Books I Didn't Finish: Shogun

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So recently a TV adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 doorstopper Shogun came out and was extremely well-received by critics and audiences. I tried watching it and didn’t like it for reasons that I might get to another day, but it reminded me that I had the novel sitting on my Kindle. Why not give it a whirl?

The books turned out to be more compelling than I had expected, but its crushing length eventually wore down my enthusiasm to finish (this is a criticism I have often received myself) and I gave up halfway through. Let’s dig into the specifics and ask the question, are some books just too damn long? Why didn’t you edit this, James Clavell’s publisher?

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Books I Didn't Finish: Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief

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Recently, or possibly a year ago (my grasp of time isn’t great these days), I saw people on twitter lamenting that they could no longer read Harry Potter due to JK Rowling’s controversial stance in the Gender Wars™. Lots of Twitter commentors were recommending Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series as a replacement, which got me thinking that I’ve never actually read any of those books. By the time they started coming out I had moved on from middle-grade fiction, save for some old favourites, and they were off my radar.

Also, they’re about Greek gods swanning around in modern-day America, and as I mentioned once or twice in my recent book preview post, that’s not my jam.

But now I’m a big cool adult, so I can read whatever I want without feeling self-conscious about it! Plus, there’s an Apple TV+ series coming next year, which means that we might soon be in the midst of full-on Percymania. Can you really afford not to be part of that cultural zeitgeist? I’m performing a public service here, if you think about it.

Anyway, I only got about halfway through it.

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Books I Didn't Finish: A Court Of Thorns And Roses

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In the post-Hunger Games world, no book series has managed to dominate the YA space and become the Next Big Thing, as many commentators and (perhaps more importantly) people with a vested financial interest in the YA market predicted something would. Instead we have multiple claiments to the throne, much like a dark fantasy setting might feature a host of squabbling monarchs.

One of those claiments is Sarah J Maas, who wrote extensively for a YA audience before more recently switching to adult novels (probably a smart financial decision). I’m completely unfamiliar with her work, so I decided to experience the Maas Effect for myself by jumping into A Court Of Thorns And Roses, the first book in her most popular series.

I didn’t get too far.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Babel

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After completely failing to connect with The Atlas Six, I was still in the mood for a vaguely “Dark Academia” flavoured alternate history fantasy. Luckily that describes roughly forty percent of the current genre market right now, so I wasn’t short on options. RF Kuang’s Babel got a huge amount of Buzz prior to release and had an interesting premise, so I chose that. Is it better than The Atlas Six?

Yes. Technically.

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Books I Didn't Finish: The Atlas Six

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So I was recently strolling through my local bookshop, looking at things to buy on my Kindle for substantially cheaper prices, when I spotted one of those “BookTok made me buy it” shelves, and I got curious—what are the TikToks making the kids buy these days?

Of the options available, Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six seemed the most up my alley. I had vaguely heard that it’s Buzzworthy and Bingeworthy and various other kinds of worthies, so surely it has to be a compelling and well-written tale, right?

Right?

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Books I Didn't Finish: Seveneves

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I’ve never read any of Neal Stephenson’s books before Seveneves, but I’ve been aware of the guy for a long time, always as a titan of sci-fi who writes very intelligent smart-guy books for smart-guy people. Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, Anathem—these and more have a reputation as being big, dense bricks full of science and cryptography and philosophy. Something like a sci-fi Umberto Eco, in other words.

So I was surprised when I cracked open Seveneves, read a few pages and then asked myself “Is the whole thing written like this? Are all of Neal Stephenson’s books written like this?”

I can’t say for certain because I didn’t finish the book, but what I did read was enough to tell me that Neal Staphenson is not the sci-fi version of Umberto Eco. He’s somewhere between Andy Weir and Joss Whedon, a location otherwise known as the Hack Zone. Let’s dip our toes in, shall we?

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Books I Didn't Finish: Recursion

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One thing I struggle with, as a big-time media reviewer with an audience of billions, is how to respond to something whose only flaw is not delivering the story I expected. Is it really fair to call something bad just because it ended up going in a direction that I find uninteresting? How do you evaluate a well-written novel that succeeds on every level, save for subjective interest?

That’s actually completely irrelevant, because while Recursion’s plot direction did disappoint me, I also stopped reading it for multiple other reasons.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Empire In Black And Gold

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Recently I have, for some reason, been thinking that it would be fun to get into a huge multi-volume fantasy series. I’m not entirely sure why; for most of my life I’ve had this idea that I should enjoy these kinds of books, even though I never actually have.

Anyway, I eschewed your Games Of Thrones and your Wheels Of Times and instead settled on Empire In Black And Gold, the first volume of incredibly prolific SF/F author Adrian Tchaikovscky’s 10-book(!) Shadows Of The Apt series. I made it more than halfway before giving up. Let’s see what went wrong.

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Books I Really Didn't Finish: The Witchwood Crown

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We’re navigating new frontiers of not finishing books with this one. Soon I’ll be writing posts about not reading books at all, and then my blog will spontaneously merge with r/books.

As an experiment, I recently walked into my local library and picked out the chunkiest, heftiest fantasy tome that I could find, without bothering to look at the synopsis or even the title. That book turned out to be Tad Williams’ The Witchwood Crown.

This was an inauspicious choice for a few reasons. Firstly, my only previous exposure to Tad Williams is The War Of The Flowers, which is to this day one of the dullest books I’ve ever tried to read. Second, The Witchwood Crown is actually the first book in a sequel trilogy to Williams' Memory, Sorrow And Thorn series from way back in the 80s, although the author forward states that it was intended to stand alone so I didn’t let that stop me.

