I start reading about twice as many books as I finish, and that’s after I’ve narrowed the list of books that I even start. (I eliminate thrillers and science fiction, for example.) I like a plot that I can hang on to, and I don’t like extreme violence. A few years ago I swore I’d never read another novel set in World War II because they were all so grim. Then along came All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr in 2014, and I decided that extraordinary novels set in World War II would be okay.

My Books in Brief posts are about books that I gave up on or just skimmed through. These are not necessarily badly written books! Many are bestsellers that got stellar reviews from reviewers whom I respect. But I did not read these titles in their entirety, and in my posts, I’ll tell you why. You may decide that you want to dash out to your nearest library or book shop to get a copy!

The Mortifications     Derek Palacio     (2016)

This complex tale about a Cuban-American immigrant family, set in the 1980s, has well-drawn characters and some lovely language, especially when the author is describing Cuba, to which some members of the family return. Palacio commingles realistic and mythic elements in an odd way in this novel, but that was not why I stopped reading. At about the halfway point in the 308 pages, the deep sadness of the story was making me too miserable. I skipped to the end to see how the plot tied up. The ending was sad, too. I should have guessed this from the title.

Pond     Claire-Louise Bennett     (2016)

Bennett positions her book somewhere between prose poetry and stream-of-consciousness. After the first few pages, I jumped around in the chapters (are they chapters?) trying to find threads of a cohesive plot, but I failed. The dust jacket says that Pond is “suffused with the almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world as we remember it from childhood.” I like descriptions of everyday experience, but I could not stick it out inside the brain of the young woman narrator for 195 pages. I prefer poetry that’s more distilled.

Vinegar Girl: The Taming of the Shrew Retold     Anne Tyler     (2016)

I’ve enjoyed several of Tyler’s past books, most recently A Spool of Blue Thread (2015), but Vinegar Girl was a disappointment. The book is one of a series of novels, by different modern novelists, based on the plots of Shakespeare plays. I was fine with a modern adaptation or rewriting of Shakespeare, who himself reworked the stories of other authors. What caused me to send this book back to the library after two chapters was the lifeless dialogue. Tyler usually spins out highly believable language, but the characters in Vinegar Girl were not coming alive for me through their words.

The Vacationers     Emma Straub     (2014)

Emma Straub gets a lot of press for her breezy novels and is held up as comparable to Anne Tyler. I don’t see it. In 2012, I tried a couple of chapters of Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures but found the reconstruction of 1920s Hollywood unconvincing. Giving Straub another chance, I quickly skimmed The Vacationers. It reads like the script of a sit-com, with a few witty zingers but not much depth to the plot or the characters, who are New Yorkers on vacation in Mallorca. Despite some glowing reviews of Straub’s next offering, Modern Lovers (2016), I don’t plan another foray.

A Great Reckoning     Louise Penny     (2016)

This is the twelfth book in the Canadian mystery series starring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. I’ve read a couple of the previous titles in the series. I loved the setting (present-day Québec, Canada), the well-developed characters (especially Gamache and his family), and the plots (intricate). I gave up on this series solely because Louise Penny’s style of writing in sentence fragments drove me crazy. If you can handle that herky-jerky movement in every paragraph, these are terrific mysteries.

The Book That Matters Most     Ann Hood     (2016)

I didn’t make it past page 40 of this 358-page book, about a middle-aged woman joining a book club to get over her divorce. I’m not opposed to books about book clubs or books about people who read a lot of books. I read a lot of books myself, and I did read and review the Swedish novel The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend. However, in those first 40 pages of The Book That Matters Most, the dialogue is strained and the interior monologues are trite. I can’t imagine that it gets better.