Month: January 2022

I’m sure it seems from my book reviews that I very much like every book I read. That is decidedly not the case. I start many more books than I finish. Here are a few that recently failed to complete for one reason or another.

I really wanted to like this book by C Pam Zhang. It was a ‘notable book of the year’ for the NYT, WaPo, NPR and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It started off fine with a story about orphaned children of 19th century Chinese immigrants trying to survive but then swerved into giant buffalo bones and tiger paw prints that made no sense to me in the context of the book. I moved on.

This is the first ‘adult’ book by Tochi Aneybuchi and I think it shows. It won high accolades and a large number of awards, but I just couldn’t get into it. It seems to me that it relies far too much on the ‘superhero’ trope and I just don’t enjoy that.

Apparently some people liked this book by Kim Stanley Robinson. I found it incoherent and virtually unreadable. It starts off promisingly enough with a massive heat wave that engulfs a part of India and kills thousands. This doesn’t seem far out of the realm of possibility to me. Then Robinson begins rapidly changing the POV, timeline, location, principals so quickly and in ways that seemed to me to be unrelated that I was unable to follow the book.

I liked this book but eventually it seemed interminable. Spencer follows the course of the English monarchy and its Norman cousins from the Norman invasion through decades of conflict with a huge cast of characters and battles. I generally love good histories, but the level of detail Spencer offers us in eventually excruciating. I might try this again if I’m trapped alone for several years with nothing else to read.

This is another book that I very much wanted to like. Here’s a blurb from the publisher:

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.

These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.

The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.

It looks really interesting and it may be that I was too busy with other things at the time I read it, but it seemed to take forever to get started and it was hard for me to keep the names straight for some reason. I’ve put it back in my queue, but my queue has over 100 entries, so it may be a while.