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his post started out as a full review of the book I just read. Not quite a pan, although the review was definitely going to be focused more on the things I didn’t like about the book than the things that I did like. And about halfway through the post it occurred to me that I really have nothing to gain by shitting on a book that, again, I mostly liked except for the part where I didn’t. I interact with the author on Twitter from time to time and he’s an entertaining guy; making myself look clever by tearing into his book seems more than a little unnecessary. But I still want to write about it, so I’m just going to do this instead. I’m not going to name the book, but the picture is a clue and there are ways on the Internet to figure out what I’ve been reading lately if you’re really curious.
Here’s the problem: The book is good until it isn’t, and the place where it abruptly becomes not-good is literally the last page of the book, and the not-goodness occurs in such a way as to throw every problem with the first couple hundred pages of the book into sharp and stark relief. I finished the book before going to sleep last night, and I damn near tossed it across the room after reading the last page. I finished the thing, thought “My God, that was dumb,” thought about it some more, realized that the idea of what had happened was actually pretty clever but that the execution of it was abominable, and then literally mentally walked myself through the entire rest of the book going “Yeah, that was a problem too, wasn’t it?”
One paragraph literally screwed up my opinion of the entire rest of the book, by throwing my brain out of story-enjoying mode and into writer-editor mode. There are plenty of people who read everything with an editor’s eye; my wife is one of them. It’s a perfectly acceptable way to read fiction; I just don’t happen to read that way. But once my brain gets shifted into writer-editor mode, it’s nearly impossible to get it out of that, and I’m going to go at the rest of your book in a sort of God this could be so much better if… mode that I really don’t like doing my pleasure reading in. And this was timed in the worst possible place, where it retroactively poisoned my entire opinion of the book.
Has this ever happened to you? Has the ending of a book ever screwed up your opinion of the rest of it? Because right now if people ask me about this book, I have to say “Read it, but ignore the last chapter.” And I don’t want to do that.
(Don’t say Skylights. Please don’t say Skylights.)
(Actually, go ahead and say Skylights if Skylights did that to you. But be aware that I will cry.)
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating, because I don’t imagine y’all actually memorize my posts or anything: part of the reason that these recaps run the day before a new episode airs is that I am a cord-cutter. I get The Walking Dead through iTunes, meaning that I pay $45 or whatever it is at the beginning of the season and then I watch the shows a day later than everyone else. I can’t watch a new episode before Monday night unless my wife and I get up godawful early in the morning (which, I’ll admit, we’ve done a couple of times) and so it’s just not possible to get a post up before Tuesday, at which point we may as well wait until Saturday.
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