This is a very apropos post for today. I’ve been stuck at home sick in bed all weekend, so really all I’ve been able to do is read. I finished Atlantia pretty quickly, and started on the next book for the readathon–Winter’s Tale.
I did not get very far. You know how, every once in awhile, you’ll pick up a book where the voice just doesn’t resonate with you? This was one of those books. It was really noiresque, kind of that macho Dick Tracy voice. Except the point of reference was a horse, not a man. It was very strange. After 20 pages, I was done. It drove me crazy, and I had no interest in the horse or the idiot running away from the “short tails.”
The next book on the list was a free Kindle read that I had downloaded forever ago: The Protector by Gennita Low. This was one I just wanted to cycle through my TBR list, maybe it’ll be good maybe it won’t. It wasn’t. It was SUPPOSED to be a romance novel about a Navy SEAL saving young girls from the sex trade. That was a tiny part of it, but really it was so misogynistic and nasty I had to throw it away. I couldn’t imagine how she was going to take it from “I hate women and you can’t be a part of my mission because you’re female and get out of my life.” to “Oh, I love you let’s have sex.” And the sex scenes that were IN the book already between a different couple were near rape. It was pretty disgusting. I’ve read a lot of romance novels, but never anything like this. The writing itself was terrible to begin with, and everything the writing was about…no way.
I hate not finishing books, especially during challenges, and it’s even worse when I don’t finish two in a row, so I was really frustrated yesterday. But, sometimes you have to give up and move on. I started Middlesex last night, which I is a reread for me that I didn’t finish last time. But, I read it back when it first came out in 2002 and would have been a sophomore in high school. I’m reading it from a very different perspective now. I’m also reading it for a book club so I’ll at least finish it, whether I like it or not.
As I Lay Reading 