I’m sure everyone has experienced this at some point: you start reading a book you’ve heard great things about, or have wanted to read for a long time only to get partway through it and find that it is not nearly as good as you thought it would be, and it is near impossible to get immersed in it. So what do you do?
Many people I know, both avid readers and not, abandon the book, with the logic of “why waste time reading a book you aren’t enjoying when you could switch to a book you’d like better?” That logic makes perfect sense to me but ever the optimist, I like to persevere, thinking that eventually the book will get better. And, if it doesn’t, well then at least I know how the story ends.
But with Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, the book I had picked to read for Books On The Nightstand’s summer book bingo under the category of a book with only words on the cover, I quit partway through.
The gist of the plot is that Will Schwalbe’s mother is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he and her end up creating an impromptu two-member book club. They recommend books to one another, and discuss them during his mother’s chemo treatments. The story is incredible, but the writing style is so far from what I like reading that it dulled the story for me to the point where I was counting the number of pages left before the next chapter began. While I have stopped reading it for now, I wrote a post-it note with the title of the book and the page number I got to and stuck it on my bookshelf so that I can always go back and try it again.
In order to fill the gap of a book with only words on the cover, I substituted in Room by Emma Donohue, which I mentioned in my Pre-Paris book haul. I read it over the course of my trip, finishing it just yesterday on the plane home, so expect to see a review of that one soon. It is an incredibly powerful novel, and one that I would have read in one sitting if I could have, but the plane ride over wasn’t long enough.
So, my question of the day is what book did you start reading but didn’t finish???
Thank you for stopping by, and I hope you have a lovely day 🙂 🙂
Literary and Lovely 
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