books suck

No...really, books don't suck, yet recently I have struggled to find good boojs, browsing the best sellers and must read lists and being dissapointed.

Hunger Games...I love dystopian fiction and so I eagerly downloaded a free ebook sample. Twenty some pages in, I felt like I was reading a supermarket shelf young adult novel. I just couldn't get vested in the characters and thought, die already! Except, their deaths were just as....banal.

Then there were the Twilight saga books. One day at work, the computers were down and one can hardly aggregate online data without a computer, so I saw Twilight sitting on the 7th grade bookshelf and went at it. A few pages in, I thought, hmm I could care less about stupid vampires (having tried Anne Rice back in 6th grade)  but hey it is written kinda nicely, I mean it has a nice vocabulary. If a book hating kid wants to read this, right on! Sadly, it turned to nap inducing low intensity soap opera drivel. I struggled through 100 pages, unable to retrieve a better book because the 7th graders were testing.

Dan Browb books looked full of intrigue but the first three pages had me saying, and? So what? So I stopped reading.

The Great Gatsby was a book somehow avoided in high school and college, and even my years as a high school teacher. So one day, before it was even a movie, I picked it up. I even read a few chapters. I loved the way Fitzgerald made the characters so real that I could imagine their accents, mannerisms, and persona. He gets a gold star for "words painting a picture". So why did I stop reading? The story line bored the hell out of me. I felt like I was stuck in the hell that was Gone With the Wind. I know, everyone loves that movie but frankly I don't give a damn.

Pride and Prejudice and all those verbose Victorian novels are a no go, too. I respect the prose, it is excellent from an English teacher perspective, just...who gives a f@ck?

Now before you have a heart attack, I do love some decent literature. One of my absolute favorites is The Grapes of Wrath. The character development and story line is so raw and real. In fact, I haven't read it for about five years so I just may have to again. Even the old grainy black and white film was amazing for its time.