I'm going to start something I like to call "Tried But Failed." The point of this page is pretty self explanatory: out of the many books I read each year and review about whether I liked or hated them, there are any number of books I have started hoping to enjoy, tried to get into, and then just given up for one reason or another.
Welcome to "Tried But Failed" where I tell you why I tried (i.e. what the book is about) and why it failed when I decided to give up on the book. My intention is for people to see these books and either find out what I have to say and save themselves from reading them because of the reasons I state, or to give them a shot and prove me totally wrong, in which case they should e-mail me at: alex@alexctelander.com. And now for the first "Tried But Failed" . . .
THE PHYSICIAN BY ANN BENSON (November 28th, 2006 release): The plot line of this book really appealed to me, which was why I got hold of an advance reader edition with high hopes, sadly they did not pan out. This is one of those books that has two seemingly separate stories that are inextricably linked together in some way. Our key element here is plague; in one story you have a post-apocalyptic world where plague has wiped out a good percentage of the human race with straggling survivors checking the air every now and then to see if the plague has gone, only to discover new strains of another plague released by someone; in the other story we are in fifteenth century Europe where the Bubonic plague is tearing through the continent, and for our main characters we have the royalty of France and England, as well as a young fellow named Chaucer.
I got through 119 pages of this book and I always figure (depending on the book) that once you get to the hundredth page of a book, whatever is supposed to have got you interested should've hooked you by now. Sadly this book was just going nowhere really with the different character lines, and while a link had been shown through a diary from the character of the Middle Ages in possession of the character in the post-apocalyptic future, it was still weak, and the story wasn't moving along fast enough for me. I guess if I'd given it another hundred pages, I would've discovered more plot to the story, possibly enough to keep me reading to the end, but reading takes time, which I don't have a lot of these days. And if there's anything I've discovered in working in a bookstore for four years, it's that there are a hell of a lot of books out there demanding to be read, and more keep getting published every week! Nevertheless, if the book receives rave reviews and lots of amazing tales on the Amazon.com page of how people liked it, at some point in the future I may squeeze it into my reading schedule. For now, I move on to other and better books, in my opinion.
TRANSMETROPOLITAN BY GARTH ENNIS:This is a comic book series that ran in the mid nineties and has been out and revered by many (mostly men) for quite a while now; I’ve also had it recommended by various people (all men) on multiple occasions. About a month ago I managed to download all the issues and start reading it.
It’s a very interesting doomed future where everything is overdone and to the extreme, in the vein of Blade Runner. I found this fascinating and the art is done in a colorfully garish style, with an immensity of detail which, while it didn’t mean much to me because they were references to the overall story, I enjoyed picking out and studying. In total I read about 15-20 issues, I don’t remember exactly how many. While the characters were interesting in their weird and out of the ordinary ways, after this number of issues they didn’t go anywhere; there was little to no development and it was just wasn’t holding my interest. As for the stories being told issue to issue, while some made me think, for the most part the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere also. As I read on, I couldn’t help but feel I was reading something written in an effort to be like Sin City; the more I read, the more I felt this was the case, with the graininess of the story and the rough and obtuse moods of the characters, not to mention the portrayal of women in this comic. And it was then I decided I didn’t want to read this anymore.
