Abandonment Issues

Abandoned Japanese Theme Park

 This is a semi-regular feature where I confess to the books I've abandoned.

Moonlight in Odessa by Janet Skeslien Charles (from LibraryThing Early Reviewers).  Sadly I did not find this book humorous or entertaining.  It felt like a slog and I thought, "Nope, not doing this."  So I didn't.  I just couldn't find a way to care about the travails of the main character and the sense of place wasn't clear enough to suit me.  Honestly, this book could've taken place anywhere and I found that very disappointing.  Too much chick lit, not enough novel.

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton (from the publisher).  This book has all the elements that should make a really good, entertaining read.  There's a decrepit and decaying English country house falling into ruin around three sisters, one of whom is quite mad.  There's the story of their family and how the mad sister got that way.  And there's the story of a mother and daughter trying to bridge the gap between them.  Sounds great, right?  For me, not so much.  First, this book is HUGE which means it's a pain in the ass to lug around, read in bed, etc.  If the book is really good I don't mind huge (I recently re-read a 931 page tome that I carried around with me for a week), but if it's huge just to be huge I have a ... well ... huge problem.  This just wasn't engaging enough for me and there was too much set up without any real punch.  I neither liked nor cared about anyone in the book and was still unengaged around page 250 (which in many instances is the length of a full novel - that's about 1/3 of the way into this one).  The whole thing just became one big chore of needing to lug around the book and dreading to read it.  I read the Wall Street Journal on BART to avoid having to read this and that means I'm really done.  Cool cover, though.

Now that that's over with I can get on with my reading life.