Books I didn’t read in 2008

Another resolution for this year is to be more selective about what I put on my To Read list. I’ve heard way too many interviews with engaging raconteurs, only to find that they gave away all the interesting stuff in the interview. And yet it’s really hard to totally give up on authors that I’ve [...]

Soul Music

Sadly Soul Music was the first Terry Pratchett book that was long enough for me to invoke the 150 page rule. I wanted to like this book, but I couldn’t.

Sly Mongoose

I’ve been having a terrible run of luck with fiction the last week, none of them worth talking about, though I was tempted to take a picture of the stack of books I could barely start that went back to the library. To some degree, I managed to break that streak with some kickass [...]

Matter

Usually I enjoy Iain M. Banks, so I was excited to see him return to the Culture with Matter. I was not so excited to see how thick it was. I was even less excited to plow through palace politics with a lost heir, an evil vizier, a naïve prince, and a superhuman warrior sister [...]

Accelerando

I’m about to insert one large grain of salt into the 150 page rule. (Ouch.) The rule sounds generalized, but the results are individualized. There are books I can’t finish that you may love. Take Accelerando, by Charles Stross. Please.

Lunar Park

One of the books that helped me establish my 150 page rule was Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis. And that despite an enjoyable first chapter / preface. In a oh-look-metafiction way, the opening purports to recount, in first person, Bret’s carreer up to the great splash of American Psycho . Now, I don’t know [...]

The Collapsium

When you’re reading something that’s so aggressively bad it makes your stomach hurt, it’s no great act of courage to invoke the 150 page rule. But when the book merely fails to entertain you, you can only set it aside with a twinge of regret. For example, I’m sorry that I gave up on The [...]

Fat Fantasy

I formulated the 150 page rule as self-defense against fat fantasy novels. You know who I mean. I was pretty sure I was going to hate them, but lots of people love them. How bad could they be? So I tried to give them a chance, I really did. And my reactions were nearly as [...]

The 150 Page Rule

Somehow we get it into our head that if we pick up a book to read for pleasure, we have a moral obligation to finish it. That’s ridiculous. For starters, if a published book doesn’t grab you on the first page, don’t take it home. If that seems too draconian, you can also invoke [...]