February Reads and Do You DNF?

I read at a much slower pace than usual in February, mostly because I started reading The Power by Naomi Alderman, which I really disliked, but then I got too far in to abandon it.

And being too far in to abandon it, did I then race through to the end to try to get it over with? No I did not. I just stopped reading in general because I didn't want to keep reading The Power, and again, I felt too far in to give up, and I can't read two books at once any more because YAY MENOPAUSE BRAIN.

So this begs the question -- do you DNF?

DNF -- do not finish -- is apparently a reader term of art that I had never heard of until social media. It means exactly what it sounds like -- abandoning a book mid-read.

I don't know why this concept is so difficult for me. I walk out of plays at intermission. I've been known to walk out on films. I abandon TV series mid season and often mid-episode. But books? That's really never been my thing.

However, having already pointed out that I am deep in my midlife -- time runs short to waste precious minutes on books you have zero interest in, or even passionately dislike with a burning fever.

That's how I felt about The Power -- it had an interesting hook but the muddled the message in a big way and I really disliked the ending, which I resented not just because it was annoying in a million ways but because I killed weeks -- airplane rides, even, perfect excuses to read -- NOT READING, just because I didn't want to read that book.

But apparently it was a big hit when it was published ten years ago so what do I know? Maybe you'll like it.

However, my new rule is if I make it through the first 25% of a novel -- essentially, the first act -- and it's just not doing it for me, into the Goodwill box it goes.

Life is too short.

Eventually I finished hate reading The Power and turned to two shorter and much more enjoyable novels, Vera, Or Faith by Gary Shteyngart, and Vigil, by George Saunders.

I had high hopes for both books.

I loved Shteyngart's COVID book, Our Country Friends, and I was excited to see what he did next. Vera, Or Faith, is that book. It's very enjoyable -- our 10-year old heroine is compelling, the broken country she is living in (like ours but just a bit more overtly broken) totally believable given our own America, but for me, the plotting went a little bit off the rails and I found myself reading reviews of the this book elsewhere to try to wrap my head around what Shteyngart was doing. I got a lot of insight his references to Nabakov and other interesting tidbits, from the critics, but I strongly believe that if you can only truly understand a work of art through the lens of critics, it hasn't quite done it's job. Still, it was a super fun read, and I read the final sequence a couple of times because I couldn't quite believe what I was reading.

Vigil is another novel I've been waiting for since Saunder's extraordinary Lincoln In The Bardo, which is one of the best books I have read in the last five or ten years. It's just astonishing. (Seriously if you haven't read it you should click that link and buy it right now. It may change your life, that's how good it is.)

Vigil is less astonishing, but it's a quick and interesting read, and Saunders does a lovely job, as he always does, building whole new worlds in every paragraph. There is nothing to fault in the way he writes, sentence to sentence. The subject matter, however, left me a little cold. The premise concerns a powerful oil baron on his deathbed, who is visited by a number of ghosts who want to usher him kindly to his death or force him to repent all he wrought on the world during his career. I enjoyed the prose, but for a really excellent take on our climate crisis and who is to blame, and how we have all sort of rolled over and let it happen, read Mobility by Lydia Kiesling. I think about the Kessler book all the time, just as I think about Lincoln in the Bardo often. Vigil is not going to stick with me as either of those books do.

Onward we go to March!

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