Book Meme, part 4

[osprey_archer]

For inspirethoughts: 21. A book you gave up on, and the reasons why.

I give up on books with a fair amount of regularity - or, at least, more regularity than I used to, when I grimly read just about everything to the end. Nowadays I’ll give something up because it’s boring, too technical, not what I’m in the mood for right then, due back at the library and someone else has a hold on it so I can’t renew it and I don’t care enough to sit down and steamroll through it before the due date...

I think the book I abandoned most recently is Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species. I’d heard it was charmingly written despite being a 150 year old science book, but the part I read was baffling rather than charming, and life is just too short for this sort of thing.

I also gave up on Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which at the time I meant to get back to, but the more I think about it the less I want to read the romance that, I have been informed, is going to unfold as the book continues. Whyyyy do authors have to lard their books up with unnecessary romances?

Comments

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Aww, Uprooted is on my endless to-read list, but maybe now I'll push it a bit further down the ranks.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I mean, I've been meaning to go back to it, and maybe I will someday. But the longer I'm away from it the less I remember the parts I liked and the more I think about the incipient romance.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

Uprooted's romance is so shoehorned, given what's already there between the two girls.

(That said, I enjoy it a lot as a book and just assume the romance breaks up in a couple years and the girls get together)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Every review I've read has said that the two girls are way more compelling as a possible romance. Maybe I should read it for that and just go "LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU" whenever the het romance is happening.

[silverusagi]

I have also been struggling to get through Uprooted. Which I kind of started reading because I wanted to see how bad the romance was? I mean, I was kind of intrigued by a scathing review I saw, given that I had heard really good things about the book elsewhere. But I've had it on hold from the library's ebook service four times, and still haven't managed yet. I'm kind of interested in the Wood and stuff, but I'm beginning to think that Novik is just not my author. I was disappointed in her dragon series as well.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I also struggled through the first book of her dragon series and never read the others. Uprooted is in a very different style, so I thought maybe it would be the Novik for me, but... maybe there just isn't a Novik for me? I do like the Wood, but somehow it just didn't click.

[inspirethoughts.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this.

Uprooted has been on my list to read. Oh, I may have to rethink again.