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No no no no no!

As in hell no I didn’t finish it! I made it through a third of the book but I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was right up there with a root canal—maybe worse, because it required intense concentration. A fascinating book that sadly was unreadable for me.

I feel bad I’m bad-mouthing this book. First 60 pages, I was on my knees worshiping this author for being such a freakin�� genius. The sentences, oh the sentences: Unique, twisted, revealing, stunning. The writing was very stylized and I loved the style: Intricate, personal, clever, unusual, spot on (it’s very hard to describe the power of the writing). The first sentence of the book is killer good. And there was psychology, oh how I love psychology. I got yanked inside the author’s head, a hostage to her off-kilter way of thinking. Hot diggity! I was forced to let go of my way of looking at the world and I bought into hers. I did have to concentrate hard, but I didn’t care because I was enjoying myself so much. I can’t stress how much all of this was working. I held tight to her vision…until all the sudden the rubber band burst and the magic was gone. Kaput. The sentences that had seduced me now confused me and annoyed me. No connection anymore, zilch.

So what the hell happened? Too much politics, too much philosophy (which always makes my head spin). My theory is that the author indulged herself and wrote every single word that came into her head. She analyzed everything to death. This led to long paragraphs about ideas (sacrificing dialogue and plot), with many abstract thoughts and compound words, all in a row without room for a breath, plus a zillion commas. (Sort of like I’m doing here, oh god no!)

As I went from complaining to being pissed off, I realized that I would have loved this if it were a short story. I could have sustained that concentration for a shorter amount of time. To have to endure 300-plus pages of this thick pea soup, which became unpalatable to this pea brain, no way.

It was just too friggin�� dense and there were too many tangents. I had to reread and reread sentences until I had severe brain pain. This writer, she could take a spec on a wall and write a whole complicated treatise on it. Questions that kids think of, like why is the sky blue, actually launches the author into analyzing just that, in painful detail. (If I were a kid, I would run away to play in my sandbox.) Granted, it’s not a simple question but you don’t have to make it a Ph.D. thesis either. At first I was having a ball, such a cool subject, but as she droned on about it, I changed my tune.

I started realizing that I was dreading picking up this book and I thought: Root canal. This is like a root canal. But a root canal would be over sooner. Hey, I told myself, I can end this root canal this minute and simply stop reading. I can make it shorter than a root canal, damn straight I can! (Wouldn’t it be fun to walk out in the middle of a root canal—and suffer no consequences?) And thus I did what I seldom do, and especially with a book I was absolutely loving at first—I ditched it. This gave me both relief and distress. Was I just too stupid to understand it all? Were the sentences readable to my smart friends but too dense for my lesser brain? I decided it didn’t matter. I read for pleasure, and this had swerved into the torture category.

Oh, you probably want to know what this book is about. It’s told in first person by an 18-year-old girl in Belfast in the 1970s, during the time of war. No one has names, only nicknames. For example, she refers to her boyfriend as her “almost boyfriend.�� There’s a stalker who she calls the milkman, and there’s another stalker named Somebody McSomebody, and a few other players who she refers to in funny ways. I thought the name thing was clever. The main character is the subject of gossip and she is criticized because she walks and reads. You really get the sense of war and the accompanying fear. Unfortunately, the author’s self-indulgent tangents take us away from the characters and the plot.

Oh, and a warning: There’s a dead animal scene that I could have done without. I don’t know why the author went there. Gross and upsetting.

This book won an award, it did indeed. I think the judges considered it great art but didn’t think about how it fared as literature—whether it was accessible, whether the plot and characters popped out like they should. Because I think it failed.

The final thought before I gave up: This thing will take me two months to read, and life is too short. So many books out there that will make me shiver. Get me the hell out of the dentist’s chair!