"I couldn't finish that book either."

I’ve had a disappointing run with books the last few weeks, starting one, then another and another, and putting them down because they just didn’t hold my interest.

Why does that happen?

What is it that allows us to enter some books and live in them from beginning to end but bars entrance to others?

I often love Sigrid Nunez’s books but her Covid novel, The Vulnerables, left me cold. I’m listening to Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, another Covid novel, which I like okay. Her writing is gorgeous, as usual, and Meryl Streep is the reader. I could listen to her forever. But, for me, the story lacks tension and the family of girls is a bit saccharine.  

I could not get into Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch at all.  Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren and Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience, books that sounded really interesting—weren’t. Same, though in a different way, with Tom Crew’s The New Life—in which the lives of two gay men’s lives and careers are jeopardized by the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde. But I read and read and read and read very graphic accounts of their sexual exploits, waiting for the arrest and trial and the real story—and finally gave up.

I love books about friendship and enjoyed the first half of Best of Friends by Kamila , the story of two fourteen-year-old Pakistani girls just beginning to realize what life’s going to be like for them if they stay in Karachi. Then, boom. They’re grown up, living in London, astronomically (not quite believably) successful and...who cares?

Not that other readers shouldn’t give any or all of these books a try. They just didn’t work for me.

In any case, all this casting off of novels made me remember Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Everyone was talking about it but I hated it. Then I was at the library one day, looking for an audio book to listen to on a long trip, and finding nothing on the cd shelf that interested me, checked out The Shipping News because...it was there.

I was completely enthralled. I wanted to keep driving, listening forever.

Maybe, this time around, I was in the right frame of mind for the story. Maybe it was hearing it instead of reading it. The reader was good, I remember that.

Maybe I’ll come back to one of the books that didn’t speak to me this winter and find it opening itself, telling me something I didn’t need to know until that moment.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to a few cozy, quiet days in northern Michigan this weekend, perfect for reading.

So, stay tuned.

Surely, a novel will open up to me while I’m there, compelling me to write, “You absolutely have to read this book!

(Picture snow)