False Starts

There are lots of books out there, so I guess it shouldn't be such a surprise when I don't like a lot of them. After dropping The Land of Green Plums, I started a book by Paul Auster and Tempting Faith DiNapoli, by Lisa Gabriele. Both of them sounded promising--one is an account of a man who wakes up in a cell and can't remember who he is or what he's doing there, and the other is a not-too-sweet memoir of a Catholic childhood--but both became a chore to read. Maybe I was turned off by the suffering in the stories. However, the book I've currently settled on, What is the What by David Eggers, is about one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, certainly not a light story of good times. Maybe it's the stakes. In the books I dropped, the suffering seemed to be an internal dilemma of achieving happiness. In my current book, the suffering is escaping lions and militia men with machine guns. It's a lot easier to be gripped by stories of boys getting eaten by lions than by a girl facing 1950's social demands. Also, Eggers's writing is witty and quick, and the story jumps from the present day to reminisces of the main character's life in Sudan, so there are short anecdotes. However, right now, there are philosophical ramblings which are getting a bit long. When is a shark going to come along and eat somebody? When is somebody going to be thrown in a pit of rats?