Why didn’t anyone tell me…

There are a few books I’ve read since I last blogged. And here’s something I don’t do often enough: I stopped reading midstream. That’s right, I gave up on a couple of these books. Gasp! The horror!

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. While I appreciate that this may have been the launch of modern True Crime books, the fact is that we see twice as hard on CSI three times a day with new seasons being cranked out in triplicate even now. The wandering nature of the narrative is distracting and plainly annoying to a modern reader. This is a book that time has outdated. I appreciate that it may have been groundbreaking, but now it’s just broken. Uninteresting and slow with no apparent direction. Please everyone, run out to your local store and demand they stop selling this disaster of a book. Send it back to the ’50s where it belongs.
Also given up on:
Bridge of Sighs. At first it opens like a guy going to recount a story about a trip to Italy, to tell about his life in context of life in a small New York town, then it suddenly jumps to him getting locked into a trunk in the woods by a bunch of bullies and him listening to drunk people having sex, and the life of a spoiled artist in Venice. What happened? After a quarter of the book and nothing really going anywhere, it was ejected. There were clearly 2 stories going on, but I just didn’t care enough about either of them to waste more time on it. 1 point for the old man narrative, -1 for the artist, -1 for jumping around. Shame on you Russo. Reel us in and keep us, don’t try to make Memento a book.