Giving up on a book

[asakiyume]

Sometimes it happens. I just gave up reading The Night Circus. Several people thought it would be a surefire winner with me, but while I was initially enchanted by the feats of magic that get performed at the circus, eventually I just found myself drowning in them. I needed more to happen; I needed the characters and their lives to matter more; I needed more sense of urgency. There was supposedly urgency and threat, but there was so much fabulosity and ethereal beauty all over the place--such long stretches of it--that it was hard to really grasp or appreciate the threat. I expand on this a little here at Goodreads . . . so what I'm going to add here on LJ are a couple of things that are too silly and pettish to put on a Goodreads review.

One thing: one of the characters wears a bowler hat, and there are scenes in the story that I felt were clearly meant to call to mind Magritte's paintings of the man with the bowler hat... and instead of feeling charmed by this, I felt irritated.

A second thing: language! Why is this story set a hundred years ago when everyone uses modern lingo ("impact" as a verb jumped out at me)? Why not just set it in the present? At the point where I gave up (about two-thirds of the way through), I had yet to see the necessity of the setting in the past.

Okay. That about does it. I *wish* I could have liked it. I did appreciate some of the lovely inventions. . . but there got to be too many, for my tastes.