I’ve had a lot of time to read when resting lately. I have asked for suggestions and various people have recommended books. For many years I didn’t read much, so now that I am reading again, I actually found that I didn’t some of the books I tried to read. Like this book I reviewed a few weeks back. That was the first time I had to actually stop reading a book because I disliked it so much. I felt like such a quitter!

Recently, Oprah announced a new book club book, Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan. The day she announced it, I reserved it from our library and I picked it up last week. I guess it is a few “short” stories (although I would not define one of the stories, which takes up half the book, to be “short”). I have really tried to like this book, because it is an Oprah Book Club book, and how could she recommend something I wouldn’t like? But, I am afraid it is true. I cannot stand this book either. It might be me: it could have something to do with the depressing settings and circumstances in the book, and the fact that I’m looking for something to distract me right now from being constantly uncomfortable. Possibly a book full of despair, and stories of children immersed in poverty and suffering is not the best choice. Or maybe it is the fact that the dialect in which the characters speak is almost half French or another language and I can’t tell what the heck they are saying most of the time.

I wonder if I should think twice about how I am selecting books lately. Apparently this method of accepting recommendations from others is not working for me. My previous method of selecting books was to just pick something that had an interesting cover. This is also my methodology when picking a wine – I pick wines that have nice labels. I realize this is a shallow way to select things, but I have to say that it has worked in the past. I have had almost 100% success picking books with nice covers.
Maybe less with the wine, but still.
I might consider going back to that method with the books.