I answered a meme the other day and one of the questions asked if I had ever "give up a book halfway in." How prescient. When I answered the question last week, I couldn't remember the last book I stopped reading. I do now. The Poe Shadow became tedious and boring. Two death blows to reading. I became uninterested in the search for the truth of Poe's death. And Quentin Clark, the protagonist was a weak character. He seemed to be misplacing his anger over his parents' death into finding out what really happened to Edgar Poe in the days leading up to his untimely death. Clark is searching for answers to death and since he couldn't find out what happened to his parents or why they had died, perhaps he could determine what happened to Poe. But 200 pages in and I'm giving up on his quest. I haven't picked up the book in a about four days and that tells me something.

At least it had this bookish passage. "It seemed as I read that God was dead to me, Quentin. Yes, it's that other world that I worry about for you-that world of books and bookmen who invade the minds that read them. That imaginary world. No, this is where you belong. These are your class, serious and sober people. Your society. Your father said that the idler and the melancholy man shall ever wander together in a moral desert."

If that is true that let us wander.

Now reading:
Lawrence Block Burglars Can't be Choosers