Friday, January 8, 2010

Unfinished Friday




Marie, the Boston Bibliophile has a wonderful new meme I'm going to participate in periodically. Unfinished Friday is designed to provide a way to blog about books that for whatever reason just don't work.  My unfinished work this week is Evolution of God by Robert Wright.

I abandoned reading this scholarly tome last week. I have had it as an ARC since July, and have tried on three different occasions to tackle it. I cannot get past the first 40 pages. It is well-written, but has far too much detail about a topic that just couldn't grab me. I have never been interested enough in anthropology to read deeply. I have an overall intellectual appreciation of the subject, but no desire to delve into it.

I'm not ready to part with it yet. It's a NewYork Times notable book of the year (2009) and I'm going to try to read it in pieces instead of all at once. It's gotten such great reviews, I feel like if I persist, I'll get something out of it, but for now, I've got a bucket load of ARCs waiting, so it will have to go onto the DNF-try again pile.

2 comments:

  1. I always feel bad when I've accepted an ARC and can't get into it, but ---it happens right? Time to move on as you did.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Personally, I think you have more than fulfilled your ARC duty.

    It's funny how we keep a book like this around, unwilling to part with it as if at some point we will still want to read it.

    ReplyDelete

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