I spent a full week on a book last week, which for me is a rarity when reading fiction. Now if it’s a non-fiction book I’ll take forever because I’ll set the thing aside to look up every little piece of information that sounds interesting. The George Washington biography is taking so long precisely because it has led me down more rabbit trails than the Easter Bunny. But a fictional story? Those I can move through pretty quickly, once I place my mind in the author’s hands.
I am beginning to think this year, however, is going to be cursed. Because every book I’ve read since my birthday (or series of books–>I’m looking at YOU, Hunger Games Trilogy) has started out like gangbusters and sucked me in. I’ve skipped meals because I’ve been so engrossed and enthralled by Katniss and Sugar.
But then they start to just flake out. The book that sucked my week in last week, and ended up just sucking, was The Crimson Petal And The White. And yet again it started so wonderfully well that I honestly couldn’t put it down. And then about 51% of the way through (reading a Kindle is like watching one of those fundraiser thermometers colour itself in) I started to realise that all we were doing was spending time watching a male author from the 21st century imagine what was going on in the minds of female prostitutes and missionaries of Victorian London. And he spent a LOT of time on those minds. Almost too much after a point. Because it just became plodding and dull.
If you have a book about prostitutes that is dull, you have a problem.
When I read the reviews for Crimson many of them warned me away because of the explicit sex. I wish they’d warned me instead of the dullness and frustration that turned the second half of the book into a gristle pudding; both flavourless and hard to chew. Harder to swallow.
It’s funny because my biggest problem in my own fiction writing is knowing how to finish something well. I am loathe to bring things to a conclusion because I generally love my worlds and the folks I’ve created to people them. But I’m starting to gather that endings must not matter, given my experiences with these last two books.
And now I’m nervous because I’ve just started the first half of the fourth book in A Song Of Ice And Fire. I put off reading the thing for the bulk of a year, because I insisted I wouldn’t start it until the second half (marketed to the world as “book 5“) was on the horizon. I’m starting to fear that I’ve cursed that book as well, seeing as how nothing I read this year seems to hold up.
The obvious solution is to stick with short fiction for a while. Novellas are good.
I’ve read 3/4 of the way through many books. Lately, I’ve started skimming. I’m not proud, but, time constraints, and if the prose isn’t really drawing me in, but I want to see how the story resolves, I just let my eyes skip over until they find an important plot point.
All I can say is don’t start reading The Wheel of Time. š
Too late! Although I didn’t even make it through BOOK ONE of that. To know that there were more than a dozen after that–when he couldn’t even maintain through the end of the first one–I honestly can’t understand why so many folk revere it so.
I have slogged through the entire thing – I enjoyed the first few books one summer, and Joel likes it a lot, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I now feel that I *must* see it through, but there are a few books in the series that I will never, ever reread.
“If you have a book about prostitutes that is dull, you have a problem.”
Fanny Hill set the bar pretty high on that one. Dull? Never. But the yuck factor’s out of this universe.
I’ve never read that, to be honest. Should I? Keep in mind that my tolerance for yuck is very, very, very high. I grew up reading the Bible. All of it.
I’m not sure what you mean by the “yuck factor.” I thought Fanny Hill was delightful, though probably for some of the reasons you hate Austen, Coble, so you might not delight in it the way I did. But the combination of the world’s most saccharine narrative arc, comfortably genteel (but not nudgy-winky) prose, and forthright sexual adventurism worked for me. I found it both erotic and funny.
Funny, I have avoided it thus far because I associate it with Austen
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Fanny Hill is nothing like Austen. Nothing. It’s a male fantasy, in which there’s woman on woman action, man on woman action, and the male phallus is likened unto a machine that drills into the woman. It’s the book that coined the phrase pornography because it is pure pornography. But it is actually a fascinating read. People were not nearly so prudish in the 18th C as they were in the 19th and 20th.
p.s. What don’t you like about 18th C lit.? I like it because it’s so bawdy and funny, so outrageous.
Yeah, my impression is that it would be too 18th-century for you.
I read the Crimson Petal and the White back around the time it came out, so my memory may be rusty. But [SPOILERS] the book, as I recall, was engaging and intersting for exactly the amount of time the main character works as a prostitute. Once her john sets her up as his kept woman and she starts studying his business, it all goes downhill fast. Because his business is boring. Then, when we’re in his household, the situation turns claustrophobic and stifling. His sick wife is a vaguely interesting character and the Victorian gynecological exam for “migraine” was horrific, but Sugar still isn’t doing anything but chafing to leave.
The ending was awful, I remember that well. But so very many books are like that. I don’t think endings aren’t important, I just think that most people can’t write them. If you can, you are head and shoulders above most folk writing today.
Spoilers…
whew. I thought it was just me.
I mean, I felt really guilty saying “the book is only good when she’s a prostitute”.
But, really. The book was only good when she was a prostitute. Then she became some sort of japing Victorian version of a man having an affair with his secretary. I thought it was all very out of character for her, all so that the author could make his point about all women being Madonnas, Whores or irretrievably ill.
As for the ending–and the authors many interviews about that “ending”–it seemed too contrivedly arty to me. I know that endings are hard, good endings are even harder. But this sort of “we aren’t going to have an ending” ending is just pretentious and rude. If people have given you that much of their time to hear a story you ought to at least tell them the whole story, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. To drag them into the minutiae of characters’ lives and then say “that’s all. We’re done now” is rude.
To write a second book of short stories about the characters and that world, to sell that book and to STILL not tie up the loose ends is unforgivable.
Yes! Well said.
Sugar stops being the ambitious, interesting, independent character we’ve come to know halfway through and the plot turns into some denatured version of “bored man has affair with loyal, brilliant but unexciting secretary/child care worker.”
I feel like only a man would ever conflate those two plotlines in that way. But I hate literary essentialism, even when I halfway subscribe to it. So maybe it’s fairer to say that only A CERTAIN KIND of man would do that.
And there’s another book? I will avoid.
Something else I was disappointed in the ending of lately: The Passage. Huge literary fiction yet beach book from last year about post-apocalyptic world where humankind is almost lost to a horde of virus infected vampired-like creatures. Terrble lame non-ending. I put in 700+ pages of reading and got nothing back. Dammit.