The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I had to quit this one, but not because I didn’t like it. I downloaded it from Audible, and it was all fine and I was enjoying it, but then the sex talk happened. And I just can’t do audio sex. I can’t. I am trying to wash the dishes, and then somebody is touching something wet, and it either embarrasses me, annoys me, or distracts me.

Fortunately I do have it in paperback, so I will bump it to the top of the list.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King. Continuing the Arthurian kick that prevailed when I stopped updating here. I loved this book the first time I read it, but I have since become too old for it. I did like the way that he dealt with the real history, by making Arthur into the reality and the Wars of the Roses into the myth. That was cool. And it is interesting to see the ways in which this book was influenced by its time; in an odd way it makes me less forgiving of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, because they look like a couple of fascists next to White. But I’m still too old for it.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon. Why, God, why, did I reread this? I was too old for this when I was born.

Gregory Maguire, Wicked. Audio. I never finished this when it first came out, but this time I finished it and liked it fine. Actually I liked it a lot, until it was over and I couldn’t exactly remember what I’d liked about it. I was never a huge fan of the Oz books — I read them too late, when I was ten or eleven, and they always seemed sort of babyish to me — but I am a big fan of Oz as an American metaphor. But Wicked didn’t quite work for me on that level. It was fun, how’s that?

Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch. Audio, abandoned. This felt exactly like Wicked except minus Elphaba (uh, I hope it is not a spoiler to tell you that the Wicked Witch of the West dies). And I think maybe Elphaba is what makes Wicked interesting, so this sort of wasn’t. I will probably go back to it; I only quit because I lost my place in the audiobook and then couldn’t find it again. Although that last part is usually not a good sign.

L. Frank Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz. I am still not a huge fan. The annotations were pretty good, although mostly they concerned trivia about the original stage production and the film.

L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz. Abandoned. Yeah, that’s enough of that. This series was too twee for me when I was ten, and it’s too twee for me now.

Stephen Dobyns, The Church of Dead Girls. I’m not going to say that this book was good, exactly. But of the books on this list, it was possibly the least disappointing. I picked it up in a used book store for four bucks because it looked like a good thriller, and it was in fact a good thriller. I only rolled my eyes and said, “Oh, please,” maybe seven or eight times. I enjoyed it. I would pick up another of his books to read on an airplane, and I don’t really do airplane books.

Martin Amis, Night Train. I read this on accident instead of the book I was supposed to read for my book club, and I don’t really remember much about it except that I thought it was a really great reworking of the noir novel, and that I had no fucking idea what happened to the dead chick. No idea. This book went right over my head.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. Oh, I loved this book so much. This is the best book I’ve read this year. I have nothing to say about it, because I know, I know that the language is ridiculously flowery and the imagery just conks you over the head like it is a caveman and you are its bride, but I loved it, and I want to have twin boys and name them Caleb and Aaron and let them fight it out. And I have finally forgiven Steinbeck for all that annoying shit he wrote, because I love this book.

Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Audio, abandoned. Dear Amy Tan: please do not write any more books. Maybe you could take up pottery.

Larry McMurtry, Telegraph Days. Audio. At some point I wound up in an audio slump; I couldn’t finish a book, couldn’t start a new one, and it occurred to me that Larry McMurtry would be good on audio. And he is. This is read by Annie Potts, who is probably the most adorable person in America. Jeremy and I listened to it on our trip to and from Wyoming, and we both enjoyed it a lot, even though the novel isn’t really about anything and it seems kind of pointless and actually, we didn’t quite finish it and didn’t really care. It is a good book to read as you drive across Utah, and that’s about all I have to say about it.

Larry McMurtry, Boone’s s Lick. Audio. This one is also a little meandering and pointless, and it also has an ending that can be skipped altogether, but it kept me diverted while I washed the dishes.

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost. I wound up liking this just fine, and I wanted to know how it turned out, but I was left vaguely disappointed, and I almost dropped it after the first chapter. There is a blurb on the front that calls this possibly the greatest historical mystery of all time, and man, I really hope that isn’t true. I have to hope there are better historical mysteries out there, because I would sort of like to read them. This one was okay except when it was excruciatingly boring or annoyingly earnest, and except when it got all mystical for a while.

Pamela Ribon, Why Moms are Weird. Man, what am I, a hundred? I am too old for everything lately. I had trouble with this because the pop culture references went right over my aged head. But people who enjoy chick lit have been loving this, so if that is your thing, you’ll probably like it too. I didn’t think it was really chick lit, which probably just means I don’t know what chick lit is. To me it seemed a lot like some of Susan Isaac’s stuff, where you have a kind of unlikeable heroine who attracts a whole pack of gorgeous men just because she’s spunky and has big boobs. It doesn’t really feel like a romance novel, because the men, wow, what a pair of assholes. Uh, I wouldn’t read this one if you are single, because it might make you kill yourself. But if you are not single, and if you like chick lit, and if you are younger than I am, and if you don’t feel like reading East of Eden even though Oprah and I both told you that you should, then this is the book for you.

