A Couple Books I Won't Be Finishing

As most of you may know, I'm not good at a lot of things, but I've found my real life skill: Quitting books. As someone once told me, there's no reward for reading bad books. A lot of people feel compelled to go on, but I'm happy to drop a book before even giving it a chance. I'm like an American Idol judge who sees someone walk in and says, Thanks, but I don't care for that outfit. No need to sing, dear.

Let's start with this one, American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent.

It had a promising premise and a sort of endorsement by Chuck Klosterman ("...Benjamin Nugent is just weird enough to be absolutely right.") but it didn't really do much for me.

For one, I don't really care to speculate on the origin of the nerd. Who was the first nerd? I don't know, and neither does anybody else. Some caveman with poor vision and overzealous masturbatory habits who eventually found acceptance by creating the invention of the point, which his business partner applied to the stick and took most of the credit for.

We can speculate on some proto-nerds, but I feel like discussing Dr. Frankenstein and T.S. Eliot in the context of being some of the early nerds is, well, getting a little esoteric for my needs. Does nerd-dom need to have a history that pre-dates Eniac? I think not. Moreover, do I need to be aware of it?

The real problem I had with this book is that it read like a textbook to me, which is to say that it took some interesting stuff and bookended it with a bunch of stuff I didn't care about. Plus, the organization seemed a little off. Take this graphic demonstration of how the word ratiocinative was used in the book:

Now, if you want to choose to use a word like "ratiocinative" in a book about nerds, there might be some justification for it. I can cope. But why use it twice and then define it the second time? That makes no sense. I've already either looked it up myself or decided that I don't care to.

The sections all seem organized this way, information in piles instead of steady streams. Too much for me.

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The second book I won't be finishing is Long Drive Home by Will Allison.

The premise is pretty good. A guy is driving his daughter home from school, and as they head into the neighborhood they come across a maniacal driver, a guy who cuts them off, nearly bashes right into their car, and then speeds around the block. As he's coming back around at about 80 MPH, the father driving his daughter decides to jerk the wheel towards the other driver and then back the other way, an aggressive driving move to try and slow the guy down.

Well, it works, slowing him down from 80 to 0 when he jumps the curb, plows into a tree and dies.

Okay, that's the first 15 pages or so, and from there it feels like it's going nowhere.

The father feels guilt, which is understandable, but he's constantly trying to keep his daughter from telling anyone what he did, but he's not even sure she knows and he mostly worries about it instead of actually talking to her and finding anything out. Also, a detective keeps nosing around like there's something going on, but what is unclear. What is he looking for when a car going 80 in a residential area crashes into a tree and the driver, without a seatbelt, is ejected from the car? How is that not case closed?

Furthermore, what is a 7 year-old going to say about her father's driving that would incriminate him in any way? 7 year-olds don't know how to drive, so what could her opinion possibly be?

There was really nothing to feel for the main character, the father, before I quit reading. He made a dumb decision, and I couldn't help but feel like, "Okay, either cop to this thing or not. But just decide and move on."