Hi,
Have you ever abandoned a book? Sometimes I get the urge to try and read some early science-fiction or fantasy. Therefore I read "War of the Worlds" some time ago... and
nearly abandoned it. The reasons were because of the large amount of name drops with regard to locations, the copious use of "____" instead of names and/or locations, and stretches where not much is was happening. I did finish the book, though.
Now I'm reading "The coming race" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It started out OK. It actually started out fairly modern... but now, at around 30% of the book, I've been reading a VERY meticulous description of the Vril race: politics, differences between men and women, philosophical points of view, and differences of the race to humans. The story is basically at a stand-still with an enormous info-dump going on.
I said the book started out fairly modern: with that, I mean use of words and sentence construction. It has, however, slowly been reverting back to the Victorian style of writing. I don't mind that too much, but at the beginning of Chapter 11, the author dropped this gem of a sentence:
Quote:
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Nothing had more perplexed me in seeking to reconcile my sense to the existence of regions extending below the surface of the earth, and habitable by beings, if dissimilar from, still, in all material points of organism, akin to those in the upper world, than the contradiction thus presented to the doctrine in which, I believe, most geologists and philosophers concur—viz., that though with us the sun is the great source of heat, yet the deeper we go beneath the crust of the earth, the greater is the increasing heat, being, it is said, found in the ratio of a degree for every foot, commencing from fifty feet below the surface.
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That's ridiculous. It takes about 25-30% of the screen on my e-reader which is a 7.8 inch KA1 with the font set to a normal paperback-sized font. I want to read a story... not spend two minutes reading, re-reading and analyzing a sentence to understand what has just been said.
I basically forced myself to finish War of the Worlds because I never abandoned a book in my life. However, to some extent, I feel I'm getting too old for slogging through a book as if I'm in high school.
About 80% of English required reading was from the Victorian age when I was in high school in the Netherlands in the 90's. The objective of reading was not "reading", or "having fun", but "analyzing literature and afterwards writing reports and essays on it, with regard to the impact they would have had on society as a whole in the time in which they were written." There was stuff such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, some stuff from just before 1800, most from 1800-1920, and everything after 1920 was basically out. Maybe up to the 1960's for books in Dutch.
(A similar curriculum was true for reading books in Dutch. At the time both Dutch and English were obligatory subjects in high school and you had to pass both to be able to graduate. Depending on your school level, you had to read 10, 15, or 20 books per language. In my case, that would have been 40 books per year. Now you know why so many people around my age detest reading.)
Reading this book, and coming across a sentence such as the one I quoted above, makes me feel as if I'm doing required reading from my high-school days again and it makes me want to abandon the book.
Should I?
It is said in the blurb that the almost perfect society discovered by the protaginst has a "dark secret"... but if I abandon the book I'll never know, unless I look it up.
Did you ever abandon a book and if so, do you do so quickly, or keep reading in the hopes that it gets better?