For posterity I’d like to quickly record my “I Quit”s of the 2011 (I’m fairly confident the books I’ll still read this year will be good ones – I chose them most particularly). They’re only five in over 80, which is a pretty good number, but I probably should have been tougher with others I managed to finish.

The Exception by Christian Jungersen

Chosen by my bookclub in March. That was also the month when I quit my corporate job to work for a small NGO. It involved some risks and a significant pay-cut, some people around me were foreseeing doom, so it wasn’t the best time to read about psychological bullying among a group of women in a small Danish NGO.

 

 

 

 

Highland Fling by Katie Fforde

I was in the mood for a bit of fun, so picked this one up. When boy meets girl they take an instant disliking for one another (he actually tells her to “shut the f**k up” in the middle of a really silly argument), while at the same time they feel the sexual tension yada-yada-yada. What’s new? That’s when I stopped reading and put on the You’ve Got Mail DVD.

 

 

 

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah E. Harkness

I could have handled the endless sessions of vampire yoga and even the descriptions of the hero’s clove smell every other paragraph. What I couldn’t handle was how a confident, smart, resourceful, rational heroine gets transformed into a fragile being in need of protection, just days after meeting The Vampire She Can’t Resist Although She Tries.

 

 

 

 

Solar by Ian McEwan

This was the toughest to let go. McEwan wrote Atonement, which shook my literary world and I’m still determined to read everything he’s ever written, but had a hard time with Solar. It was lying around the house for months with the bookmark roughly in the middle. I read a few pages here, a few pages there, but never really connected with the book, so in the end decide to wait for more auspicious times.

 

 

 

 

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler

You can read my rant thoughts here.