Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Abandoning books

When do you give up on reading a book? That’s happened to me twice recently.

The easier of the two was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, edited by James B. South. I thought this might be, y’know, “interesting” but the stuff I read in the first third or so of the book are really just term papers: dry and laborious explications of a thesis that should only take a paragraph or so. The Buffy stuff is mostly irrelevant to the papers (most definitely not essays) and it’s amusing to see one writer faulting Whedon for not following through on the philosophical theme properly. Better watch that Joss. Anyway there’s a slim chance I may skim the remainder of the book someday but we know that won't actually happen.

A tougher call is Halldor Laxness’ Iceland’s Bell. Kevin got me interested in the recent Vintage reissues of Laxness and when this showed up at my library I snagged it. This novel wasn’t what I was expecting. Guess I thought it would be some wild, quasi-folk tale sort of book but instead it’s a fairly stark tale of peasantry with a dark and grim (but not unwelcome) sense of humor that might almost passed unnoticed. After about a hundred pages it just hasn’t grabbed me which may not be the book but in any case it’s about to go back to the library.