When do you give up on a book?

I had a plan to review Yale professor Stephen Carter's new thriller Palace Council before I headed off on a 3-day holiday weekend, but I regret to report that I have been foiled in this desire. I could notget past the first 80 or so pages. It's weird, because even with their problems, I generally am interested in Carter's books. I reviewed his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, and was fascinated despite its  rather inept ending (an affliction that affects many first-time thriller writers).

About his second novel, New England White, I wrote:

Like his debut novel The Emperor of Ocean Park, which delved into similar territory, New England White excels at societal dissection and character development. Carter, more Scott Turow than John Grisham, builds his mystery meticulously, but though he exhaustively reiterates every clue -- or perhaps because he does -- New England White ultimately grows fatiguing, its logic repetitive, and its final confrontation comes off as ridiculous.

Overall, though, the ratio of entertainment to disappointment is high. Carter's exploration of morality is compelling, and he's not afraid to turn the standard convention of justice on its head. He also has deftly rendered Julia Carlyle, a dean at the divinity school, and her husband Lemaster, president of the university and possibly, as an old college buddy of the U.S. president, the most powerful black man in the country.

Palace Council is set in '50s Harlem and involves a writer who stumbles across a dead body and, presumably, sets about finding out why the guy was murdered. It should have been interesting, and yet I felt growing impatience as every paragraph passed. Picking up the book became a chore. And so, I quietly put it on the sad pile of books to bring back to the office in hopes someone else might enjoy it.

People always ask me: When do you give up on a book? I guess the answer is: If I'm reviewing it, 50 pages after it becomes a chore.

Comments

[Obamanible]

When the author's Obama.