Now, on to the admission.
I'm giving up on a book.
No big deal, I know, but I don't do it often. I can normally make myself work through it. I feel every book deserves the chance to be finished.
Well, usually, that is. This is one of the exceptions:
Rhett Butler's People claims, on the cover, to be "The authorized novel based on Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind". Well, it may be the authorized novel but it wasn't the worthy novel. Not in my opinion, at least.
Gone With The Wind is an epic novel, spanning an intense, crazy time in American history. It is filled with characters and events you can't help but care about and root for. And that's the problem with McCaig's book - after reading 235 pages I still didn't care about the people. They were boring and lifeless. The writing was flat and lacked cohesiveness. And the two people I cared about the most in GWTW, Rhett and Scarlett, are absent from too much of the story.
So, I'm throwing in the towel on this one. It's 687 pages long and if I don't care about the characters after 235 of those pages, I'm not going to, no matter how much I wanted to.
Time to move on...
6 comments:
Oh...I'm sad you weren't liking this one--I really did! But, it's definitely worth it to give up on something you aren't enjoying instead of wasting your time!
Laura -
That's interesting and I have a question for you - didn't you find it a tad jumbled and confusing? I found myself having to go back and figure out who I was with several times. And one more question - do Rhett and Scarlett become more prominent later in the book? That might make me give it another try...
cjh
cj: considering how much reading we all do.. the fact that we give up on a book or two now and then is not surprising.. what is surprising is that we enjoy as many as we do!! We can't like "everything!"
DesLily -
That's certainly true. I think it's worse, somehow, to give up on a book we really wanted to like, you know?
cjh
I know that Laura really liked this one (as you can see above), but she's really the only one who I know that's read it. To be honest, I struggled with GWTW. It took me months to read it (partially because I started grad school right after beginning it), but I thought it was incredibly long winded. Sorry this one didn't do it for you, CJ, especially since you wanted to like it. But there's just not enough time to suffer through that many pages.
Trish -
I read GWTW a long time ago so I have no idea if I'd feel the same about it but I remember how amazing I thought it was, especially the scenes with Rhett and Scarlett!
I've moved on to another re-issue, this one by Andre Norton, who I love dearly. It's going much better.
cjh
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