The last time I made a post like this it was April 2017 so I think we're about due an update. I thought I'd take a minute to talk about the books that I started in 2018 (and in the last week which is what inspired this post) but didn't actually finish. Not to be overly melodramatic, but I think it's important to give myself (and you dear reader) the permission to put down a book if you're not enjoying it. School is for pushing through books that may not knock your socks off. Once you're on your own time and reading for pleasure there is absolutely no reason you should continue a book if you don't 100% want to continue reading it.
So let's start with Matt Haig's
How to Stop Time. This book was recommended to my by my bestie who probably knows better than most what my taste in literature is and she wasn't wrong with this one. However, I'm a fickle mood reader and when I picked up this book I just wasn't particularly interested in reading about the lives of these characters. The story follows a man named Tom who has a rare ability: he ages at an incredibly slow rate. The reader follows him from his birth up to the present where he is struggling with his centuries old existence and having to keep his secret (while trying to locate his estranged daughter). There's a secret society of those like him that are ruled over by a man who will do everything in his seemingly unlimited powers to keep their secret from being leaked. The issue I had wasn't that I didn't enjoy the narrative or its delivery but that once I put it down I didn't actively seek to pick it back up. (It was also on hold at the library so I didn't have long to languish over it.) I took that as a sign that this was one I'd have to revisit some time in the future. (haha time reference) Progress: I made it to page 127 out of 325.
And then there was
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies which you might recall kept showing up at the end of my posts as my 'currently reading' book of choice. This is a weighty book, ya'll. Jared Diamond's book had been on my list for
ages because once upon a time it had been on one of my recommended reading lists for an undergraduate Anthropology class (I majored in that field). I didn't have the time to read it then (it is 425 pages after all) but the topic still intrigued me. Much like the book above I was interested in the subject matter and found no fault with the writing style (other than it being more like a textbook than casual, recreational reading) but it was
so dense that I didn't always feel compelled to pick it up in a spare moment. (I also kept falling asleep for some reason.) Progress: I made it to page 290 before I had to concede defeat (and ship it to the next person waiting to read it).
The Sellout by Paul Beatty was an entirely different kettle of fish. Besides being on the bestseller list, it came highly recommended to me by a patron at my branch who felt so strongly about it that she went to the shelf, brought it to me at circulation, and insisted I check it out immediately. I hadn't heard anything about this book before she placed it in my hands despite the praise it had received from the literati of the world. This book is a conundrum to me. It has been touted as an uproariously hilarious satirical take on race and culture in America. I'll agree with the latter part of that statement but I didn't find it funny in the least. In fact, I found that the 'jokes' were not at all to my taste. This is probably due to the amount of books on race and culture I've read over the last year but I just couldn't read this book without feeling thoroughly depressed at what felt almost hyper realistic. Now I made it halfway through this book so I feel like I got the overall gist and flavor of the thing. The narrator (name not revealed beyond the nickname BonBon) lives on a farm in the middle of a Californian ghetto called Dickens where you're more likely to see cows on the side of the road than a white person walking their dog. The book starts with him being called before the Supreme Court on an issue of dragging black people's progress back to the time of slavery...because he has a slave of his own. I don't know what this book was but I do know that I didn't like it and I have no intention of finishing it in the future. Progress: 145 out of 289 pages.
The next two I'm going to pair together because I made the same mistake with both of them.
Computers of Star Trek by Lois H. Gresh & Robert E. Weinberg is exactly what it states to be in its title. It examines the various pieces of technology used in the different iterations of
Star Trek through the years and compares it to the reality (and future of) technology.
The Future Factor: The Five Forces Transforming our Lives and Shaping Human Destiny by Michael G. Zey talks about the advent of social, economic, and technological innovations which have shaped us as a species and how these and others will continue to help us evolve. The problem with both of these books is that they are so outdated that there was little point in me reading beyond page 20 of either of them.
Computers of Star Trek was written in 1999 and re-published in 2001 which predates the beginning of
Star Trek: Enterprise not to mention the reboot movies or
Discovery. It was also written before the first iPod (end of 2001) or the first smartphone that didn't rely on a stylus (2007). Then there's
The Future Factor which was written in 2000 but from the first page made reference to events and situations which considering how fast technology changes made this book (and its many references) obsolete. That's the problem with books about the future...once you reach a certain point they hold no relevance or accuracy beyond a certain window of time. Progress: I barely cracked the spine on either of them before I was checking their publication dates.
For those curious about the book covers (which I think tell a story of their own):
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| Source: Barnes & Noble |
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| Source: Barnes & Noble |
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| Source: Amazon |
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| Source: Book Depository |
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| Source: Amazon |
**If you're interested in buying this book or any books really, you can click
here or here. The first will re-direct you to AbeBooks and the second will re-direct you to The Book Depository. These are great websites for purchasing books (AbeBooks carries inexpensive used and out-of-print books and The Book Depository ships free everywhere in the world). Full disclosure: I will receive a commission on all sales made by following either of these links. I wouldn't recommend a site that I didn't use and you are under no obligation to purchase anything. :-) **
