2014 Book #34: The Cleanest Race – and a couple additions to the Fail Pile
North Korea fascinates me. The culture is so vastly different than my own, and it’s so secretive, that I’m intrigued. I saw The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters on Oyster, and it sounded really interesting. I’d just finished Butcher’s Crossing and had no idea where to go next, so I thought […]
On Not Finishing Books (and sometimes finishing them when I know I shouldn’t). Also: 2014 Book #24: The Shadow of the Wind and Fail Pile #3: Noggin
I knew what I was getting into when I finally picked up The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, but Goodreads had it lingering on my recommendations page, and I was seeing it everywhere. Tumblr, mostly, which is usually bad news because quotes usually come from books I abhor like The Unbearable Lightness of Being […]
2014 Fail Pile #2: The People in the Trees
Remember how, after I read The Magus, I noted that, while I don’t mind challenging books, I don’t like books that are entirely, unequivocally, effed up? Yeah, well, note that I at least finished The Magus. I’m not finishing Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees. Here’s the blurb on Goodreads: “In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs […]
Fail Pile Book #2: Herzog
Usually, when I can’t get into a book, I stop around page 50 and move on. I read an article a few years ago that said if you’re not interested at that point, you probably won’t ever be, so you might as well read on. That’s not always the case, of course. The Satanic Verses […]
The Fail Pile gets its first book: This Side of Paradise
I jumped into This Side of Paradise right out of The Hunger Games, and I liked it at first. Then it got tedious. It reminds me of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but without a cohesive plot. It’s a series of little vignettes about a kid who grows up and goes to […]