This afternoon I’m drinking wine – a crisp dry chardonnay – and thinking about books I just didn’t think were that great.
You know the kind. The Guardian raved about it, it’s a best seller. Everyone’s reading it.
The Finkler Question springs to mind immediately. Maybe it was too highbrow for me. Maybe I wasn’t the target audience. Maybe I’m not terribly attuned to Jewish humour.
Maybe maybe maybe. The bottom line is I found very few of the characters likable or interesting. This is what happens when I think I’m clever enough to read anything that made the Man Booker list.
The second book that springs to mind is actually two books (basically because in my head they’re the same book).
The Girl on the Train and The Luckiest Girl Alive.
The Girl on the Train was touted as the next Gone Girl. And it had potential. It really did. Except three quarters of the way, it veered off the tracks, becoming predictable and lacklustre.
The Luckiest Girl on the other hand, was well written but my God the main protaganist is just a very unlikable piece of work who never really gets an opportunity to redeem herself in the eyes of the reader. Ugh.
And rounding out this trifecta is the hefty tome – The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair. Now you may or may not have heard of this novel, but translated from it’s original French (translated into 32 languages in fact) it won a bunch of prizes, selling 2 million copies in one year.
Yadda yadda blah blah. Maybe it reads better in French. Maybe it loses some of it’s flare in translation. Arrgh, who knows. All I know is that at one point I did start to wonder if a highschool English student had written it.
No finesse. And nothing special. C’mon Frenchy, wow us!!
That’s it for now. I’m sure as I drink more wine, more will spring to mind.
Have you read any of these novels? What did you think? Am I being too harsh, or am I on the money (I am really, you know it’s true)?
What others would you add?
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