I Think It's Over...Please Be Over...

Yeah, my last post was a mistake.  Not two days after that, we had ANOTHER issue with email and I worked hard to get it resolved.  To say this has been a hellish couple of weeks is an understatement.  Last night I had to work until midnight writing a Root Cause Analysis document, knowing all the time that the true root cause is not one my management wants to admit to.  After all, it was truly their constraints on us as email administrators that put our agency in a position to fail.  The answer wasn't one they wanted to hear, so I spent 18 hours total trying to creatively word it in a manner they could accept (without lying of course).

Today however, is the first day I've been able to go to work and come home without being completely stressed about whether our email environment is going to fall to pieces.  It's not Gmail-status, mind you.  But at least it's stable for the moment.

I'm still enjoying my way through Elana's book Possession.  I can't seem to hear any other voice from the main character than Elana's.  I don't know if she intended that, but it is what it is.  I think Elana just has such a strong and unique style with her writing that it's impossible to read her book without hearing it in my mind.  Thankfully, I really enjoy her style so it's been a pleasurable read.

Shaun Hutchinson recently asked the blog chain to name three books we had refused to put down despite the fact that they started out slowly or didn't grab us from the get-go.  I had mentioned that there have been instances where I've definitely put a book down and Shaun wanted to know some examples.

The most recent example is when I tried to read Black Hills by Dan Simmons.  The premise sounded great.  It was supposed to be about this Native American who absorbed Custer's spirit accidentally.  The book skipped back and forth between this Native American's story (including a plan to blow up Mount Rushmore) and Custer's ghost reminiscing over his life before death.  Sounds great right?  Yeah, not really.

I have no idea whether it's true or fiction, but Dan Simmons was hell-bent on depicting Custer (and his wife) as an incredibly sexual person who's thoughts after death centered on all the ways he and his former spouse enjoyed each other.  And just as I was getting into the story about the Native American, Simmons would jolt me back to this psycho-sexual Custer world.  I'm not a prude, but it was just so idiotic (not to mention having no point in the context of the larger story) that it ruined the story before I could even get halfway through.  And believe me, I struggled to even get to that point.

A book I read all the way through (and then regretted reading once I got to the end) was Under The Dome by Stephen King.  The premise was awesome.  A town in MA gets surrounded by an invisible, impenetrable bubble.  This was one massive tome, and I loved every bit of the story...until I reached the end.  The bubble was put into place by the equivalent of technologically superior alien children who wanted to watch how the humans reacted, much like shaking an ant farm.  So how did the characters get the aliens to remove the barrier (moments before everyone died, no less)?  The used the magic word (aka please).  Really?  It was so implausible and stupid that I actually hate the fact that I wasted my time reading the damn thing.  And I REALLY like King.  Not on that day, however.

So there ya go, Shaun.  There's a couple examples of books I either put down or regretted picking up in the first place.  How about the rest of you?  Have you ever put down a book, for whatever reason?