and our hero will infiltrate a crime syndicate to find and eliminate the bad guy.   I made it 10% of the way through before stopping; this book is unreadable.

Why is that?  The writing is just too difficult to get through.   Here are some samples:

"Familiar resentment of her father seeped into her thinking and reawakened feelings she had tried so hard to repress."

"Sinking into his seat, Joshua gazed into the depths of his beer glass.  Tiny bubbles floated through the golden liquid to the surface, bobbed there a few seconds, then popped.  Many of his inhibitions seemed to pop along with them, become gas and air.  Tormented by the desire to tell his secret, Joshua gazed fixedly at the old man."

"He tossed the scrapbook aside and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. A spider's web of cracks radiated from the light fitting. For the first time in his life the ceiling above him was not his own. This unsettled him in a way he found hard to define. Intensified his feeling of alienation. He rolled onto his side and stared at the wall, thinking about the handgun and poisoned load at the bottom of his bag. Before long, his eyelids grew heavy and he fell asleep."

And so did I.

Wolfkind

The Storm Protocol, by Iain Cosgrove

This is a poorly written novel.   My chief complaint is that the book is set primarily in the USA.   But the author is clearly, obviously not American.   As a result, it is full of dialogue, spelling and jargon that one would never see in the USA.  Which, when put in the mouths of American characters, simply doesn't work.

I made it 37% of the way through this book (according to my Kindle ) before declaring it to be unreadable.

The Storm Protocol

The October List, by Jeffery Deaver

Oh no, another un-read book.  This seldom happens, and now it is two times in a very short time period.   The problem here is the design of the novel:  it is written backwards.  In the first chapter we are at the end, and each subsequent chapter works towards the beginning.

The author quotes the joke,

"The bartender says, 'We don't serve time travelers in here.'
A time traveler walks into a bar."

Well, that might work in a kind of geeky joke, but it  doesn't work (for me) in a mystery novel.  I got to page 17 out of 301 before I realized that the joke was on me, and I didn't like it.

The October List - Free Preview (first 4 chapters)

Rasputin's Shadow, by Raymond Khoury

I did not read this book. I tried to, making it all the way to page 29 before giving up. That's out of 404 pages. At a mere 7% into this novel I could tell it wasn't worth reading. And anyone who follows this blog knows that I'm really not all that picky about what I read. So consider this a public service: don't bother with this book.

Unless.

One of the big annoyances in this novel is the extraordinarily clumsy way that Mr. Khoury links this novel back to prior ones that featured the same main characters. At least that's what I imagine he was doing; if not, there's just no explanation for the ham fisted descriptions of prior events. So for someone who's invested in all those (I have no clue how many) previous books, maybe it is worth while to keep going.

But I doubt it.

The clumsiness isn't limited to the link-backs. There's an overall miasma of poor writing going on here.

Rasputin's Shadow

Heft, by Liz Moore

I seldom give up on a book once I start reading it.  This novel was one of the few exceptions; I made it only 80 pages in before stopping.   Why?  It was sad and felt pointless.

The preponderance of positive customer reviews on Amazon really surprises me; as of this writing, only 2% were negative.   Guess that puts me in the elite minority on this one.

Country Driving: A journey through China from farm to factory, by Peter Hessler

First off, a confession and a complaint.

The confession:  I couldn't make it through the book.   I was very interested in the first section, which was about Mr. Hessler's initial drives across China.   The second section, about his home away from the city (Beijing) in a peasant area, was largely interesting to me.   But by the third and final section, about a factory village, I'd lost all my interest.   Now in fairness I did skim through the remainder, reading a few pages here and there.   But that was sufficient.

Based on the uniformly positive reviews of this book I can only assume the failure here is my own inability to focus.

So now the complaint.   If you're reading a book about a remote place, and specifically someone's road trips across that remote place, don't you think you're entitled to a map?   But the first map (it is generous to call it that) didn't appear until after the 122nd page.   And it didn't show any of the routes of the first 122 pages at all.  Or maybe it did.  Hard to tell.

I really should say more about this book, at least facts about it.   The prior sentences presumably convey my assessment.    So here we go:   Mr. Hessler is an American journalist who'd been living in China for some time, and speaks the language.   Living in Beijing, he decided to get a driver's license (no small task in China), rent a car and travel along a Great Wall -oriented route, trusting the inadequate drivers maps as a general guide.   This book documents these travels (in the first section), as well as his experiences in part-time living with a small village population a couple of hours outside of Beijing (the second section), and hit visits to a factory region in the south, near Wenzhou (in the third, and as previously confessed, largely unread third section).

There are, it turns out, multiple versions of this bookavailable.

Momentem, by Jerry Lee Osborne

I glanced over at my bookshelf last week and noticed a paperback on the shelf that didn't look familiar.   It was large format, all white but for the title and author's name.   I couldn't remember putting it there, but none of my family members knew how it got there either.   I hope I didn't borrow it from someone, as I don't recall to whom to return it.

What do you do when you find a novel mysteriously sitting on your bookshelf?   You read it!

Or try to.   I made it to page 90 (out of 218).   Even this took me the better part of a week of on and off reading, putting it down as a side effect of my lack of enthusiasm.

The plot:  Dutch scientists invent a miraculous drug (momentem) which enhances sensation, cures disabilities, and generates huge amounts of cash from distribution through traditionally illicit drug channels (although it is itself too new to yet be regulated or declared illegal).    Characters deal with varied aspects of this situation.

