Disappointing Reads

Here's the Booking Through Thursday question for the week: Name a book or author that you truly wanted to love but left you disappointed. (And, of course, explain why.)

I have a couple. The first is The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman. I picked this one up because it was an academic mystery. The book blurb made it out to be a real literary puzzler. Did Shakespeare pen a series of passionate sonnets, unknown to modern scholarship? And what will people do to possess or suppress them? After reading the book, I decided the better question was: Do we care? The opening line reeled me in and then wound up being the best part of the thing. "The most thankless job on the planet may well be teaching Renaissance love poetry to a group of hormone-dazed adolescents on a beautiful spring day." If only the rest of the book had been as good. There wasn't even a decent mystery to help out with the fact that I had a total lack of interest in the characters.

The second is Arthur & George by Julian Barnes. I love Barnes. I've loved and devoured every other book by him that has come my way. It was given to me by a dear friend whose taste I respect. I wanted to love this one too.....but I just couldn't. I found this one a very hard row to hoe. I kept plugging away at it, but was bored stiff. It seemed to me that Barnes was trying his hand at writing a "major work" and just filled up space writing as much as possible about what little he had. An epic story, needing 400-500 pages, this isn't. But Barnes thought so. I've read other novels based on Conan Doyle's life that were much more interesting and involving. I guess that's the sticking point for me....I never felt involved in this book the way I had in his previous work.