I’m not particularly good at stopping books. Never starting them, that’s an area where I excel, as the tomes that have been hauled back and forth to work several times will probably unhappily attest. I’m interested in starting them, except for when I actually go to pick something up to read out of my library basket.

Two books though lost their coveted bedside table spot and were returned un-finished to the library.


Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits
Celia Rivenbark

Another round of Rivenbark’s funny stories about living in the deep south. While I appreciate her ability to self-deprecate, throw in some explanations for the Yankees, and generally be southern—I just couldn’t get into it this time. Perhaps if I’d charged right into it following Bless Your Heart, Tramp but instead it languished. And surely others need a chance at the humor.

Larklight
Philip Reeve

Magpie-like, I picked this book up based on the cover of the third book in the series. I’ve tried to read it and I’ve tried to enjoy it. I fell asleep over it when I was in NY but that was attributable to exhaustion, I fall asleep over books I’m enjoying all the time.

Reeve sets out a world where a family can live in space, with hoverhogs (convenient vacuum cleaners that have an interesting method of propelling themselves about) and gravity generators and, of course, the absent mother for two kids and the father. Only, spiders show up and take over and the father is killed and the kids must set off on adventures around the universe.

I wanted to like this book but two things bothered me: the unnecessary swearing and the repetitive sentence structure. I’m not the librarian to write off a book just because there is a curse word in it, though it does frustrate me when an otherwise easy-sell book becomes instantly impossible because the parents will not approve on that basis. But here it felt like the author was trying to be cool and edgy, and so was tossing in swearing. It got in the way and felt very out of place for the Victorian setting that the book was supposed to have, where talking of bodily functions is deemed unnecessarily crude. Secondly was the repetitive sentence structure. While this works for rhyming books, it got dull and less imaginative here. And I got bored.

Not everything is a hit, which is all well and good, but these didn’t even warrant finishing. At least not for me.