Three recent reads which weren’t for me…

….and so I do not have the enthusiasm to give them a whole post each. As always, these are just my personal opinions and responses, sorry if I’m dissing your favourites.

This book seems like it was EXACTLY meant for me. Biography! Women! Inspiration! All of my favourite things! And the first chapter was really interesting – discussing questions like: do women artists have muses (yes) and are men muses (not so much). (Example: Virginia Woolf – her muses were mostly women).

But the first proper chapter on Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale didn’t hold my attention. The second, on Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell made me uncomfortable. And I just didn’t feel like sticking with it for a third. A rare ‘started but didn’t finish’ for me.

I did make it all the way through The Hour I First Believed, but I’m not sure it was worth the hundreds of pages. It’s essentially about a man whose wife survived the Columbine massacre, but that story gets buried under so many other issues that its power is completely lost.

Apparently, it took Lamb nine years to write this, and it feels like he was compelled to keep up to date by bringing in every tragedy that happened over those nine years – 9/11, Katrina, Iraq – and then chucking in slavery, women’s exploitation, and prison conditions too. Tragedy should be emotionally wrenching – it shouldn’t just make you feel, oh god, not another one. And personally, I believe no book should ever contain pages of description of a powerpoint presentation.

I stuck with this because the main character, Caelum, was a messy-but-interesting guy. Though Caelum had an irritating habit? Of finishing all his sentences? With a question mark? Like a teenager, even though he was a middle-aged man? Which got old pretty quickly?

I also made it all the way through I See You Everywhere. I didn’t dislike it: it just seems to have made almost no impression on me. The story follows two sisters/rivals at different points in their lives, and I think that’s what didn’t work for me. I found the narrative too hop-scotch, without enough time to connect with the characters. So when The Big Thing happened, I was a bit like, oh. Didn’t see that coming and yet am oddly unmoved.

I am glad to get all those half-hearted, mealy-mouthed reviews done with in 400 words. More fun stuff soon.