I Give...Uncle!

I've had three (count 'em, three) DNFs this week.  After finishing the marathon that was Stephen King's The Stand (very good by the way--review coming soon), I started returning to the partially read books piling up on my nightstand.

After some thought, I realized that to go from committing to over 1000 pages over the last two weeks, I don't have much time to waste with books that I can't get into or finish.  So...here are the details on my 3 DNFs:

The First Wives Club- Olivia Goldsmith
I got through 250 pages (about half the book).  It's very padded with subplots that were cut from the movie version for a reason--they plod along and don't get very far in so many pages.  This is one example of the movie trumping the book.  The humour was sharper, the characters more sympathetic, and the plot more focused.

The Taking of Pelham 123- John Godey
I got through about 50 pages.  This is one of my favourite movies (the original version with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw) and was sad to let this one go.  The writing was cliched, the characters even more so, and (I admit this occurs in the movie, too) a number of racist slurs that make me cringe.  A small amount in the movie adds tension and gives the villains even more reason to hate them, but in the book, it was way too much.

On the Road- Jack Kerouac (for the Back to the Classics challenge)
This one immediately felt wrong.  I only read about 30 pages and nothing really happened.  The writing was either composed of very clipped sentences (the kind I tend to see in children's writing) with lots of "the"s, "and"s, and other single-syllable words that got on my nerves very quickly, or the polar opposite occured: there were sentences that used commas or semi-colons to make a run-on sentence into a single paragraph.  It just wasn't for me.

I'm now replacing The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway for my 20th century selection in the Back to the Classics challenge.  Wish me luck!

P.S.  I'm now reading The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and it's been a fantastic start!  Also, for a nonfiction break, U2 by U2 is an interesting historical look at the band from their start in Dublin to sold-out arenas worldwide.