Continuation of the 30 Day Book Challenge.
Day 3 – A book you did not finish
Go to Day 1
Go to Day 2
This is an easy one, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I didn’t like the movie either. I’m sure that there are many books I didn’t finish, or really in my case, books i just couldn’t get into. As in this case, I couldn’t get past the first few chapters.
I usually have a dozen books with bookmarks sitting on my side table. What happens is that I start one and it doesn’t hold my interest so I start another. Then I just go back and forth between books based on what I feel like reading in the moment. I usually do finish them eventually.
Cloud Atlas and a few others were ones that I just could not get into. Another example is Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. I really tried on that one. I tried starting from the beginning at least three times… but still haven’t gotten past page 23.
The question really should be, what is it that makes us abandon a book? For myself, I think the author’s writing style has a lot to do with it. I think if the first few chapters move too slowly or don’t pull me in they have a good chance of losing me. I also don’t enjoy reading something with a lot of made up or unpronounceable words out of the gate. It’s different if you build that stuff in slowly so the reader gets accustomed to it first. Understandability and just being able to follow what the heck is going on is a big one too. If it flips back and forth too much and has multiple characters to track it can make a book wholly unenjoyable. (Multiple detailed characters can be done well, Martin’s Game of Thrones is a good example of that.) The other killer for me may be the fault of the editor or publisher… although, the self-publishing world has certainly changed this, but if a book is full of typos andor mis-spellings it makes me crazy.
I looked ahead and they don’t have a prompt for a book you wished you hadn’t read… too bad, I definitely have one! I wanted to throw the book in the garbage after finishing it. If you know me at all you know that is sacrilege. Maybe I’ll save that rant for a different post.