I girded my loins, cleared my busy social calendar, opened the book...and made it four chapters in before I gave up and swapped it out for something more interesting.

I just...I can’t. I can’t even, with this shit.

The first chapter opens with a woman named Tanahaya, part of a race called the Zida’ya, musing to herself about how humans are as mayflies compared to her people, who live for centuries in their serene forest homes and they’re elves, they’re just Tolkien elves with a different name and a vaguely Japanese cultural aesthetic for some reason, Jesus Christ what is it with the fucking elves

I honestly don’t understand how people can write this stuff without falling into a coma. Reading it is excruciating enough, God knows what it would be like to have to live with Shan’anda’landa’land’alar, First Zephyr of the Elv’en people or whatever in your head for several years. 

Granted, this is a sequel to a fantasy trilogy that started in 1988; maybe these tropes didn’t feel quite as played-out 33 years ago as they do now. Maybe, after years of gritty grimdark fantasy, people are hungry for wispy elves giving thanks to Mother Sun and riding horses named Spider-Silk. I guess it’s possible.

After the elf chapter we get a wise kingly king and his rambunctious princely prince son, and this is the stuff that made me drop the book. The elf shit is at least entertainingly bad, but sombre kings being all wise and sombre and kingly is perhaps the least interesting subject in the world to me. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to see eye to eye with the epic fantasy genre until it gets over its fawning attitude towards monarchy, and there’s absolutely no sign of that happening any time soon.

For all that I mock grimdark fantasy (like I did two paragraphs ago), it at least tends to be a lot richer and more interesting than this hokey nonsense.





Books I Didn't Finish: Mordew

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When it comes to books, I’m extremely basic. I have bought many books based solely on their nice cover designs, and I will likely continue to do this until the moment of my death. I wouldn’t say the actual contents of the book are completely irrelevant, but there’s a lot of leeway.

Mordew by Alex Pheby seemed like the best of both worlds: style and substance. Firstly, it’s got a really nice cover illustration, and it’s one of those ones that goes all the way to the edge of the cover, which I like. The book itself is pleasingly chunky and yet also compact, with a great hand-feel. A+ so far.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Agency

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Here’s a very quick Books I Didn’t Finish post, explaining why I stopped reading something a few chapters in. I guess “Books I Barely Started” would be a more appropriate title.

I have read precisely one (1) William Gibson novel in my time, which is Neuromancer. Maybe it’s because I don’t really like the “punk” part of cyberpunk all that much, or maybe I just came to it too late, but it didn’t do anything for me at all and I pretty much didn’t think of old Willie Gibbs again for years, until I saw Agency on the shelves of my local library and was reminded that he’s still alive.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Utopia Avenue

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Note: I’m afraid I’m once again going to have to take a blog break while I get some health issues under control. I had this post mostly completed before my current round of brain problems kicked off, but I wasn’t able to finish it, so I’m throwing it up incomplete.

Presented for your enjoyment: the thrilling story of why I bailed on a book 85% of the way through.

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Books I Didn't Finish: A Curse So Dark And Lonely (aka That Time I Got Reincarnated As A YA Heroine)

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I have a confession to make. I love portal fantasies, or whatever you want to call them. Stories about people (preferably kids or teens) getting whisked off from our world into a fantasy setting is something I’ve always had an affinity for. It’s one of the hokiest, most played-out tropes in all of fiction, and for some reason I can’t get enough of it.

So when I found out that one of the more prominent recent YA releases is an example of the genre, and that it was on sale in the Kindle store, I demolished that purchase button and eagerly started to read.

Why did I not finish it? Let’s find out!

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Books I didn't finish: Q

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You may not have noticed this, but I like reading bad books. When a novel lets me down, my immediate reaction isn’t to cast its author out of my Kindle wishlist for all time; it’s to take a keen interest in whatever they write next.

In that vein, today we’re looking at Q, Christina Dalcher’s followup to 2017’s Vox, which I didn’t really like at all.

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Books I Didn’t Finish: American Dirt

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American Dirt came out in January and attracted a lot of attention. Some of that attention was no doubt the kind that author Jeanine Cummings was hoping for, taking the form of rave reviews, weeks spent on top of bestseller lists and a lucrative advance and movie deal. Other reactions weren’t so kind, focusing instead on inaccuracies and cultural stereotypes, and the validity of Cummings as an author of Irish and Puerto Rican descent telling the story of a Mexican mother and her son fleeing across the border to escape cartel violence.

I was vaguely aware at the time that there was a lot of hubbub around American Dirt, but being in the grip of migraines and not reading a huge amount, not what the content of that hubbub was. When it appeared on the Kindle daily deals a few weeks ago I remembered that it had been highly praised and smashed that Buy Now button without any further thought. So abrupt was my YOLO-purchase that I didn’t even bother to look at the author’s name.

This is how I ended up going into American Dirt assuming that the author must herself be Mexican or the child of Mexican immigrants, thinking that surely such literary powerhouses as Oprah and our friend Stephen King wouldn’t shower high praise on a writer using the experiences of an oppressed minority as fodder for a pulpy thriller.

In hindsight, I really have no idea what possessed me to think this.



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Books I Didn't Finish: Devolution

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Max Brooks is back, baby!

Following the success of The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and a book about how if you find yourself in a world of mines and crafting the most important thing you can craft is you, we now have Devolution, which is jumping on board the increasingly-hot bigfoot scene that’s inexplicably growing in America. Will it kick start a sasquatchenaissance in the same way that The Zombie Survival Guide helped to revive zombie mania in the early 2000s? Maybe, but it probably doesn’t deserve to.

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