Susan Jacoby - Freethinkers, A History Of American Secularism. From colonial times to the present, how "freethinkers" (anti-authoritarians, the irreligious, secularists) have shaped American history.
Well, I generally don't really like history books, so I should have known better than to get into this one. I gave it a try anyway, and I made it up to the 1920's! But in the end, I just couldn't read any more minutia - knowing when this or that meeting took place, or when some minor radicals issued their proclamation seems unimportant to me.
Don DeLillo - Libra. It's a semi-fictionalized history of the JFK assassination. Basically, a handful of former/fringe CIA agents are determined to get the US into a confrontation with Fidel Castro, so they design a plot to make it happen. They need a pro-Cuba patsy (Oswald) to take a shot at JFK (and they want him to miss); and they need a convincing paper trail to lead the inevitable investigators from their guy back to Cuba. So, they get it all in motion - and then I gave up.
DeLillo weaves real people and actual events and popular conspiracy theories into his fiction. But I don't know all the history around the assassination, and I constantly felt like it might be a lot more interesting if I did. Since I lack that background, the book had to stand on its own. And it didn't. DeLillo's writing is both terse and overwrought - it's pencil sketches in some places, and splashes of garish color in others. He tells us that the smallest of events are momentous, but I grew tired of taking his word for it. He jumps around in time and place, to various scenes and an ever-growing list of under-drawn characters, and I found it impossible to give a shit about any of them. Only the sections on Oswald - nearly the only person in the story who seems subject to events outside his control, and who isn't a mustache-twirling conspirator - managed to hold my interest at all. Oswald is the only character in the book who feels real, and the only one who elicits any sympathy. But, he's Lee Harvey Oswald, so you can't really root for him, you just get to understand him.
DeLillo gave himself a tough challenge here: write a fictional story to which everyone already knows the ending, with the real life antagonist in the role of anti-hero. Sadly, neither his prose, nor his story's structure were compelling enough for me to put in the effort to get to the end.
Meh.
How about you: give up on any dull books lately?
Yeah, a bunch… all ones that I started out loving and midway through began to lose their appeal. Let’s see, most recently abandoned are Antigua vida mía by Marcela Serrano, El siglo de las sombras by Juan Luís Cebrián, La culpa by Antonio Dal Masetto.
Hmm, I think I’m probably more apt togive up on a dull Spanish language book just because of the higher effort/page.