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Friday 1 August 2008

DNF

I am a very grumpy reader. I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of two books I really, really want to read. I also have a migraine. Now, if either of said books had arrived in the morning's mail, I would have had a very pleasant day popping painkillers and reading. As it is, I'm DNFing everything I come across. Here we go:

Beverly Lewis - The Crossroad: I read The Postcard on holiday last year and complained then that Lewis had employed one of my pet hates - dialect. Dialect is fine when it's one character's voice. Well. I still don't like it much but I can live with it. Unfortunately, Lewis allowed the Amish dialect to spill over into her own narration. It would have worked, perhaps, if the book were narrated by an Amish character, in the first person. I forgave Lewis for this when reading The Postcard (possibly because I was on holiday and therefore only had a limited number of books available?). So, just over a year later, I come to the sequel - The Crossroad. Unfortunately, I've read a lot of books since then and don't remember much from The Postcard. But I expected that there would be some overlap between the books and it'd all come flooding back to me. This wasn't the case. Lewis provides a few pages in the voice of one of the principal characters and then goes on with the story and there just weren't sufficient signposts for me. I felt all at sea, was irritated by the language and gave up. If I'd read the two books more closely together, I might have persevered. But I am as I am and life's too short. Especially when my head's thumping!

Jay E Adams - Christian Living in the Home: I'd already looked at this book and cast it aside but decided to make another attempt. I got a little further this time before learning that the author believes there's no such thing as mental illness (save for that caused by brain injury). As a sufferer of Atypical Bipolar Disorder who has now recovered from bad Church experiences (no, I'm not demon possessed ...) I decided to close the book at this point.

James D Berkley - Essential Christianity: This is a pleasant enough little book which aims to set out the tenets of Christianity in an easily digestable format. The author is a little patronising - I think he's just trying to hard to be friendly. As I'm already a Christian, I don't see the point in reading it.

Judith Miller - Whispers Along the Rails: I read the first in this series (In the Company of Secrets) some time ago. Unfortunately, I couldn't really interest myself in this instalment. The situation of a young woman becoming a kind of mystery shopper on the railways in the (I think) 19th Century didn't appeal to me although it's possible that I would enjoy this as a popcorn book at another time. For now, however, as I'm being ruthless I shall allow the book to find a new home.

2 comments:

Angie said...

Goodness, I sure hope those two books your anxiously awaiting hurry up and arrive! What are they?

I'm going to take a guess and say your probably not interested in the third book in the postcards from pullmen series. I'll just mooch it. :)

Hope your headache is gone.

Brooke from The Bluestocking Guide said...

I'm assuming that DNF is not a good rating cuz those books sound dreadful. I can feel the pain from here.

Why don't you drop by my blog for a bit.

http://web.me.com/bluestocking_bb