Acute Disappointments

Seems only fitting that a series of poor decisions the other day should lead to a series of acute disappointments today. In my reading world, two (perhaps not so acute) disappointments have arisen.

First, the other day I wrote that I wished I'd read Nelson DeMille's Lion's Game instead of listening to it via audio book. Then I retracted the statement with a blog post about how what seemed like an expansive and far ranging plot and idea had now boiled down to a more (too) focused and limited plot. Now, I'm regretted ever thinking I wanted to read the book. It's not that DeMille's writing is bad, it's that it takes so damn long to get anywhere. It's taken about two hours of audio book reading time to move just fifteen minutes in the book's time line. DeMille goes into such detailed and specific introspection on the part of each character that any decision a character makes is parsed and dissected to the nth degree that the reader ceases to care. What seems like an intriguing plot has been complete squashed by the plodding and pedantic pace. Add to this the fact that the book switches from first person POV to third person and had I not paid so much for the book, I would have ditched it by now.

A perfect seque to Cut Shot, A Jack Austin PGA Tour Mystery. I have stopped reading this. I'm halfway through and I've given up. I initially downloaded this because it would be similar in scope to my manuscript Toe the Line. Where John Corrigan has a mystery among golfers with a professional golfer being the sleuth, I have a mystery centered around triathloning. I hope that my readers aren't as disappointed in my story as I was in this one. The plot was far fetched, the characters motivations were complete nonsense, and the characters were formulaic and poorly fleshed out. Sorry, Corrigan, I'm not impressed.