i went to the library on monday and picked out like 8 books. so far, all of them have sucked.

admittedly, some of my reasoning wasn’t fabulous in terms of selection criteria; i put far too much weight on the cover of a book sometimes, but i usually have a better record than this. i just can’t seem to get excited about anything i picked up.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman i grabbed after seeing the title on a Librarything group list and thinking: huh, that sounds cool. unfortunately it just made me go into super skim mode. never a good sign. the writing was incredibly pretentious and cumbersome (something i usually like, actually) but the diffuse and necessarily vague nature of the action in the story just made my brain snort in disdain.

The New York Trilogy i grabbed along with 2 other titles by Paul Auster because he is an author i KNOW i like having been a huge fan of other works of his. this is a trio of short stories about writing and detectives. eh. worst of all, he writes himself into the first of the three tales. i am NOT for that. ever. haven’t cracked the other two yet, just haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm after the first flop.

The Sot-Weed Factor i actually enjoyed the first chapter of, but now cannot find. whoops.

The Heretic is just necessarily going to require more effort. i really enjoy historical fiction, and am fascinated by all things theologica, but there’s nothing harder than sitting poolside and trying to drag oneself through a novel about the Spanish inquisition (which, nobody expects). the cognative dissonance was too much for me so i put it down in favor of more tanning oil. i’ll try taking this one to bed, see if that goes better. nothing else interesting happening there, that’s for sure.

i haven’t looked at the others in more than a passing way since i got them. for some reason i have the notion Willa Cather might be a downer, and the other one, i just haven’t gotten around to yet.