Books I'm Not Reading

I blogged here about my reading list and about one of the books I wasn't reading (Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping) and why and now I have two more books from that trip to the library I'm not reading.

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris is supposed to be all the rage but you can have it. It's told in an annoying tense - "We were fractious and overpaid," etc., right up to the last sentences of the book, "We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me." - which I can't be bothered to look up but you get the idea. Like that for nearly 400 pages, I don't think so. The four or five pages I read had no sentence that stuck out beyond the sentence's tense. Writing that calls attention to itself is bad writing.

So I moved on to Ian McEwan's Saturday with great hope but by the end of page three, the protagonist was still waking up and looking out his window on the morning of the day of the book's title. Yawn. Sorry, pal. Have to leave you greeting the dawn.

I'm now on Lawrence Block's Hit and Run. It's great fun. Block has a smooth, clean prose style and the genre lends itself to getting right to the heart of the matter: the hit man of this series is stuck in a far away state, suspected of assassinating a popular governor. He has to get back home and solve the mystery and clear himself and, well, you know the rest of it. Just sit back and let a master work.