BRIDESHEAD REVISTED (Evelyn Waugh) - March 27/14

Arrrrrrrrgh! So I read the second half of this book without actually reading it - it was basically the book equivalent of fast-forwarding through a movie - but man oh man Waugh really didn't leave me with a choice. This inexplicably well-known hack drowns the narrative in some of the most overly descriptive, flowery prose ever, and I just couldn't work up any interest in the one-dimensional characters as a result. I barely was able to distinguish the various characters from one another even by the halfway mark. There's just nothing here to hold the reader's interest, to the extent that I can't help but wonder if the book is actually just a test to determine how pretentious one really is (ie you have to be an almost comically over-the-top snob to actually enjoy anything here). What a horrible, horrible book. no stars out of ****

DIVERGENT (Veronica Roth) - March 24/14

I had previously vowed not to read anymore YA dystopian trilogies, but the library had a brand new copy sitting right there, so... Anyway, for most of the first half - actually more like two-thirds - I was cursing my decision to start this, as Roth packs the book with one tedious training scenario after another. If you condensed all the training scenes the book would be a novella. Anyway, I wasn't, as a result, too invested in any of this but the book takes a very sharp turn about two-thirds in, as Tris and Four, being Divergent, don't succumb to the zombie-like status of their fellow Dauntless, which kicks off a very exciting stretch in which Tris is forced to basically quash the entire revolution by herself. Lots of extremely entertaining stuff here and a handful of surprising deaths - BOTH of Tris' parents! - so I found myself racing through the last ten or so chapters in just a few hours. I was sure I wasn't going to read any followups, but now I'm pretty curious to see where the series goes. *** out of ****

MY AGE OF ANXIETY (Scott Stossel) - March 10/14

I really like the idea of this book, obviously, but it's pretty much unreadable. Stossel suffuses the book with page after page and chapter after chapter of almost shockingly dull stretches detailing statistics and the personal histories of figures I couldn't care less about. The book feels mostly like an academic text and though I attempted to read this stuff in the first half, I breezed through the last 100 pages just because I couldn't take it anymore. I really feel like Stossel let the reader down in a big way. I wanted to read about his day-to-day struggles and how he's overcome his anxiety (how did he meet and woo his wife, for example? How does that relationship work?) Instead he wastes the readers time with things that couldn't be less interesting. I'm not a professor or a psychology student; why does Stossel think I would care about all these facts and statistics? Ugh. * out of ****