I think it’s time to admit I am just…bad at blogging. Even back in the Heyday of Blogs (and the days of the dearly departed Google Reader; no, I have not recovered from that particular loss), when a solid third of my day was spent reading knitting blogs, I was still bad at it. There are about a thousand reasons why, but here I am, taking another whack at it.

Mostly, I’m taking another whack at it because I want to lament one of the dilemmas of a passionate reader: running into a stretch of books that just don’t work for you. A stretch I am in at this very moment.

So far this year, I’ve read 70 books, and I’m crossing my fingers I can hit 100 by the time the year is out, but there’s been between ten to fifteen books that I’ve started, and then cast aside for various reasons. Even books by authors I love, like Ruth Ozeki, aren’t safe; I adored A Tale for the Time Being and My Year of Meats was so, so satisfying, but All Over Creation just wasn’t working for me.

Before this, I was on an absolute mad rush through a bunch of monster-human romances, starting with Morning Glory Milking Farm (look, I know what I’m about), but after slamming through six romance novels in a row, I’m finding it hard to connect with anything else. In the past week and a half, I’ve tried and abandoned

• Ordinary Monsters by J.M. Miro
• Shift by Hugh Howey
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
• All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki

I think I’m most frustrated with Shift, because its predecessor, Wool, surprised me with how much I enjoyed it, but Shift was just a lot of pointless obfuscation while the protagonist wandered around not asking any of the questions he should have. I’m all for unreliable narratives or a slow unpacking of what’s going on, but when a character behaves like a moron and that’s the only thing keeping the plot together, into the DNF pile it goes.

Now I’m moved on to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which will hopefully break this streak of subjective duds. I really liked The Secret History, and The Little Friend was an interesting but not all that successful experiment, so we’ll see how this goes.

It’s just so frustrating to waste time on books that aren’t working for me, and while sometimes it’s worth pushing through a bit, once I hit the 100 page mark (which I did with all the above books), it’s time to call it a day.

At least I’m making progress on my physical TBR shelf, and reclaiming space for MORE books! The ouroboros continues!

It does make me feel like a failed reader, which is completely my fault since I’ve built my entire personality around “girl who reads too much” since I was about ten years old. But: life is too short to waste time on books that aren’t for me, and if nothing else, I’ll have a lovely pile to haul down to one of the local Tiny Free Libraries, where they might find someone they love.

Just saying, though — if The Goldfinch fails me, I’m going back to the monster romances.