Today I decided not to finish a book, which is a rarity for me but does happen. I had been waiting weeks on the library waitlist for Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I never picked this one up back when it came out in 2005, probably because that was the year I started library school to get my masters degree, and fiction was temporarily under my radar except for whatever I was reading for school. But the book kept popping up on the several Facebook reader pages to which I belong, and I finally decided I needed to circle back.

Yesterday I received my email notice from Kindle Unlimited that there were new titles awaiting my selection as part of my subscription. I browsed them and found several books that I was surprised and delighted to get “for free,” and this morning I woke up having decided to quit pursuing Never Let Me Go so I could go read one, hopefully to be more entertained than I have been for the past couple of days spent on Ishiguro’s supposed masterpiece.

This has been a unique reading experience for me, in that the story was simultaneously slightly intriguing and the most boring chain of meandering day-to-day reminiscences I have ever read. It’s as if the author decided, “What if I wrote a book about completely ordinary people in somewhat extraordinary circumstances, but didn’t focus on their uniqueness or their peak experiences or their defining moments but rather just detailed every dreary mundane bit of their lives in minute detail for almost 300 pages?” What a slog.

I went into it knowing virtually nothing about the story (I did that on purpose, because I’d heard that’s what you needed to do), and when I realized what it was about, I felt cheated—because I have encountered it before, in a much more captivating form, in a young adult novel—The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer, which I actually read during library school for my readers’ advisory class. And which, by the way, came out in print three years before NLMG, so this book wasn’t even particularly unique. (Not implying anything here, but…not as creative as everyone who lauds it as a true original may think.)

Anyway…I was keeping on simply because so many people gave it such rave reviews, but…I’m bored, I’m dispirited, I’m slightly depressed, and I’m moving on. I had great respect for this author based on The Remains of the Day, but this one isn’t that, and it isn’t for me. Letting go now.