I love to read, but I don’t have a problem abandoning a book if it’s not doing it for me.
I found a book in the library’s science fiction section, a title I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of. I checked out the first couple pages, I read the author’s bio—apparently the author’s “name” was a nom de plume for an award-winning writer of thrillers, trying their hand at SF. OK, I thought, I’ll try it. It’s the library, it’s not costing me anything.
I started reading it, and… it was not great. It featured one of my least favourite tropes—the protagonist wakes up with no memory of where they are, how they got there, how all their crewmates died. The writing was a little overwrought, too, one of those “more adjectives is better” manuscripts that could’ve used another editing pass to pare it down a bit.
The story started to intrigue me despite myself, though, and I decided to give it a chance.
But then there was a flashback scene, the “meet cute” between the hero and her husband, where she ran him down with her car and then insulted him loudly enough that bystanders applauded. At that point I thought, Nope, I’m done.
So it goes. Back to the library for another try; or maybe I should work through some of the short stories in The Wolfe at the Door, which I bought at the end of the summer.
It wasn’t all bad, though; on the same library trip I also checked out Ex Libris, a graphic novel by Matt Madden. It’s a strange little piece of work, very meta, and the kind of story that works best if you know basically nothing about it going in. I’ll say just two things about it: it makes me want to read more work by Matt Madden, and I’m going to have to read it again because it feels like it’ll help me with one of my works-in-progress, Dried Flowers.