I’m pairing these two lackluster books here because although very different (a paperback romance and a non-fiction expose), they were alike in 1) that they’ve been in my TBR for years; 2) I finally started to read them; and 3) I did not finish either. I’m usually a fairly strict book finisher, even if it’s a hate-read (Faulkner, I’m looking at you). With these two, I realized that my hate-finish policy was not assisting me- my TBR pile is too big to read books I’m not enjoying. At more than 100 pages into each of these, I realized that I just wasn’t getting anything out them- so I closed them up and moved onward to books I would enjoy more. Here’s what didn’t work for me:
- I Like it Like That by Claire Calman
I like a good light romance novel every so often- they’re a frothy blender margarita on a beach, and a good balancer when real life gets too hard or heavy. Given that I read romance for pure pleasure, I want to like the characters and vicariously go through the roller coaster of emotions with them. Neither of those was happening here- I made it through nearly half of this bloated novel (500+ pages) without any emotional attachment, and instead a building annoyance with the main character. The plot here is not novel: Georgia is a type A therapist who is in a long engagement with a man who is safe but boring. Leo is a laid back neighbour who literally crashes into her life and upends her plans to marry Mr. Boring. I wouldn’t mind the basic plot if things had moved along a little quicker and the main character wasn’t as grating. At 260 pages, all Calman had given her reader was one mediocre make-out session, and no promise of things heating up soon. Instead, she slowed it down again with a return to long passages about how Georgia couldn’t possibly really like Leo, it was just her engagement jitters, or work frustrations or …. zzzzzzzz. Way too slow for my romance reading tastes- I’ll be avoiding Calman romances going forward.
- The World According to Monsanto by Marie-Monique Robin (Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/World-According-Monsanto-Marie-Monique-Robin/dp/1595587098)
I initially expected that I was going to love this book- not only am I a fan of a good expose documentary, but I grew up on a family farm where there were lots of opinions about Monsanto, none of them good. I am the target audience! Once I started reading, my excitement rapidly faded. Robin is incapable of presenting a neutral exploration of the facts- her language drips with anti-Monsanto sentiment in every sentence and she sets up arguments from the presumption that Monsanto is evil. In addition to the way Robin framed her arguments, when she tried to back up her conclusions with evidence she didn’t do it neatly- her support was jumbled and hard to follow and meant I didn’t feel like I was getting the hard facts necessary to support such sweeping conclusions. I strongly suspect that Robin is right on her presumption of Monsanto’s evilness, but I want a documentary to show me, not tell me, and that wasn’t happening here. I’ll wait until Michael Lewis takes an interest in exposing Monsanto and read that book instead.
CBR11 Bingo- Reading the TBR
