In Which I Tell You Why I Will Never Finish The Casual Vacancy

Life is too short, people.  It's too short to read books that you don't enjoy reading all the way through.

Which I suppose could be considered an odd perspective coming from someone who recently decided to re-read books that she read in school and positively and fearsomely hated, but I feel that's a different story.  Some of those books just weren't given a fair shake back then for whatever reason.

But here's the thing about J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, or at least the first one hundred pages or so of it: I just kept waiting for something to happen.  And nothing did.  (There's a joke in an episode of Gilmore Girls where the characters are making fun of The Donna Reed Show: remember that episode where the dad came home from work and was upset because dinner wasn't ready and nothing happened?  Remember when Donna tried to bake a cake and nothing happened?  That's what the first bit of this book felt like.)

Well, strictly speaking, that's not fair.  One major event happened, really the event that sparks the novel's title: someone dies.  So in all fairness I would describe the first bit of the book thus: someone dies, and then nothing happens, except that everyone somehow mostly internally reacts to the death and then there's some blahblahblah about local politics.

You might be thinking that I was unwilling to give this book a fair shake because it's not Harry Potter, but that's not even a little bit the case.  I don't like this book because it's dull.  Nothing that's going on in this first bit makes me want to keep reading.  As of where I stopped, there's only a whisper of a plot and I don't have any faith at all that it will ever reach normal speaking volume.

I could possibly, potentially, maybe get behind some of these characters--well, at least one that I can see--but nothing has given me reason to.  And I have no reason to carry on reading this book when I could be reading something else I'll enjoy more.

So that's my two cents, in the event you were debating whether to pick up this book.

(I didn't post this on the book blog as it seemed decidedly unfair to review a book without reading it all the way through.  And I didn't want to read the book all the way through to post an opinion.)

I somewhat recently read an interview where Rowling stated she's sure she'll find her way back into children's books.  I have great faith in what she might add to that particular genre, mostly because you don't find a lot of children's books where nothing much happens.