Dismantle My Bed

That’s right. Read it in high school. Didn’t love it.

Tried to read it again recently. Still didn’t love it.

In fact, not only do I not love this novel. In high school, I never got through it. I copied a friend’s homework when we had to fill out the reading sheets about the book.

This time around, I made it a lot further, but at roughly page 100 I started skimming.

I simply don’t find the old man’s battle with the sea and the great fish all that interesting.

Want to.

Don’t.

Americans have reading lists, as mentioned earlier. And the Bible tops that list. Man, do I wish I had written the Bible! Think of all of those sales I would be making. Instead, I did not write the Bible. No, I wrote another piece of fiction. And it is not selling nearly as well as the Bible. Even if I did get an order from Amazon last week for some copies.

After having enjoyed The Thief Lord rather a lot, I was looking forward to reading Cornelia Funke’s other novels.

First up, Inkheart.

Now, it isn’t that I disliked Inkheart. The idea behind it is actually quite genius. However, the execution, I felt was a bit lacking. There wasn’t a single character in the that I really loved, which sort of made what they went through a non-issue for me.

I’m halfway through Inkspell, and I still haven’t come to love them, with the exception of Farid, who is considerably more interesting in this book than he was in Inkheart.

The point is, when life and death comes knocking at these characters’ doors, I feel hollow. No baited breath, no sweaty palms or racing heart. I want to care, but I don’t.

To be fair though, English is not the language in which these novels were originally written, and a whole lot can be lost in translation.

…I read/started two young adult books, neither of which I loved.

The first one, You Don’t Know Me by David Klass, I read all the way through. I can’t say it was a book I thoroughly enjoyed. There were several things that I found incredibly annoying. However, there were two parts that were so brilliantly written that they actually made reading the whole book worthwhile. The first was when the main character, John, described the way that he saw his mother. The other was when John indulged in a father fantasy. Those two parts, I could have read again and again (especially the part about his mother).

The second book, If I Should Die Before I Wake, by Han Nolan, I admit I didn’t last long in. In general, it takes a lot to get me to give up on a book. I will skim to get to the good parts before I will determine it a lost cause and stop reading. This book, however, I quit about thirty pages in. I found nothing redeeming about it at all. I skimmed a little to see if I would happen upon something great, then I gave up and skipped to the end, just to make sure I wasn’t going to miss anything. When I did, I was glad I’d quit when I did.

The Da Vinci Code has some merits, though whether those merits are owed mostly to Dan Brown or to the men who accused him of stealing the ideas they put forth in their non-fiction book is debatable. Where the book has merit is in the storyline itself. As far as plot goes, it is, for the most part, intriguing. What The Da Vinci Code lacks, in my own personal opinion though, greatly overshadows what it has to offer. The writing is commonplace. The dialogue is cheesy. The characters are either devoid of human traits (Robert and Sophie are nearly perfect in every way) or are too over-the-top (everyone else in the novel). I found myself doing a fair amount of skimming while trying to get through this book, and I am not a skimmer.