Did Not Finish - Off the Record by Camryn Garrett

I really loved Full Disclosure by Camryn when I read it last August, so I was really excite for her new book. I pre ordered it and picked it up not long after it arrived. I read about sixty pages, but I wasn't very gripped by the story. Then I had to read something for one of my blog tours, so I put this down. I read the other book, and then picked this up again. I read about another thirty pages and realised I just really wasn't enjoying it. So, it's going on the Did Not Finish shelf. 

It's about a girl called Josie, who is the youngest of three, who gets the chance to go on a press tour for a new film, so that she can write a piece about one of the stars, Marius something. She's already a writer who's been published, and this is a major senior project for her. While she's there, one of the female actors in the film warns her off a famous director. I didn't get further than that, but I'm guessing there's a Me Too element to it. 

I just couldn't get into the characters properly. I didn't care enough about Josie to see what she was going to go through. She suffers from anxiety, which is something I suffer from terribly myself, but I didn't like the way it was portrayed. I wanted to love this, but I just didn't. I'm sorry! 

Did Not Finish - If It Makes You Happy by Claire Kann

It is so rare that I don't finish a book, or that I get halfway through a book and then give up on it. I sometimes read just a few percent of a book on my Kindle or a few pages, but rarely get too far. I don't like giving up on books and I wanted to love this book, so I persevered, I really did. But, I just couldn't get on with it.

My friend Angie recommended this book on Twitter and said it had an amazing black fat protagonist, which intrigued me. I ordered it and picked it up a couple of weekends ago. The protagonist is Winnie, who is seventeen and who spends the summers with her grandma in a small town called Misty Haven. Granny owns a diner called Goldeen's and Winnie works there. She's accompanied by her brother Winston and their cousin, Sam (who I think also lives with Winnie's family full time). Sam is spending her summer babysitting. Winnie tries to get Granny to enter a competition, but she's having none of it. Winnie's ungirlfriend Kara lives in Misty Haven. The two of them are friends who are dating, but are both free to date other people.

So every summer there's a like homecoming thing where the town nominates a Queen, and then someone volunteers to be her consort, and then there's a whole celebration thing around that. I don't think I read far enough to fully understand the ins and outs of this thing. Winnie gets nominated as Queen. Kara volunteers to be consort, but then so does this boy called Dallas, who is totally dashing and who Winnie has a crush on.

This is like all that happens in the first half of the book. The action just wasn't moving fast enough for me, and I felt like there was a lot of telling me what was what rather than showing me. There was a lot of what I felt was unneeded detail. I liked Winnie and Winston and Sam, and even Dallas, but Kara left me a bit cold.

Oh, there's also Granny commenting on Winnie's weight and trying to get her to go on a diet and exercise with Sam. Usually I love this stuff, but it just wasn't gelling for me. It took me five nights to read half the book, which is ridiculously slow for me. So for now, I'm giving up on the book, but if it sounds like your thing, do read it!

Did Not Finish - The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

I got this book as part of Sarah's Round Robin which had stopped for a while but it's got going again now. While it didn't look like my kind of thing, I thought I'd give it a go. It is intriguing, but the story wasn't moving fast enough for me and at a hundred pages in I gave up. I feel like I gave it enough of a go!

The story is set in the late 1800s and it's sort of steampunk in origin, which would appeal to a lot of readers. Thaniel works as a telegraphist at the Home Office and one day someone breaks into his bedsit and leaves a watch on his pillow. He can't work it, or open it up, but then one day there's a bomb threat from Clan Na Gael (an Irish independence party) and the watch ends up saving Thaniel from getting killed. He then discovers the watchmaker and sets out to meet him. Meanwhile, a young woman called Grace is a student in Oxford and she has a watch too, although at the time I gave up nothing had happened to her with hers. We also saw flashbacks of the watchmaker, Keita Mori, and his life in Japan.

I liked the writing in this and thought it was quite poetic and lovely in places, but like I say the story just didn't move fast enough for me. I hate not finishing books but now I'll pass this on to the next person in line!

I Am Thunder by Muhammad Khan - Did Not Finish

It is so rare that I don't finish a book. I like a lot of different genres and can usually find something in a book to keep reading, so even if I don't like something particularly, I nearly always end up finishing it. Plus, I'm quite discerning about books I pick up off the shelf and often know that I already want to read it, if that makes sense. I try to unhaul books quite often and donate them to charity or libraries if I know they're something that I'm no longer into. I don't have loads of time to spend reading so I like to read books that I can see something in.

I think though that 2018 might be the year to give up on books if they're not grabbing me by, say, 30 pages in. Life is too short and I've got dozens of books that might be amazing and that are waiting to be read.

I started I Am Thunder with high expectations because I'd heard great things. It's about a Muslim teenager whose boyfriend wants to join Islamic State, I think. I didn't get that far, because I just couldn't get into the style. Muzna, the main character, didn't appeal to me at all. I tried, reading about forty pages, before I gave up. I'm sorry, because I think this would've been an excellent story to read, but I just couldn't get on with the style.

Have you read this? Did I give up too quickly? Do you give up on books?

Did Not Finish - This Beats Perfect by Rebecca Denton

It is so rare that I don't finish a book so when I don't, I feel really bad about it. But I've not been reading like a smart reader recently, for one reason and another, so I decided to fall back on a rule I read once. The rule said that if you're under 50 years old, you should read fifty pages of a book before deciding whether to give up on it or not. If you're over 50 years old, you can deduct every year over 50 off the pages you should read. So my mum, who is about to turn sixty, should read forty pages of a book before giving up on it, and my grandma, who is 91, should read just nine pages of a book before being allowed to toss it. It makes sense, right, no one who is 91 has time to spend on a book that just isn't grabbing them!

I'm 33, so a fair way under the fifty years old, so I'm stuck with fifty pages. So I picked up This Beats Perfect as I've heard loads of good things about it, and I also knew I was about to start editing my own novel, which is about a band. As This Beats Perfect is also about the music scene, I thought it might be good to read.

However, I just couldn't get into it. At the beginning of the book, it's Amelie's birthday and she's going backstage at a gig that her dad is doing the sound for - he's pretty famous at doing that. The band on stage is The Keep, a boy band that Amelie feels she is far too good for. She gets photogrpahed with one of the band and wakes up to a million Twitter notifications, all wondering who she is.

I was a bit unsure about this beginning to the novel, because it just didn't grab me. It seemed to be existing in nothingness. We saw Amelie and the band and her dad and a couple of other people, but we didn't care about them enough to get emotionall invested. The second part of the book (around 60 pages in, I actually went over the 50 pages before I gave up because I really did want to give it a chance) has Amelie celebrate her birthday with her mum the next day, but it seemed to flash forwards and backwards in time with no warning, and I couldn't centre Amelie very well in that world either.

So, I gave up. Do I feel bad about it? Yes. Do I think this author is a bad author? Of course not. I would give her another chance, for sure. I just didn't click with this book - and that's okay.

Reading the beginning of this combined with reading my own novel brought one thing very clear to me - writing about music is hard. Music is such a sensory experience, but it's auditory, and auditory traits don't tend to translate well on to the page, which we read and don't always otherwise interact with. There's a couple of bits in my own novel where I hope I get across the idea that playing a gig is scary and exhilarating and thrilling and sometimes painful and often amazing. I probably need to work on them more, but it's definitely something I want to pay attention to.

There are a couple of books about music that I really do love, like Songs About A Girl by Chris Russell and My Secret Rockstar Boyfriend by Eleanor Wood. You can check out all my posts with the label 'music' here.