Babel

I didn’t come close to finishing this book, so if you feel like stopping reading now, that’s fine with me.

I didn’t stop because it’s badly written. Far from it; it reads beautifully. I didn’t stop because the setting isn’t intriguing: a tower of translation, where language is power. And I didn’t stop because it’s science fiction/fantasy because I’ve got nothing against either genre. (Although anything to do with swords and elves usually leaves me pretty cold.)

I stopped because it’s boring. It’s a great big thick padded book that plods along at the pace of a dying tortoise, happy to dwell at exhausting length on every plot development, as if length and detail are more important than pace. It strikes me as the equivalent of a 10-hour Netflix series that tells you everything you don’t need to know about all the characters all the time. And it seems to join an ever-increasing group of books not content to be just a good story but driven to arrive with all the critic-beclad status of AN EVENT!

Maybe this is what books need to do these days to succeed: become AN EVENT. Something special. Something to grab our attention from the mobile-focused, social media-dominated, split-second attention span world we live in. Because if it’s not big, or long, then it can’t be good and definitely isn’t worth our attention or money.

Judging by the reviews I’ve read, I’m in a minority on this one. A tiny minority. Well, so be it. Life is short, and there are too many other better, and shorter, books to read. And I’m off to read them.