Books I abandoned in 2022

I used to be person who always finished the books she started reading. Until one day I was bored to death by a book written by one of my favourite authors at that time. Since that day, there have been others as well. So here is a list that I am not very proud of: the books I started reading last year and abandoned (+my reasons for abandoning them). Hopefully, this list will not have to be updated.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The reason I started to read Never Let Me Go was that it was said to be a dark academic dystopian novel.

In the beginning, I found it interesting. The story was told through the memories of the main character. No matter what I had found out, there always remained a missing piece of information, something sinister seemed to be going on in the background but nobody (including me, of course) knew what it was, and I couldn't wait to see the puzzle solved.

However, as the characters reached teenage years, the book became overly sexual. Yes, I was aware that it was for a reason, that maybe I should have waited - after all, the story was a dystopia and the things that happened were obviously a part of it. It was too much for my taste, though, and I just deleted the ebook from my phone.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

When I started reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I was excited. The book seemed to me like Dead Poets Society, only reversed: an all-girls school, an eccentric woman teacher who was later betrayed, a special set of girls who were especially close to her. Except there was this one difference: Miss Brodie was a narcissist who claimed to be in her prime and promised the little girls that she would make them the creme de la creme. The reviews on Goodreads were good. And in the beginning, I found the book interesting indeed, plus it had a dark academia feel to it.

But then I found myself in the middle of the book, having just finished a loooong chapter (no, I wasn't bored), and started pondering the question, "What am I actually reading?" The answer seemed to be - a story of two little teen girls investigating the love life of their teacher. This book, just like Never Let Me Go focused too much on sex, and I thought, "This is not worth it." I admit, the feeling of not having finished this book was nagging me.

Having written the previous two paragraphs, I changed my mind. Maybe I would continue to read it after I had read something else. After all, I wanted to see Miss Brodie fall. But then my best friend lent me a copy of The Cruel Prince. After reading such a masterpiece, I couldn't care less about Miss Brodie's prime.

Well, what do I do with this list? I know that unless I restart reading these books, I will never know what happened to the characters, how the events all unfolded, and the mysteries will remain unsolved. This is the cost of abandoning a book: your curiousity remains forever unsatisfied. Mm, maybe I should restart them some day.