Saturday, January 23, 2021

BORNE by Jeff VanderMeer

Been thinking about this for a while, and yesterday I took a Slack poll at my day job, where I asked who finishes every book and who trashes a book if it's boring. I was the only one who voted that they try to finish every book they pick up, so I'm going to go back and drop books if they're lame. I did that back in the day but stopped because A) it felt like giving up, and B) I was speed-reading and giving up the book within 10% of its total page count. Part of the reason I'm dropping boring books is that I've found if I hate it, I'm then speed-reading from page 100 onwards, and months later I don't remember anything about it (Yun Ko-eun's The Disaster Tourist is an example of this).

Jeff VanderMeer's Borne is the first novel I'm returning to the library. I've given up on other books in the past several years, like Jasper Fforde's Early Riser and Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests, but Borne is the first one I'm giving up pretty early on. After reading 100 pages, I'll return it to the library on Monday. I saw Annihilation recently, a movie based on one of his books, and Borne is pretty much the same: the weird ideas distract from the overall story . . . weird is good but at a minimum.

No comments: