Should I Read This?

When I started my blog almost two years ago, I wrote a post about Tana French's In the Woods. At the time, I absolutely adored the book and French's writing until the last 100 pages. Within the last 100 pages, I became very impatient to solve the mysteries and then was disappointed by one aspect of the ending. Then yesterday, I read that Tana French's third book is coming out soon and thought maybe I should give her second book, The Likeness, a try.

What do you think? Should I give The Likeness a try? Have you read any books by Tana French? If so, what did you think of them?

Booking Through Thursday

How about, “What’s the worst ‘best’ book you’ve ever read — the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?”

Recently I read In the Woods by Tana French and was disappointed. I heard so much about how fantastic it was that I finished the entire book and felt that it didn't deserve the hype. The story is two mysteries rolled into one with interesting characters that just seem to deconstruct in front of you. The story is slow moving, the crime is something that you would see on an episode of Criminal Minds, and over the course of the story I went from enjoying the characters to finding them annoying.

A few years ago I tried to read A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I read a hundred pages and then walked away. To this day, I have no idea what this book is about -- but I am told it is great. Here's a summary from the Barnes and Noble website:

One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career.The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race.

So what about you? What is the worst 'best' book you have ever read?

In the Woods: great literature or utterly disappointing?

I recently read In the Woods by Tana French. It was suggested during book club by a local author. I went online and read a sample chapter and was very excited at the prospect of reading this book. For the next 2 1/2 days I worked my way through the 438 (or so) paged book and came away disappointed. The beginning was fantastic, a murder of a young teenager in a small town in Ireland, two detectives who are called to the scene, and one of the them hiding a secret from his childhood that took place in the same town.



I fell in love with the characters and got swept up in the plot. All of a sudden, with 150 pages to go, I just wanted it to end. I wanted the story to wrap up -- needed to know who the murderer was and how it connected to the detective's past. So I soldiered on through the last 150 pages and came away with one mystery solved and one unresolved.



I never thought of myself as a person who needed closure or everything wrapped up in a bow at the end. Yet, I was frustrated by the fact that one of the mysteries would never be solved and that made me dislike the book overall. So here is the question: Have ever read a book (or seen a movie) that you completely loved until the ending? If so, what was it?