… or more like What I started to read but put down in favour of something else, which I then also put down, and so on, and so on, and so on… am I right?
… though that doesn’t lend itself to a great headline.
Here’s how October worked out:
Read
(Ha!)
Started and stopped
Crow Winter – Karen McBride
Time Salvager – Wesley Chu
Attack Surface – Cory Doctorow
Rain Like Hammers – Writer/Illustrator: Brandon Graham
Reading
Wildwood – Writer: Colin Meloy, Illustrator: Carson Ellis
Crow Winter was engagingly written despite being slow-moving. It would offer a tasty bread crumb here and there that kept up my interest for a stretch, but unfortunately it simply got to a point where it was slow enough and didn’t pick up again in time, that it finally lost me. Graphic novel Rain Like Hammers was similar: Interesting setting, but without enough happening to keep me engaged long enough to see where it went. Slow burns are a tightrope walk between easing the story forward mixed with paced moments of intrigue along the way, and how they’re done aren’t going to be for everyone.
Time Salvager felt a bit heavy-handed with dropping the reader into the middle of a frenetic moment — that’s a standard tactic for writers, but here felt head-spinning — which also raised too many questions too fast for my tastes.
Like other Cory Doctorow books I’ve tried to get into, Attack Surface seemed to need me to know a lot more than I did about what was happening — here it was about digital system hacking — to really enjoy it. I couldn’t parse the specifics about what was done by whom to really appreciate the main character casually out-performing a rival. It struck me as well written but just over my head.
Wildwood, however, seems to be much more my speed. Yes, at first glance it seems like a subject for younger readers, but it’s 541 pages long — and I believe even at that, is one of a duology — which suggests it’s much more than a book for kids. And besides, I’ve long since realized that it’s completely okay to just like what you like, so hey…
As much as I say it, here it goes again: It would be great to actually get through a book next month. Here’s hoping Wildwood (and dare I say other books as well) keeps me coming back for more.