didn’t finish – Avanta Knits

When I first started this book, I really enjoyed it — the alternating viewpoints, the sly digs each young woman got in at her fellow students while proclaiming her own virtues, the different backgrounds of the girls. But somewhere around the 50% mark, the same things I enjoyed at the beginning started to annoy me. When I began to want to reach into the story and slap certain characters upside the head for their sheer pettiness and lack of sense, it was time to set the story down. I didn’t really care what happened to the girls, or their schoolmistresses, or the young man. I figure it was not a happy ending for him, because up to the point I laid the story down for good, he never got his own chapter to speak his piece. I may still watch the movie. This one might be the exception — where the movie is better than the book.

View all my reviews

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So, here’s the thing. I know this is supposed to be one of the seminal works of American literature, and blazingly funny to boot. And while I have no doubt Catch-22 will maintain its place in the canon regardless of anything I write, I found the whole thing quite tedious.

Perhaps that was Heller’s point: that war is tedious, that war doesn’t make sense, that the only way for a soldier to survive a war with sanity intact is to develop a sense of the absurd and act on it. But after 144 pages, I knew I didn’t care enough about Yossarian or any other character to follow the absurdity for another 300 pages.

Thus, a two-star rating simply because I didn’t care. No reflection on writing quality. Just bored with content.

View all my reviews