Booking Through Thursday: Best

From Booking Through Thursday

What, in your opinion, is the best book that you haven’t liked? Mind you, I don’t mean your most-hated book–oh, no. I mean the most accomplished, skilled, well-written, impressive book that you just simply didn’t like.

Like, for movies–I can acknowledge that Citizen Kane is a tour de force and is all sorts of wonderful, cinematically speaking, but . . . I just don’t like it. I find it impressive and quite an accomplishment, but it’s not my cup of tea.

So . . . what book (or books) is your Citizen Kane?

This prompt took me a while to answer. I actually had to go back through my GoodReads library and look at the list of books I’ve read over the past few years. However, as soon as I saw it, I knew which book I’d pick: The Kite Runner.

I loved the first half of the book. I loved that it held my interest without big events happening every few pages. I loved that it focused on the ordinary life of the characters.

I did not love the second half of the book. I thought it got too fast, to the point that it no longer became believable to me. The careful development that I loved about the first half seemed to have been tossed out the window in favor of a high speed play-by-play of extreme events.

I stayed up until 4 in the morning to finish it, but more because I had to get it done. The emotional reactions I’d had to the characters in the first half were long gone, and I was essentially reading because I was curious how the book would end. I finished it, went “Wait…what?”, went to bed, and picked up a new book in the morning.

I know the book is well written, relevant, and probably more realistic than I might think. I know the rest of the world loved it. I thought I was going to love it, but I didn’t.