It is not often that I will actually put down a book for good. I mean, I have never finished — don’t hold this against me — The Lord of the Rings. I’ve read Fellowship probably five times and Two Towers three times, but I’ve never read Return of the King. I just get bored. I almost didn’t finish The Once and Future King, but I powered through. Dune was another rough one.  Not too long ago I posted about the First Law Trilogy that I waded through. There are books that I have put down, a number of them in fact, but I usually go back eventually and finish. I swear, I will read Return of the King before I die.
But there are rare books that I have put down and never intend to go back to. Recently I’ve run into two and both of them have to do with the writing itself, not the subject matter. The first was Working for the Devil by Lilith Saintcrow. The story itself is something I would be interested in, and I’ve actually heard good things about the series, however, the author decided that her main character’s profession would be called a “necromance”. Even now my spell checker is telling me that I’ve dropped an “r” off the end. For whatever reason, she went with this spelling, and it bugs the crap out of me. It happens just often enough in the text that it pops me out of the story and back into myself where I commence screaming “ER! ER! NecromancER!” I had a similar problem when reading Dead Witch Walking about that author’s choice to make up her own swear words, but I was able to gloss over that. For some reason this use of “necromance” is something I just couldn’t get past.
More recently I made a stab at reading James Patterson’s The Dangerous Days of Daniel X. At first, the description of a superhero book sounds like it would be right up my alley. However, I might have skipped it had I read the red box on the inside back flap of the cover. It reads:
In the spirit of the most enduring hit movies and books, James Patterson has written this story for readers from ten to a hundred and ten. Special care has been taken with the language and content of The Dangerous Days of Daniel X.
I’ve read a number of Patterson’s books, but mostly his more adult murder mystery stuff. Going into this book with that mindset I was terribly disappointed and felt like I was being talked down to. The story itself was interesting enough, but the simplicity of the language intended to be good reading for kids as young as ten just left me with an odd feeling. I can’t say for sure that I’ve put this book down for good, but I definitely probably won’t pick it up again until I have a ten year old to read it with, either as a bedtime story or something we share and discuss.
So… have you ever put down a book? Why?