I remember an article a while back entitled “Everything Taking Too Long.” In it, people complained about the microwave not being as fast as it should be, a drive-thru taking precious extra minutes and pretty much everything mankind needed was getting in the way of what mankind wanted to be doing.
While I don’t disagree that the article maybe hit a little too close to home in this age of self-delusion and entitlement, I find there are times when things just take a little too long.
Take reading books as a key point. No not textbooks*, those awful things as insightful as they are give me the heebee jeebees.
I’m talking about the kind of book where you think it’ll be a great read and then you find yourself struggling and laboring to get through it. We’re talking about the kind of procrastination that makes doing your taxes look good.
The worst part is I’ve hit that with the last two books I’ve tried going through. Ask a friend and they’ll tell you that I can go through a book in 5 hours if I want, but my recent tackle, Boneshaker by Cherrie Priest might have been more painful than childbirth.
The annoying thing was the book promised so much. Airships, pirates, Steampunk and zombies. Instead, what it provided was a lot of random plots that loosely tied a besieged town together with no real meat and bones to it and a lackluster end. Worse the whole book was all about female empowerism. The rises and struggles of single parenthood. COME ON! I want brain-eating action and suspense out of my sci-fis.
Secondly, we come to my #2 author, Chuck Phalanuik’s latest tale in Tell-All. It’s an ambitious approach writing a screenplay format as a novel, but where it loses people is in the way it drops its adjectives and descriptions. If a normal person were to describe a cup of coffee as “hot,” Chuck goes through the excruciating effort of describing the same cup of coffee as catching Marilyn Monroe walking across a vent with her dress flying up.
That’s all fine and dandy considering most of the world knows who Monroe is, but he lists so many dang actors and actresses of a generation I completely missed out on that I’m reading IMDB.com more often than the pages of his book. It’s frustrating I tell you.
Either way, Boneshaker took me nearly six months to get through and if it wasn’t for the fact that there were times during a camping trip with nothing else to do, I might not have made it at all. It looks like Tell-All will be no different. Bullocks.
Has that ever happened to you?
I just bought my first Kindle book (more on that later) and I'm curious to finally take a crack at it. Hopefully it doesn't fall into the same kind of stagnation. To be warned I'm terrified of falling asleep on it and having a keyboard imprinted into my cheek or just breaking the dang thing.
I think there’s a couple of video games that I might have put on too hard of a difficulty setting and just said screw this too, I’m sure there’s more out there.
Ciao for now.
*Note I consider Great Expectations to be a textbook because it was what introduced me to the world of coffee. Not that I'm not grateful, but I had to read that book and do a summary chapter review the night before school started. All 50 gazillion chapters. Sure, I procrastinated, but still. That book is dead to me. I even almost gave up on Reading Rainbow. Almost.
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