The problem:  stilted writing.   I don't precisely know how to describe it.   I imagine that if a high functioning autistic person wrote dialog, this is how it might sound.   But that might be pejorative to autistic folks.   I don't want to be rude to the author either.   The writing was just so stilted.

Another way to describe it:  imagine you read the wonderful Elements of Style but then go overboard with terse business style writing in the dialog and descriptive sections of your inventive novel.

So I just gave up.

Oh, and also because the author misspelled Zilker park Zulker.

Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan

I came across this book through the recommendation of a friend during intermission at the Austin Playhouse theatre quite a long time ago.   I bought the book immediately and have tried ever so diligently to read it since.   But I find that after only a few pages my attention wanders, which explains why even though months have past, I've scarcely made it through half this novel.

The premise is a historical fiction about Mamah Cheney and her love affair with architect Frank Lloyd Wright.    This novel got great reviews and by every indication should have held my interest.   Perhaps I've read too many spy / murder / thriller / action novels lately and this has dulled my appreciation for literature. But in recognition of the facts, however unpleasant, I will confess: this book is tagged "unread" as I'm simply giving up on it.

Wet Desert, by Gary Hansen

As posted previously, in my excitement to download inexpensive Kindle novels, I picked up more than one horrible, unreadable novel.   This is one of those failures.

Lest you, dear reader, wonder "why wasn't Carl at least bright enough to check out the reviews first," let me point out that as of this writing, Mr Hansen's unreadable book has 158 four or five star reviews on Amazon, and only 14 at three stars or fewer.  Only nine reviews were the lowest rating of one star.

The phrases used in those nine low reviews are dead-on:  "the characters were wooden and shallow," "dialogue is uninspiring," "Very plodding sentence construction," "the main story and side stories never come together."

Sigh.  What's a reader to do?  Go with the majority reviewers (who in this case prove themselves to have either far lower standards than I)?  If I do that, I will sometimes end up with a book like this one, and have to count the moments until I can reasonably stop the pain, just tag the book as unreadable and move on.

Crack-up, by Eric Christopherson

I tag my posts: biography, mystery, etc. One of my least often used tags is "unread." It means that the book was so excruciatingly awful that I just couldn't bear to finish it.

It is novels like this one that justify the tag.

But the fault is not only Mr Christopherson's. I am guilty of greed: the appeal of a 99 cent Kindle download was my undoing. I downloaded several of these in a fit of bargain hunting, but never again.

As for this book: horrible writing. Irritating plot. I stole a peek at the last page just out of curiosity, and saw that even the resolution was annoying.

Save yourself: if you see this author's books, even at a yard sale, run for the hills.

Now in fairness, a word in Mr Chrisopherson's favor:   as of this writing, a full 90% of the reviews for this novel on Amazon are positive -- either four or five star.   So full disclosure drives me to point out that I may just be the bizarre outlier on the curve and that the typical reader would actually love his writing.

Here's the Deal: Don't Touch Me, by Howie Mandel

This book was a failure for me -- in that I couldn't get past page 29. Just too bleak. I'm sure this book is quite helpful for many people; I'm just not one of them.

Now I feel doubly guilty: that I gave up so quickly on this book, and that my empathy to folks with a variety of disorders might be lacking.

My rationalization on the second concern: empathy isn't lacking, I just don't want to read about this topic.

Just like some folks probably don't want to read about how to field dress a deer.

Amateur Barbarians, by Robert Cohen

If this novel represents modern American literature, then I'm sorely out of the loop. As the jacket points out, Cohen was "...touted by The New York Times Book Review as the 'heir to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.'" I should have quit right then.

It was, in fact, the New York Times that pointed me to this book, top of the "100 notable books of 2009" gift list.

The problem is, the main character, Teddy Hastings, bored me so much by his narcissistic whining that by the end of the first chapter I was irritated. Just a few more pages about the other main character, as the chapter title puts it, the "melancholy" Pierce, was enough to shut me down.

Not even the attempts at building suspense worked: why was Teddy briefly in jail, why did he take a sabbatical from his job, what's up with his weird relationship with is wife? Who cares. It just isn't interesting enough to find out.

This novel gets filed in my seldom-used category of "unread."

The Fire, by Katherine Neville

I tried, I really did. In spite of the scene jumping from place to place and time to time. In spite of the convoluted writing, the unsympathetic characters, the complexity and the tired writing style. But after 156 pages I gave in. I just can't bother to keep reading this; the thought of another 250 pages of this tripe is simply too much to bear.

Darkmans, by Nicola Barker

This is the second book of the weekend that I was unable to finish reading. Coincidence, or is it me? Here's a sample sentence from Darkmans:

"It went without saying that the Chunnel (now a source of such unalloyed national complacency and pride) had caused huge headaches - and terrible heartache - in East Kent, but Beede's greatest betrayal had been on a much smaller, more informal, more abstract level."

The use of parentheses is rampant (in nearly every other sentence) and quite distracting (as you might imagine, especially in a novel). Well, there we go - it is just coincidence. Even putting the parentheses aside, this book is unreadable.

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

I want it on the record: I don't give up easily. But a mere 211 pages into this confused and confusing mess of a novel, realizing there were 403 pages left to go, I just stopped.

Unread: The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman

Well, I tried. A friend lent me his copy of this first book of the series. Having seen the advertisements for the upcoming movie of this name, I thought I'd read the series before seeing it.

Made it to page 62 before giving up. I don't generally prefer this sort of story, but this seems worse than most. It was just too painful for me to continue to the end.

And so, it joins the ranks of the tried, but unread.