Book Reviews - Books I Couldn't FinishPick an author or just scroll at leisure.
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Saul Bellow
Herzog
There's something to be said for stylistic virtuosity, but when it's employed at this level of density one has to wonder if there's any substance underneath it. Exhausted, I didn't hang around long enough to find out.
A S Byatt
The Virgin in the Garden
Well-written and as dull as dishwater. Byatt's compulsion to describe every detail of every scene in undiscriminating detail, without any sense of poetry or purpose, slows the action to a snail's pace and had me closing the book a final time before 100 pages were up.
E M Forster
A Room with a View
A young middle class woman goes to Florence with her straight-laced guardian, and meets a couple of unconventional English blokes. That's as far as I got.
I didn't expect this early novel by Forster to be up to the standard of "A Passage to India", but I wasn't prepared for anything quite so slight and insipid. Forster seems to aspire to the wit of Jane Austen and the (for want of a better word) sophistication of Henry James, but his sense of comedy is weak and let's face it, even if he'd succeeded in sounded like James the book wouldn't have been any better.
John Gribbin
Science: A History
A selective history of science that concentrates on potted biographies of key scientists rather than attempting to trace themes or a coherent narrative across the ages.
The things that really put me off this book were its superficiality and the patronising casualness of the style: it read like something designed to win over reluctant GCSE students, rather than being aimed at adult readers with a genuine curiosity about, and enthusiasm for the subject.
John Harrison
Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing
A book about synaesthesia, the neurological condition in which input for one sense gets "picked up" by others, resulting in subjects "seeing" sounds, and so on.
Sounds fascinating, but after a few pages this book started to strike me as superficial and carelessly organised. Worst of all was the appalling prose, riddled with grammatical errors and incorrect usages, that made me wonder if the Oxford University Press still employs editors.