The Game. Possibly the most boring book I’ve started this year. I gave up after about six hours, because I had four hours left to go and I didn’t want to waste any more of my life on this boring, boring book. I did not especially like Possession but at least it was engaging. This one is just about boring British people and their boring problems. I don’t know anything about Byatt’s half-sister, Margaret Drabble, so I don’t care that this is allegedly just a veiled attack on her. Even if that’s true, it’s still a very boring attack. I think I am done with A.S. Byatt.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I really loved the portion of this book that I managed to survive, but I just can’t stand the reader, Frederick Davidson. He made David Copperfield unbearable, and he made The Tenant of Wildfell Hall unbearable in exactly the same way.

He’s not terrible like Flo Gibson is terrible, but he reads in this sort of smug-sounding British accent that tends toward the whiny, and all of his female characters sound insipid. His male characters sound bored and arrogant. This is very unfortunate, because he reads an awful lot of books — 108 separate titles at Audible. I have his version ofThe Brothers Karamazov and I am sure I will never even attempt it now. Ditto The Aeneid and Ivanhoe. He always sounds fine on previews, but after about an hour or so he’s insufferable.

I have gone ahead and ordered a paperback copy of this novel, though, because I do want to read it.

The Time Traveler’s Wife. I made it about an hour into this one before I gave up in disgust. I hated every thing about it in the meantime:

• The readers. Especially the woman, who inflects like she is reading Peter Rabbit to a crowd of heavily sedated four-year-olds, and who mispronounced “Derrida.” And the man, who said “cock” like it was the first time he’d ever said that word and he had to repress a giggle.
• The sex. Which was skeevy and gross. Sex can be hard to take in audio format, and this was particularly bad.
• The dialogue. Save me from bad dialogue. And the descriptions. And the everything.

After I wrote about my feelings at the Usual Suspects, several people posted that they had thought when they were reading the book that I would hate it. Ha. Sometimes it is good to be predictable.

David Copperfield. I give up. I was trying to finish volume one of the audiobook so I could pick it up again later without losing my place, but I can’t do it. Two weeks ago I had two hours and a fifty minutes left in volume one, and right now I have two hours and thirty one minutes, and I wasn’t paying attention for most of the 19 minutes I actually listened to.

It’s not the reader’s fault. I hate this book. I need to stop right now, because it took a lot of effort for me to stop hating Dickens, and this stupid book is undoing all the good work done by Bleak House. I might try again some day, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

I, Robot. I made it through the first story — Gloria? I already forgot her name — but I couldn’t go on. I started with an audio version, which was fine, but skipped to paperback to get it over with faster. I still couldn’t do it. He may have been brilliant and visionary and all that crap, but Asimov could not write a sentence that didn’t include a couple of cliches and a whole bunch of extra words. Horrible.

Watson’s Apology. You can blame my lack of recent updates on this book — it is sapping my will to read, and my will to write about reading. I think this will be my last attempt at reading one of Bainbridge’s books, and I am going to set this one aside without finishing it.

I don’t know what it is about Bainbridge that makes her books such slogfests. All of her works are very short, around 200 pages, and from the bare plot outlines they always sound like they are going to be page-turners: an explorer’s crew gets lost in the Antarctic, the Titanic sinks, a Victorian scholar murders his wife of thirty years. (All of these are based on true events.) But they aren’t page-turners; every one of these turns into the book you dread, the one that leads you to see if there is anything on TV rather than sit down to read for a while. I’m not sure what the problem is. Her prose is occasionally slow-going but it’s not awful or complex. I think the difficulty might be with her narrative style, with the way she hides the ball so that her characters seem to develop out of thin air with unexplained outbursts and moments of violence. I was a little more forgiving the last time I read one of her books, but this time I’m bored and I’m sick of this novel and I am not sufficiently interested in these characters to want to spend another three weeks with them, which is how long it has taken me to make it halfway through this tiny little book.

The Empress Orchid. I’ve given up on this one — the reader is just awful. I barely made it through one hour of the recording, and her swallowing and breathing and flat tones were too much for me. I might try it later after it comes out in paperback.

This is the third audiobook in a row I’ve abandoned (although I’m finishing Underworld in paperback). I think it’s time for drastic measures, like Thomas Hardy.

The Great Fire. I give up. I might go back to this later but I wouldn’t count on it. I’ve listened to about three and a half hours of it and I just can’t get past the labored and affected prose. The language is depressing me to the point where I don’t even care about the story. Monkeytoe (who loved the book) advised me to quit because the prose style doesn’t change, and he pointed out that Hazzard writes very much like Elizabeth Bowen, and I also hated The Last September.

The Great Fire feels old-fashioned to me, and not in a good way. Very disappointing.