Books I've only been able to read a bit at a time

To say a book is good, reviewers will often praise it with the comment "I couldn't put it down." But there have been a number of well-written books that I did put down; I could only read each a bit at a time. 

These are tales that spook me, but not in the shock-horror or creeping-suspense. Instead, they touch a nerve with me personally. There's something about a character's experience which resonates with something I've lived through and felt. Here are a few examples of books I put down any number of times before finishing them.

Mean girls. I don't really need to explain if you've read or even heard of this Margaret Atwood book. She goes deep with the feelings and her character portraits are well-drawn, so it's a good if tense read. 

I've read Dracula all the way through maybe seven or eight times in my life, and every single time I had to set it aside for a bit before I could keep going. I definitely can't read it at night. Not anticipation of the plot twists and turns, but a dread of Stoker's ability to shine a light on the darkest of dark otherworldly powers. Also, the book brings up how difficult it can be to protect the vulnerable or precious people in our lives. The bad forces sense our feelings of love and they seem to zoom right in on those. Eek. 

In fifth grade, I won the Classics Illustrated version of  Willkie Collins' The Woman in White in a classroom competition.  I was excited. I've always loved books with ghosts or ghostly figures in them, especially ones where the mysterious spirit is attempting the warn the living before...it's...too...late. We are watching the TV mini-series of the book at our house, and by "we are watching" I mean "we were watching" and then I asked that we delay viewing last three episodes. 

I know the story comes out all right in the end, but the way Collins' truly evil character works the system against his intended victim(s) reminds me too much of our current political climate. The bad person probes the souls of local authorities and statesmen, finds a spots of corruption he can exploit, and then springs his trap. Remind you of anyone?

Robert Flanagan's best-known book is Dress Gray, but I so remember reading Maggot a few years after its 1971 publication. In the years after I finished the novel, I would go through some of the same type of bullying that the Marine recruit endures in this realistic book. Long before that happened, though, as a reader I saw clearly how the villain understood group thinking and how he could take what a bad person did and make it look good and what a good person did and make it look bad.  It's that last part that stuck with me after forty-plus years. There is a turn in the plot near the end of the story, but for a bit it does look as though someone characterized as a screw-up is going to be blamed for the bad guy's error, and of course after he was brave and noble too. Man, I hated that. 

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Next week, I think I'll pay tribute to books I kept putting down because I was stretching out the reading, not wanting the story to end. 

Garbo

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