I love to read. But sometimes, I start a book, and it simply does not captivate me. If it’s still a slog by page 100 or so, I’m done with it.

1. The Lord of the Rings—I know it’s the definitive heroic fantasy trilogy, the one that everyone in the Universe cribs from, but somewhere around the middle of The Two Towers, I was struck with the feeling that I wasn’t reading an adventure story so much as a very long, and in many ways very dry, travelogue.
2. Children of Men—I so wanted to like this. I saw the film, and it was fantastic, a thinking person’s action film. The book, however, has no action in it whatsoever. (Unless it starts on the other side of the hundredth page, that is. And I’ll never know now.)
3. Les Misérables—I didn’t really abandon this one. Eventually I finished it. But I had a wicked case of food poisoning just as I was getting to the part where Jean Valjean carries Marius through the sewers of Paris, and the descriptions were a little too vivid at that point. I set it down and didn’t pick it up for about four months.
4. Life of Pi—Yann Martel likes his lists. Lots and lots of lists. I can only read so many comma-separated lists before I start to wonder how I would take them apart for inclusion in a database. I’d probably whip up a little perl script—fast, dirty, and inelegant, but it gets the job done.
5. The Butlerian Jihad—I really, really wanted to be able to finish this one. The thing that most fascinated me about Frank Herbert’s Dune future history was the Butlerian Jihad, mentioned often but only tangentially. I tried to read it, really I did. But after the fourth “ragged cheer” in less than 200 pages, I decided it wasn’t going to work out between us. I took the book back to the library.
6. House Atreides—As above, so below. The Dune series was SF literature. The Dune prequels are not. I personally feel that Frank Herbert’s legacy would have been better served if his family had simply released his notes instead.
7. Chapterhouse: Dune—Okay, this one I read to the end, but Lord, I didn’t enjoy it.
8. Titus Groan—A classic of Western literature it may be, but it didn’t turn my crank. Maybe I should try it again, sometime when I’m not on a train, trying to sleep my way across Saskatchewan in the cheap seats.
9. Closing Time—I loved Catch-22. This sequel didn’t cut it. Maybe I’m just not old enough.
10. The Divine Comedy—When you’re chaperoning an overnight church retreat for 15- to 18-year-olds, and you volunteer, perhaps foolishly, to be the guy that stays up all night to make sure the kiddies don’t try anything stupid, sometimes the only thing that’ll keep you awake during that dark lull from 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM is whatever you can find in the church library. Sometimes that’s an illustrated coffee-table edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But you can’t take the book home with you, and really, all you want by morning is some sleep and maybe some pizza, if the kids don’t eat it all before you get back.
11. The Hunt for Red October—Three pages of intense, exciting action; fifteen pages of tediously-detailed Russian submarine technical manual; repeat. I got about fifty-odd pages in and decided I just couldn’t hack it anymore.
12. Earth Sphere, by yours truly. I’ve cannibalized too many ideas from that one, slotted them into too many other projects, to really go back and make a coherent novel out of this project.
13. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—I started to read it last year, or maybe the year before. I think I missed my window. This strikes me as the kind of book I’d've liked when I was a kid, and would read now for the happy memories, but the story itself wasn’t really engaging me, for whatever reason.

• Doug reads Cosmo so I don’t have to
• Amy tells us about her perfumes
• Wacky Mommy makes me blush
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It was a Dodge Caliber, and it looked pretty much exactly like this:

1. It was orange.
2. Its speakers were woefully inadequate. I like my music on the loud side, and I enjoy the bass. This would let me do neither, tragically, without sounding like all four speakers in the car were blown. Everything from Barenaked Ladies to Corb Lund to KMFDM caused distortion. It didn’t make me happy.
3. Its rear-window wiper was a godsend on the dirt roads around my grandpa’s farm.
4. Its cruise control, when told to RESUME, would actually take me up to 5km/h faster than I had set it to, and then slowly ease back off on the hammer. I had a car that used to do that, once. It was a 1988 Tempest. I think cruise control technology should by now have evolved to the point where RESUME means what I think it does — take me back to the speed I was going before, not faster, not slower.
5. It had four wheels, four doors and a hatchback, and as far as I can tell, four cylinders.
6. It had cup holders that lit up when the headlights were on, for no reason I can think of. (Well, that’s not true. I can see the engineers saying to each other, “Hey, you know what would be cool…” Too bad they missed #10.)
7. It had a “racing style” gearshift to make you think you were driving a high-performance car, and…
8. its cruise control control was set up like a racing-car paddle shifter on the steering wheel, to further develop the high-performance illusion.
9. It had decent acceleration.
10. It had the worst visibility out the rear windows — I dreaded changing lanes, because all I could see when I shoulder-checked was car interior. Not a clue what might be lurking in my blind spot. As far as I can tell, this was due to the sub-porthole-sized rearmost windows, and the fact that the driver’s seat headrest and the back door pillars got in the way.
11. It did not conform to my standards of an attractive car.
12. Since it was the long weekend, it was half-price.
13. And it was what they had left down at the rental place.

So no, I won’t be buying a Dodge Caliber any time soon.

• Doug got lazy. Sort of.
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